The History of NES Emulators - Part 6

Squeem (2000)

Squeem (MS-DOS)

Squeem was released in February 2000 for MS-DOS by Dead Body, and already came with its own interface (GUI) created by the author. Squeem was one of the pioneers in adding sound, video and control plug-ins to NES emulators. According to its creator, Dead Body, who was only 15 at the time, did not know that the Pretendo emulator had done the same thing a year earlier. The creators of Pretendo later ended up helping him with the project. Dead did everything from scratch, taking inspiration from the plug-ins of the first PS1 emulator, PSEmu Pro. At first, it ran without sound, was accelerated, had bugs and had few compatible games. Also in February, its second version was released, this time for Windows. Dead alternated between releases, sometimes with a version for Windows, sometimes with a version for DOS.

Squeem (MS-DOS)

In March, it adds support for plug-ins, along with its own video (Glide) and joystick plug-ins, as well as full-screen mode. In April, it begins supporting save states, Famicom DiskSystem, sound plug-ins, frameskip, and rewrites its mapper system and creates its own 6502 emulator, called Dead6502. From the beginning, it used Neil Bradley's m6502 emulator, which it continued to use for a while until it implemented its own. In May, it adds scanlines mode and Game Genie. In December, it completely rewrites the emulator. Its latest version is released in April 2001. It comes with support for netplay and several video and sound modes, mostly DirectX plugins (remember that the plug-ins were downloaded separately).

Squeem (Windows) (Greatest 18 Holes of Major Championship Golf)

Another of its distinguishing features was the choice of CPU cores. It offered three of its Dead6502 cores, in addition to Matt Conte's Nes6502 and Shu Kondo's s6502 cores. It also offered the possibility of choosing the APUs, which were audio processors, offering those from Matt Conte and Xodnizel and palettes from Chris Covell, Matt Conte, Kevtris and Roni. For a better experience, you needed to test the plug-ins, processors and palettes with each other and see which one was the best compatible. Sometimes certain combinations would mutate the game or speed it up, for example. The project also supported screenshots in .BMP format and pause (already in the first versions), reset (already in the latest versions) and screenshots in .PCX format (in the latest version), among others. Squeem was a very promising emulator, with a project for a Linux version even started after its last release, but never released. Dead Body created another NES emulator in 2002 called Marijuanes and only one version was released.

Nintendulator (2002)

Nintendulator

Nintendulator was a project started by Quietust using a recently failed emulator called NinthStar NES by Akilla as a base, with only one version released in January 2001. NinthStar initially wanted to become a multi-console system, but the idea ended up being abandoned along with the project. Quietust reworked several things in the emulator. It also used mapper DLLs from the NESten emulator until April 2003.

Nintendulator (Interface)

Among its various options, it ran well-known NES game formats of the time, such as NSF, UNIF, iNES and FDS, the latter belonging to Disk System games. It also supported Game Genie, four controls, save state and video recording. Throughout its existence, it had very few releases, being released in June 2002 for Windows, and having another nine updates in March 2005, January 2006, June 2009, January 2010, August 2014, January 2019, March and July 2022 and July 2024. Nowadays, it is considered, alongside Nestopia and FCEUX, one of the three most popular NES emulators.

Nestopia (2003)

Nestopia

Nestopia was developed in mid-2002 by Martin Freij in C++. The first version was released in June 2003 for Windows, and its distinguishing feature was its CPU requirement, with a minimum processor requirement of 800 MHz, which was not a small feat at the time. This was due to its high emulation accuracy. It was also known as one of the emulators with the greatest game compatibility. All of this made it considered the best emulator of all time, and it is still used today, even after its discontinuation. The emulator supported the main tools of the NES and its competing emulators, such as CPU/PPU synchronization, netplay kaillera, image filters, support for VS System and Disk System, games in UNIF, FDS, NSF, INES and other formats, Game Genie, save state, video and sound recording in AVI and WAV, screenshot, as well as support for various controls and keyboards. It also allowed sound customization, with changes in multiple channels, noise, bit, hertz, between mono and stereo, and allowed choice of sound driver to use. And video customization, with changes in resolution, filters, bits, palettes, brightness, saturation, color, hue, and also choice of video drivers. Other features included having an NSF file player, which were the original NES sound files, and a ROM editor, with changes between NTSC, PAL, RAM and ROM memory, for console or arcade, horizontal or vertical screen, among others. Like many other projects, it had help from many influencers in the field, such as Marat Fayzullin from iNes with documents, Matthew Conte with audio processing information, CaH4e3 from the FCEU-MM project with mapping information, Xodnizel from FCE Ultra also with mappings, Yoshi with the nestech.txt documentation, among many others.

Nestopia (Beetlejuice)

The MacOS X version was released in December 2003 by Richard Bannister, a leading name in ports and emulators for Macintosh, who continued to update it even after the original project ended. The last update to the Mac version was released in May 2021. There was also another version for MacOS X around July 2007 by Deamoncollector. The Linux version was released in May 2007 by Richter Belmont, who had left the Emuhype project, which developed emulators for arcades. The last version of Nestopia was released in June 2008. The emulator had 32 updates in total. There was an attempt to port it to the Nintendo 3DS called Nestopia3DS in 2006, but this never came to fruition. Nestopia was ported to the Xbox in 2010 by Nes6502 under the name NestopiaX. It was also ported to the PS3 under the name NestopiaPlus, also running on Linux and Windows, and to iOS as just Nestopia, both in 2013. Also in 2013, it was added to the OpenEmu multi-system emulator for MacOS X. Nestopia has always been open source, which has led to the creation of several ports and forks of it. In March 2010, a hack of the emulator was created by Keith Kelly, known as Nestopia 1.41.1 Unofficial. Its purpose was to fix a joypad lag in the original emulator that consisted of a delay when the VSync option was activated. In May 2011, it was updated by Geestarraw, adding full-screen support for secondary monitors on PCs with more than 1 monitor. The same author created another update in September 2012. In January 2013, notBald modified the Geestarraw version by adding several image filters. He creates versions 1.41.2 and 1.41.3 in the same month. 

NestopiaEU (Basewars)

NestopiaEU (Menus)

A little earlier, in late 2012, Dan Brook created a fork of Nestopia, called Nestopia Undead Edition (something like a living-dead edition), known as Nestopia UE. This project combines updates from the versions by Geestarraw, Keith, notBald (more later), and the 1.40 AH version for MacOS X by Bannister. The emulator was released for Windows and Linux (it also runs on Open/Free/NetBSD, in addition to Ubuntu) also in 2012, and in January 2016 it was ported to MacOS X, among other systems. The project added, among others, a new interface (GUI), fullscreen mode with native resolution, OpenGL rendering and save state in SRAM (i.e. for read-only devices). Its main updates were versions optimized for several different systems. Nestopia UE was ported around February/March 2013 to LibRetro/RetroArch by themaister (creator of RetroArch) and twinaphex. In 2020, Rupert Carmichael joined Nestopia EU, helping Brook with the project. Nestopia EU was last updated in March 2024.

Other Emulators

FakeNES and No$nes

G-NES

There were other NES emulators, such as Vortendo, Famtasia, NesEM, Mesen, LoopyNES, G-Nes, FakeNES, madNES, no$nes, PlasticNES, QuickNES, TNES, Nezulator, VirtuaNES, uNESsential, DNES, as well as AmiNES, CoolNESs and A/NES, both for Amiga, Nestra and TuxNES for Linux, Godlenes for Atari Falcon, Graybox and QNES for MacOS, among many others. The NES had around 100 emulator projects. Without a doubt the console that generated the most emulators in history, following its history as one of the most popular video games of all time.

VirtualNES and NEZulator

PlasticNES and LoopyNES

Regarding versions for consoles and portables, in addition to those already mentioned above, there were many others, such as for the Dreamcast, PS1, PS2, PS3, N64 consoles, the portable GB, GBA, NDS, Gamepark 32, GP2X, the Java and JavaScript systems, the portable Windows Phone, iOS, Android, PalmOS systems, in addition to the Pocket PC's, totaling dozens of emulators and ports.

NESten and Mesen

uNESsential and TNES

In multisystem emulators, it ran on NesMac (from GB and GBC) in 1997 for MacOS, SmartGear (from GameBoy Color, GameGear and Sega Master System) and MESS (from computers and consoles) both in 1998, Yame (from TurboGrafx 16, SNES and GB) in 2002, MAME (from arcade) in 2004, CrabEmu (from Sega 8 Bits and ColecoVision) in 2015 and VDMGR (from ColecoVision, MSX, Sega 8 Bits and others) in 2017.

MS-DOS: RADARnes, FakeNES, DragoNes, uNESsential, TNES, Nezulator, NesEM, NES-Lord, madNES, PlasticNES, LoopyNES, mIRCNES, Utimate Nes, DNES, Emutator

Windows: G-Nes, NESten, no$nes, VirtuaNES, QuickNES, Famtasia, Vortendo, puNES, Mesen

Linux: Nestra, TuxNES

Amiga: AmiNES, CoolNESs, A/NES

Atari Falcon: Godlenes

MacOS: Graybox, QNes

 

Come and learn the history of Squeem, Nintendulator, Nestopia and Other Emulators in video on our YouTube channel.