Nintendulator
an NES emulator by Quietust
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About

Nintendulator is an open source Win32 NES emulator written in C++. The original goal was to emulate the NES down to its hardware quirks; though it's fallen behind over the years, recent builds have caught up once again and can emulate certain behaviors most other emulators neglect to handle. However, this emulation precision comes at a price - a 1500MHz (estimated) or faster CPU is required to emulate at full speed.

Supported file formats include .NES, UNIF, FDS (fwNES format), and NSF. Mappers are handled using external DLLs, complete with extra sound channels for most games which provide them. Other notable features include writing to FDS images (by storing the differences in separate files), Game Genie support (limited to 3 codes), customizeable controllers (including 4 player), input movie recording and playback (with re-recording), AVI capturing, and a debugger with moderate breakpoint support. Additionally, savestates and battery-backed RAM are saved within the current user's Application Data folder rather than in the application's own directory, allowing Nintendulator to function properly when not run as an administrator.

To contact the author, send email to quietust at either @qmtpro.com or @gmail.com - you may also send Skype messages to "Quietust" but only after you first send an email, as messages are only accepted from existing contacts.

News

All - Recent - 2013 - 2012 - 2011 - 2010 - 2009 - 2008 - 2007 - 2006 - 2005 - 2004

April 21, 2013

Nintendulator's sprite evaluation logic has been partially rewritten in order to match behavior observed from Visual 2C02 and actual hardware.

March 10, 2012

Some graphics/sound code has been reorganized somewhat in order to avoid needlessly reloading parts of DirectX. In the process, I fixed a bug that caused 64-bit builds (MSVC 2010 only) to crash upon changing video modes.

December 9, 2011

Support for the SNES Mouse controller has been added - try it out with the game "Thwaite".

September 27, 2011

Nintendulator will now only attempt to relocate old save data from the "Saves" folder once, rather than doing so every time the program starts.

September 21, 2011

Apparently, the Oeka Kids tablet controller had the same problem as the Zapper when the pointer was outside the window - this has also been fixed.

Downloads

Here you may download various versions of Nintendulator and other related applications.

Latest unstable build

This is a snapshot of my latest development code. Though this has features not present in the current release below, it may also have significant bugs, so download it at your own risk!
This is NOT a release!

Notable changes include added NES 2.0 support, various emulation fixes, and numerous added or improved mappers.

Current release

This is the latest officially released version of Nintendulator. You are highly recommended to use this version instead of the latest build above unless you require any of the new functionality added since the last release.

On June 22, 2010, the Winamp plugin was rereleased after it was discovered to have been completely broken. The ANSI release of the emulator itself has also been found to not run on Windows 98 and earlier; if, for some reason, Windows 98 compatibility is needed, please use a newer version.

Outdated releases

These are old releases of Nintendulator, archived here for posterity. Where present, mapper DLL binaries are also included with the corresponding emulator releases.

Mappers Supported

These mappers are supported in the latest released version of Nintendulator. Mappers listed in bold have been added or improved in the latest beta build; for iNES and VS, strike indicates what the compatibility was in the official release, while for UNIF it indicates boards that have been removed.

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