NESEmu is an open-source emulator project for the Nintendo Entertainment System, Nintendo's first home console. The NES was a revolutionary system that sparked the home gaming industry in the United States.
The NES was innovative in using a dedicated PPU (picture processing unit) to display graphics, allowing it to be one of the first consoles to offer pixel-level background scrolling. In addition, an ingenious tile and palette system for displaying the background and sprites allowed for remarkably efficient use of the PPU's limited onboard memory. The memory could also be expanded using mapper circuits onboard the Gamepak cartridges, which could dynamically remap CPU and PPU memory to multiple ROM or RAM banks on the cartridge during gameplay to effectively multiplex the address space.
The NES has also gained great popularity in the retro gaming and hacking communities, with many emulators in active development and a wide library of homebrew games written for the console.
NESEmu builds with XCode on macOS 10.14. Open NESemu.xcworkspace and build the NESEmu target
Double-click on NESEmu.app, open a .nes rom file, and play! Below are the controls (currently only player one input supported):
- A Button -> K
- B Button -> J
- Start -> M
- Select -> N
- Up/Down/Left/Right -> WASD
The next goals for NESEmu are adding APU emulation to output audio. In fact a third party audio library has already been implemented in the APU branch but we would very much like to write our own APU.