Nestopia

What is this?

Nestopia is an emulator for the Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom (and Famicom Disk System). It is a computer program that acts like a physical piece of hardware. In other words, this is a method of preserving videogame history, with the welcome side effect of allowing you to play NES games on a modern computer.

History

Nestopia was started many years ago by Martin Freij, and quickly rose to fame for being one of the most accurate NES emulators around. Due to it being released as open source software, other people were allowed to enhance it. A Linux port was eventually done by R. Belmont, but the emulator, and the Linux port seem to have been abandoned since 2008.

What now?

A lot of bugs have been fixed and improvements have been made already. The emulator core is in pretty good shape already, so most of the improvements will be related to user-friendliness and modernity. Support for FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD is now integrated. The Windows version is also being maintained, and will receive any updates to the core that may come, such as support for more mappers. There is also a libretro port that can be used on most (all?) of the libretro-supported platforms.

1.44:

Support for FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD
TV Aspect Ratio option added
2xSaI filter option exposed
Renamed Linux port to Unix port
Removed status bar
General UI improvements
Stop warning about unused results
SDL is the default sound API on Linux, the only one on the BSDs
Drag and Drop re-enabled
Fixed SDL sound crashes
Fixed Movie Record crash
Loading a state when none exists no longer resets
Fixed bug that causes "Enter" to toggle fullscreen
GUI responsiveness glitches when failing to output sound fixed
TV Aspect is more accurate (win32) - W.M. Martinez
libretro port done by Themaister and twinaphex
Merged a fix for Mapper 79 that affects "Puzzle (Unl)" - shalma
Fixed a PPU bug that causes problems in "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles" - Art Vandelae, plasturion, and James
Mapper 143 fix that affects "Dancing Blocks (Unl)" - shalma

1.43:

Fullscreen mode defaults to native resolution
Completely rewrote the GTK+ GUI
More win32 stuff merged from Unofficial Build 1.41.1

1.42:

Added native support for D-pads (Hat Switches)
Fixed the 100% CPU usage bug
Fixed the "Error writing setting!" bug (patch from Arch Linux)
Added an About dialog box
Added icons and a desktop menu entry

1.41:

Fixed a braindead SRAM path issue
Merged win32 fixes from Unofficial Build 1.41.1

1.40-undead:

Ported to GTK+3
Added install/uninstall targets to Makefile
Changed default sound API to ALSA
Changed default renderer to OpenGL with a scale factor of 2
Changed binary name to "nestopia"
SRAM now saves to ~/.nestopia/save (for people who have roms on a read-only network share)
Automatically install a new nstcontrols file to ~/.nestopia if it doesn't exist
Install NstDatabase.xml to a proper location on the filesystem instead of forcing the user to manually copy it to ~/.nestopia
Fixed numerous compiler warnings.

Basic Features

All of the basic features you would expect are implemented:

Video Filters
Gamepad Support
Save States
Cheats
Soft Patching
NSF Player

Accuracy

Nestopia is extremely accurate, and as a result has very high compatibility. The NES hardware is emulated at cycle-by-cycle granularity.

Rewind

You can rewind your gameplay if you do something stupid. This is one of the coolest features ever, and helps prevent you from ruining your gameplay experience obsessing over save states.