Nintendulator
an NES emulator by Quietust
[Skip to Downloads]
[Return to NES Stuff]

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, and while it's not 100% perfect, it does emulate a variety of special cases that 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), authentic 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 simple breakpoint support. Savestates and battery-backed RAM are saved within the current user's Application Data folder, 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, or look on the NESdev Discord server (link available from the Wiki) or in the #nesdev IRC channel on EFnet.

News

All - Recent - 2024 - 2023 - 2022 - 2021 - 2020 - 2019 - 2018 - 2017 - 2016 - 2015 - 2014 - 2013 - 2012 - 2011 - 2010 - 2009 - 2008 - 2007 - 2006 - 2005 - 2004

February 20, 2024

Today's build attempts to fix a hang that can happen when rapidly single-stepping through code with the debugger open, particularly when large numbers of PPU updates are taking place (e.g. with the MMC5's graphics extensions). Additional performance optimizations have also been made to the PPU debugger.

January 7, 2024

The NTSC palette generator has been updated with properly measured voltage levels. Normal colors are largely unchanged, but color emphasis is somewhat lighter than before.

June 2, 2023

Basic support for iNES Mapper 30 (UNROM 512) has been added; note that this does not include the ability to overwrite Flash ROM contents. Additionally, all mappers which emulate Bus Conflicts now do so in a deterministic manner.

January 29, 2023

Today's build fixes a bug in Wine 6.0 and later with certain window managers, where the main window shrinks to minimum size and jumps to the upper-left corner of the screen on program startup (as well as when the size multiplier is changed).

Not coincidentally, this is also the first build of Nintendulator produced within Wine (using Visual C++ 2010).

January 11, 2023

An error in the Debugger has been corrected so that accesses to the Stack now properly trigger memory read/write breakpoints.

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!

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.

Outdated releases

These are old releases of Nintendulator, archived here for historical purposes.

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.

Valid XHTML 1.0 Valid CSS!