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.
Fullscreen emulation is mostly complete now - the only thing that remains to be added is preservation of window size and position prior to switching to fullscreen.
The RP2C04-0004 palette has been extracted, thus completing the VS Unisystem palette set in Nintendulator.
Kevin Horton has extracted accurate palettes from the RP2C04-0002 and RP2C04-0003, allowing me to add 100% accurate palettes for VS (2) and VS (3). All that remains now is the 4th VS palette.
The remaining VS Unisystem palettes have been filled with placeholders containing most of the correct colors (based on translation tables found in several games which feature support for all 4 VS palettes as well as the standard NES palette). However, some VS games may still have color problems.
In addition, I have reordered the palette configuration values slightly - as such, the values for "Custom palette" and "VS (1)" have been swapped.
The PAL palette now features a Saturation adjustment, though it currently does nothing (as the PAL palette is still hardcoded).
Nintendulator's NTSC palette generator has been updated with more accurate values, as well as a few bug fixes. Hue adjustment now ranges from -30 to +30, rather than from 300 to 360 (settings will be automatically adjusted on program startup), and Saturation is now properly set for each color.
A minor fix has been applied to the NSF player's BIOS, allowing it to properly handle NSFs whose init routines loop forever.
Today's beta introduces preliminary Fullscreen support. Further work is required, though, in order to prevent Mouse clicks (from Zapper input, for example) from causing the main application window to lose focus.
POV hat support has also been improved, allowing them to be used in two different ways. The standard mapping (which was supported first) is to treat each POV hat as up to 8 mutually exclusive buttons. An additional mapping has now been added to treat them as a pair of axes (technically as 4 overlapping buttons) to make them usable for controller D-pads.
A new option has been added to the Input Configuration dialog to allow using this new mapping. The option is not preserved, so it needs to be re-checked each time you reconfigure your controllers, but it only applies to the configuration process - it is possible to use both POV hat mappings simultaneously, but they need to be configured separately.
The first 0.965 beta build is now available, featuring an overhauled DirectInput interface, including proper axis/button names as well as POV hat support.
Nintendulator 0.960 is now officially released.
After performing numerous tests with my CopyNES and TV tuner card, I've derived much more accurate coefficients for the PPU's Colour Emphasis bits.
Here you may download various versions of Nintendulator and other related applications.
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!
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.
These are old releases of Nintendulator, archived here for historical purposes.
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.