FakeNES

FakeNES is a free, portable, and Open source NES emulator written in C and , using the Allegro game library. It runs on any operating system that Allegro supports, such as 32-bit DOS or compatible, any version of Windows released after 1995, and POSIX compliant systems such as Mac OS X and Linux.

It is one of the more common NES emulators, with a distinctive "old school" GUI. Distributed under the terms of the licence of zlib/libpng, FakeNES is free software.

History

FakeNES was created by a team of freelance software developers in mid- to late 2001, and the first milestone release was made on January 24 2002, after three months of work.

However, development efforts were temporarily stalled for most of 2003 due to personal issues. Development finally continued in September 2003 with a new release, finally dubbed "FakeNES Stable" after 2 years of development.

A year later, development was officially cancelled on October 23 2004 due to inherent design flaws. However one of the developers remained and later announced on May 6 2005 that the project was once again under limited development, followed by a work in progress release on October 26.

Between March and April 2006 the project had constant updates, but was abandoned by September 2006.

The last functionally-stable release was 0.5.9 beta 3, with CVS being left in an unstable state, causing slowness and other issues.

Features
FakeNES supports emulation of the Four Score (a 4-player adapter), and the Zapper, the NES' light gun. It also supports joysticks/joypads or the keyboard for playing, palette selection, sound-related tweaks, cheating-device emulation, video filters, and also, there are plans to implement NetPlay, including a framework based around HawkNL.

OpenAL is fully supported for audio output, and AllegroGL is supported for video output via OpenGL. Although the support for OpenGL is still in its infant stages as of 0.5.8, it is mostly functional. Because Allegro already provides numerous system drivers, neither OpenAL or OpenGL are strictly required, and are provided as more of a courtesy.

Family Computer (Famicom) emulation is partially implemented to varying degrees.

Future
FakeNES remains as one of the last high profile NES emulators to still use per-scanline emulation, which is an outdated emulation technique.

Most of the developments of NES emulation in recent years have been towards per-cycle emulation. This same method of emulation has been used by mainstream NES emulators such as Nintendulator and Nestopia for quite some time now. Because of this, the future of FakeNES remains in question, although randilyn has said that she is implementing per-cycle emulation (or an equally as accurate emulation technique) in an upcoming version.

However, the project is currently abandoned.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu