FCEUX vs HalfNES

FCEUX is a free, open-source emulator for NES, Famicom, Famicom Disk System, and Dendy systems. It supports NTSC, PAL, and NTSC-PAL Hybrid video modes and offers tools for casual play as well as advanced work such as debugging, ROM hacking, map making, tool-assisted movies, and Lua scripting. The project maintains Win32 and Qt/SDL ports. The Qt/SDL version runs across Windows and UNIX-like systems, including Linux, Solaris, BSD, and OSX. Its tools include debug utilities, movie recording, a TAS Editor, sprite viewer, NES Palette Editor, AVI RIFF Tree viewer, and frame timing tool. Network play in both Win32 and SDL ports is not functional, and the project says it has no plans to fix it. Building Qt/SDL requires Qt5, SDL2, minizip, zlib, and OpenGL; CMake is needed to build from source. FFmpeg libraries are optional for AVI recording, and libx264 is optional for H.264 AVI encoding. The project dates to 2006, and its home page lists version 2.6.6, released on 26 August 2023, as the latest release.

HalfNES is a free NES and Famicom emulator for Linux, macOS, Windows, and other Java-compatible platforms. It supports the mapper numbers listed in its README, and says nearly all US releases will start, though some can show corrupted graphics or freeze. Its audio features include a sound core and an NSF player; display options include full screen and an NTSC filter. Controls can be remapped in Preferences, and joysticks work through DirectInput and xInput. HalfNES supports battery saves, but not savestates. GitHub releases provide a Windows executable and a JAR for other platforms, and both require Java 8 or newer. Linux users need to set execute permission on the JAR. Gamepads must be connected before a game loads to be detected, and their buttons cannot be configured. PAL games are supported but may have more issues; users need to select PAL in Preferences. The README gives a 2 GHz Athlon 64 or better as the requirement for full-speed play across all games, and notes that the NTSC filter needs substantially more processing power.