FCEUX vs Nestalgia

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.

Nestalgia is a work-in-progress emulator for NES and Famicom systems, built in Kotlin for Linux, macOS and Windows. It also emulates Famicom Disk System, Dendy, Vs. System, NSF and NSFe, and lists support for 305 mappers. The emulator includes save states, battery saves, overclocking and cheat codes, along with fullscreen display and screenshots. Audio, video, controller and emulation settings are configurable. More than 20 controllers are supported, including the NES Controller, Zapper, Power Pad and Four Score. The project lists passing CPU, video, audio, mapper and input accuracy tests. Windows, Linux and Mac downloads require Java 21 or newer. The project is free and open source under GPL-3.0, with no plan limits stated. Android is listed with an uncertain “Coming soon...or not :(” status. Developers can add its core library through JitPack using Gradle instructions. Nestalgia implements the emulator but does not include debugging tools.