FCEUX vs NET-NES

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.

NET-NES is a free Nintendo Entertainment System emulator written in C# that can run some NES games. Downloadable builds are listed for Windows, macOS, and Linux, including win-x64, win-x86, osx-x64, osx-arm64, and linux-x64. Launching the executable opens a basic graphical interface with options to open a ROM and view the manual. Command-line options include ROM loading, a CPU JSON test, window scaling, an FPS counter, and debug mode. Mapper 0 is supported, while Mappers 1, 2, and 4 are implemented experimentally. The project says it passes nestest CPU instruction tests and lists tested games as working, but some games may glitch or freeze. Its PPU uses scanline timing rather than dot-by-dot timing, so it is not cycle accurate and some games may be affected. A debugger, Mapper 3, player 2 controller support, and audio are listed as upcoming features. The project distributes the software under the MIT License.