FCEUX vs Nintendulator
FCEUX
fceux.comNintendulator
qmtpro.comSide by side
| Figure | FCEUX | Nintendulator |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · NES Emulators | 8.1 (#4) | 7.4 (#14) |
| Emulation | The project describes FCEUX as an all-in-one emulator offering accurate emulation for casual play and advanced uses. | It aims to emulate NES hardware quirks and special cases, though the maker says its emulation is not 100% perfect. |
| Purpose | FCEUX emulates NES, Famicom, Famicom Disk System and Dendy systems. | Nintendulator is an open source Win32 NES emulator written in C++. |
| Support | The project directs users with unresolved questions to TASVideos forums and bug reports or feature requests to GitHub Issues. | The maker invites users to contact the author by email at [email protected] or [email protected], or via the NESdev Discord or EFnet #nesdev IRC channel. |
Plans
In their own words
FCEUX
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.
Nintendulator
Nintendulator is a free, open-source Win32 NES emulator written in C++. It aims to reproduce NES hardware behavior, including quirks and special cases. Supported formats include .NES, UNIF, FDS images in fwNES format, and NSF; mapper support uses external DLLs, with extra sound channels available for most games that provide them. Features include FDS image writing, Game Genie codes, customizable controllers including four-player setups, input movie recording and playback, AVI capture, and a debugger with simple breakpoint support. Savestates and battery-backed RAM are stored in the current user's Application Data folder, so the emulator can run without administrator privileges. The official release listed is version 0.980, dated January 1, 2019. Version 0.985 Beta is an unstable development build that may have significant bugs. Versions 0.985 and later have 32-bit and 64-bit editions and are officially supported on Windows 10 and later; older Windows versions may work, and recent builds are tested with Wine. Full-speed emulation is estimated to require a 1500MHz or faster CPU.