ANESE

Another NES Emulator - written for fun & learning - first implementation of wideNES

View the Project on GitHub daniel5151/ANESE

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ANESE (Another NES Emulator) is a Nintendo Entertainment System Emulator written for fun and learning.

Accuracy and performance are long-term goals, but the primary focus is getting popular titles up and running. There are still a lot of bugs, but many games are working quite well already.

ANESE is cross-platform, and is regularly tested on macOS, Windows, and Linux.

ANESE core uses clean and interesting C++11, emphasizing readability, maintainability, and approachability. It is well commented, providing in-line sources and insights for much of the implementation. It is also dependency free (aside from stdlib), making it easy to embed in other projects.

WideNES

wideNES is a novel technique that can automatically “map-out” levels and worlds in NES games. Check out the wideNES Readme for details.

A GIF is worth a 1000 words:

wideNES on Metroid

Pretty cool huh? Here’s another one:

wideNES on SMB1

Downloads

Official releases of ANESE can be found on the Releases tab on GitHub.

Alternatively, for the most up-to-date version of ANESE, nightly builds are available. These are compiled directly from the latest ANESE commit, so there may/will be bugs.

Windows: You can download builds of ANESE from AppVeyor’s build artifacts page.

macOS: Travis uploads ANESE.app bundles to this GDrive folder.

Building

Dependencies

ANESE’s emulation core (src/nes) doesn’t have any major dependencies, but the UI does use a couple. Most of these dependencies are bundled with ANESE (see: /thirdparty), although some require additional installation:

Generating + Compiling

ANESE builds with CMake

On macOS / Linux

# in ANESE root
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

make install # on macOS: creates ANESE.app in ANESE/bin/

On Windows:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
msbuild anese.sln /p:Configuration=Release

Running

ANESE opens to a directory-browser, from which ROMs can be launched.

ANESE can run from the shell using anese [rom.nes] syntax. Certain features are only accessible from the command-line at the moment (e.g: movie recording / playback, PPU timing hacks). For a full list of switches, run anese -h

Windows Users: make sure the executable can find SDL2.dll! Download the runtime DLLs from the SDL website, and plop them in the same directory as anese.exe

Mappers

Most popular Mappers are implemented:

# Name Some Games
000 NROM Super Mario Bros. 1, Donkey Kong, Duck Hunt
001 MMC1 Legend of Zelda, Dr. Mario, Metroid
002 UxROM Megaman, Contra, Castlevania
003 CNROM Arkanoid, Cybernoid, Solomon’s Key
004 MMC3 Super Mario Bros 2 & 3, Kirby’s Adventure
007 AxROM Marble Madness, Battletoads
009 MMC2 Punch Out!!

Feel free to open a PR for any mappers you implement :)

Controls

Currently hard-coded to the following:

Button Key Controller
A Z X
B X A
Start Enter Start
Select Right Shift Select
Up Up arrow D-Pad
Down Down arrow D-Pad
Left Left arrow D-Pad
Right Right arrow D-Pad

Any xbox-compatible controller should work.

There are also a couple of emulator actions:

Action Key Controller
Pause / Open Menu Esc Left Thumbstick Button
Reset Ctrl - R  
Power Cycle Ctrl - P  
Toggle CPU logging Ctrl - C  
Speed +25% Ctrl - =  
Speed -25% Ctrl - -  
Fast-Forward Space Right Thumbstick Button
Make Save-State Ctrl - (1-4)  
Load Save-State Ctrl - Shift - (1-4)  

(there are 4 save-state slots)

DISCLAIMERS

TODO

These are features that will add major value to ANESE:

Here’s a couple that have been crossed off already:

And here are some ongoing low-priority goals:

Roadmap

Key Milestones

Secondary Milestones

Tertiary Milestones (Fun Features!)

Accuracy & Compatibility

Attributions