Update September, 2012: As you may know, Martin’s been MIA since the last NEStopia release, but someone has come forward with enhancements to the Linux version (including adapting it to more-modern GTK 3 and other things that fit better with modern distros). You can find his page (including a new Linux release) right here.

Welcome to the new permanent homepage for NEStopia Linux. NEStopia is a portable Nintendo Entertainment System emulator written in C++ by Martin Freij and ported to Linux by R. Belmont. NEStopia strives for the most accurate emulation possible at the pixel-by-pixel and sample-by-sample level, and it has excellent mapper and UNIF board support as well. A few features:

– Supports .nes, .unf/.unif, and XML format ROMs, including Vs. and Playchoice 10 games
– Supports .fds discs
– Supports .nsf music rips
– All supported files can be extracted from zip or 7zip containers (an archive browser is not yet included – this assumes the common GoodSet case of one zip or 7zip per game)
– Supports save states
– Supports movie recordings
– Supports the “rewinder” – if you make a bad jump and screw up your game, press Backspace and the game will run in reverse. Press \ to take over again and try to fix your mistake.
– Friendly GUI configuration
– Autodetection of PAL and NTSC format games
– Supports drag and drop of compatible games and music rips from modern Linux file managers, including KDE’s Konqueror and GNOME’s Nautilus.

NEStopia’s support forum is located at Emuversal.

The latest release is Version 1.40 Linux release H, based on the 1.40 core. You get these changes from PR #5:

Linux

– XML ROM support
– Archive browser comes up automatically if you select a zip or 7zip archive with multiple NES files in it
– Option to select favored console
– More flexible video configuration including OpenGL hardware scaling
– Input mapping in the GUI
– Core logging is now enabled to the terminal you start NEStopia from for easier diagnosis of problems
– Cheat Manager with flexible support and import/export capability (.xml cheat files will interchange with the Windows version just fine)
– Automatic soft-patching added
– Coin inputs added for Vs. system
– Audio filters added for fun
– [Release B] Fixed several crashy issues in the control configurator
– [Release C] Correct default nstcontrols file included
– [Release D] Fixed remapping “meta” controls (ie, non-player controls like “exit game” and “save state”) and fixed the default control list in README.Linux
– [Release E] Fixed quicksave/quickload path generation
– [Release E] Refactored UI code to be more separate from main logic
– [Release E] Added default SDL audio driver. This should be more compatible in some situations
– [Release F] Fixed keyboard issue with numlock and capslock interfering with reads
– [Release G] Settings window auto-hides during emulation [enik]
– [Release G] Taskbar description is set properly for the game window [enik]
– [Release G] Cheat Manager now shows descriptions on imported XML files. Also fixed a CM crash.
– [Release H] Fixed bug where keyboard input could stick
– [Release H] More verbose error printing when unable to write to the settings file

Core (includes changes from 1.38, 1.39, and 1.40)

Additions:

– ROM sets and external database support using new XML format co-developed with Bootgod.
– Mapper 36, 103, 104, 106, 120, 126, 175, 176, 223 and 224. Info from mad dumper, CaH4e3 and Temryu.
– UNIF boards GS-2013 and BS-5. info from CaH4e3.
– Emulation of bus conflicts for certain boards.
– Database entries.
– Core API documentation in HTML through cppdoc.
– UPS patching format support.
– Database lookup on soft-patching.
– Database entries. Info from Bootgod.
– More recognized boards. Info from Bootgod.
– Preliminary Dendy console support. Fixes Magistr (Subor) and some other ‘clone exclusives’. Info from Flamer and HardWareMan.
– DMC DMA read conflicts. Info from blargg and bunnyboy.
– Mapper 177, 179, 219 and 221. Info from CaH4e3.
– Database entries.

Changes:

– PPU power/reset timing and register states. Info from blargg.
– Misc IRQ/NMI/BRK/DMA special-case behavior. Info from blargg.
– NTSC/PAL switch during emulation will now force a hard-reset.
– Misc mapper emulation improvements. Info from Bootgod.
– NES-EVENT board timer more accurate.
– Board names. Info from Bootgod.
– Refactoring and mapper codebase overhaul.
– Speed optimizations (accuracy NOT compromised!).
– Mappers 21, 23, 25 and 185 no longer supported using plain iNES
files because of format restrictions.
– FDS saves through UPS instead of IPS.
– Database entries. Info from Bootgod.
– Refactoring.
– Better and more flexible PPU address line implementation at the expense of some speed.
– Database entries.
– Refactoring.

Fixes:

– MMC3 soft-reset IRQ bug.
– Database entries.
– FDS file saving bug.
– NTSC burst phase incrementing bug.
– Potential memory leak in database loader.
– UTF16 to wchar_t portability fix in XML parser.
– Const-correctness bug caught by GCC 4.0.
– Wrong palette sometimes when switching to/from VS images.
– Wrong image information sometimes, e.g. battery when there isn’t any.
– Save state NTSC/PAL mode saving.
– Minor save state inaccuracy fix with tape recording.

Downloads

Binaries

I will not supply any binaries here, but I’ll gladly link to those built by others.

Get Fedora packages at RPMFusion.
(other distros to come)

Source

To build NEStopia, you need two things:

The 1.40 core source and
The Linux 1.40 release H overlay source.

Unzip the core source, then unzip the Linux overlay source over it. Change to the directory you unzipped everything in and type “make”. If you have problems, make sure you have these packages:

– General development (also called “GCC” and “G++”) plus their dependancies
– GTK+ 2.4 or later and the development packages
– The ALSA library and it’s development packages
– SDL 1.2.12 or later and it’s development package

If you can compile SDLMAME, you probably can compile NEStopia 🙂