Open Source C++ Emulators for Mac

shadPS4 is an early PlayStation 4 emulator for Windows, Linux, and macOS written in C++. If you encounter problems or have doubts, do not hesitate to look at the Quickstart. To verify that a game works, you can look at shadPS4 Game Compatibility. To discuss shadPS4 development or suggest ideas, join the Discord server. To get the latest news, go to our X (twitter) or our website.

DeSmuME is the most seasoned open source Nintendo DS emulator. It sports tools designed for hackers, speedrunners, youtubers, and casual gamers. Homebrew programs are supported and can even be debugged through GDB. The Windows and OSX versions are both relatively feature rich, and there is a small universe of forks and mods that add even more features for casual gaming. DeSmuME is the origin of RetroArch and OpenEmu Nintendo DS support and is used by several mobile Nintendo DS emulators, with the notable exception of DraStic. DeSmuME's source code is now hosted at https://github.com/TASVideos/desmume/ win32 autobuilds @ https://ci.appveyor.com/project/zeromus/desmume/build/artifacts

Citra is an experimental open-source Nintendo 3DS emulator/debugger written in C++. It is written with portability in mind, with builds actively maintained for Windows, Linux and macOS. Citra emulates a subset of 3DS hardware and therefore is useful for running/debugging homebrew applications, and it is also able to run many commercial games! Some of these do not run at a playable state, but we are working every day to advance the project forward. (Playable here means compatibility of at least "Okay" on our game compatibility list.) Citra is licensed under the GPLv2 (or any later version). Refer to the license.txt file included. Please read the FAQ before getting started with the project. If you want to contribute please take a look at the Contributor's Guide and Developer Information. You should also contact any of the developers in the forum in order to know about the current state of the emulator because the TODO list isn't maintained anymore.

Bochs is a portable x86 PC emulation software package that emulates enough of the x86 CPU, related AT hardware, and BIOS to run Windows, Linux, *BSD, Minix, and other OS's, all on your workstation.

PPSSPP is an open source, cross-platform PSP emulator which allows you to play your PSP games on Android, Windows, Mac or Linux. With PPSSPP you can play your PSP games on your PC in full HD resolution, or play on your tablet for a big-screen mobile gaming experience. PPSSPP enhances the gaming experience in more ways than one. It even upscales some textures that would otherwise be too blurry due to the fact that they were originally made for the small screen. Even on modern Android phones and tablets you can enjoy double the original resolution. Get a whole new and better PSP gaming experience with PPSSPP now!

RPCS3 is an open-source PlayStation 3 emulator and debugger, allowing users to run PS3 games and software on Windows, Linux, and macOS platforms. It aims to preserve the legacy of the PlayStation 3 by enabling gameplay and software testing beyond the original hardware's lifespan. The project has made significant progress in compatibility and performance, supporting a wide range of PS3 titles.

An emulator for Gameboy and GameboyAdvance systems.

MAME's purpose is to preserve decades of software history. As electronic technology continues to rush forward, MAME prevents this important "vintage" software from being lost and forgotten. This is achieved by documenting the hardware and how it functions. The source code to MAME serves as this documentation. The fact that the software is usable serves primarily to validate the accuracy of the documentation (how else can you prove that you have recreated the hardware faithfully?). Over time, MAME (originally stood for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) absorbed the sister-project MESS (Multi Emulator Super System), so MAME now documents a wide variety of (mostly vintage) computers, video game consoles and calculators, in addition to the arcade video games that were its initial focus. The MAME project as a whole is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, 2 (GPL-2.0), since it contains code made available under multiple GPL-compatible licenses.

Virtual amiibo (amiibo emulation) system for Nintendo Switch. A virtual amiibo is detected by emuiibo based on two aspects: a amiibo.json and a amiibo.flag file must exist inside the virtual amiibo's folder mentioned above. If (for whatever reason) you would like to disable a virtual amiibo from being recognised by emuiibo, just remove the flag file, and create it again to enable it. While old emuiibo formats are supported and converted to the current format (see above), it is strongly suggested to, unless bin dumps might be indispensable, emuiigen be used, our PC utility designed to create and edit virtual amiibos.

Software to emulate Wii U games and applications on PC. Currently, the DRC (GamePad), Pro Controller, and Classic Controller is emulated. Wiimotes are emulated as well (including native support). Keyboard input + USB controllers as input devices are supported. GamePad touch input can be controlled via a left mouse click. Gyro functionality is emulated with limitations and can be controlled via the right mouse button. Cemu is currently only available for 64-bit Windows and Linux devices. The native Linux build is currently a work-in-progress. See Current State Of Linux builds for more information about the things to be aware of. You can download the latest Cemu releases from the GitHub Releases or from Cemu's website. Cemu is currently only available in a portable format so no installation is required besides extracting it in a safe place.

Denise is a cycle accurate and platform independant C64 / Amiga 500/1000 emulator. My motivation for this project is understanding how it works and write clean and easy readable code. RetroArch SLANG shaders are supported by Denise. Features already known from the C64 emulation, such as runAhead, savestates, drive sounds, PAL encoding, dynamic rate control, G-Sync/FreeSync, Warp, just in time polling are also available for the Amiga. Denise supports SuperCPU, Final Chesscard, REU, GeoRam, EasyFlash, EasyFlash³, Gmod2, Retro Replay, Action Replay, Final Cartridge, Light Guns/Pens, GunStick, Mouse 1351, Mouse Neos, Paddles, fast loaders such as ProfDOS, PrologicDOS, DolphinDOS, ProSpeed 1571, Turbo Trans, 1571, 1581, drag'n'drop and command line support. GIT repo: https://bitbucket.org/piciji/denise/src/master

An open source NES Emulator for Windows and Unix that features solid emulation accuracy and state of the art tools for power users. FCEUX's source code is now hosted at https://github.com/TASVideos/fceux/ win32 autobuilds @ https://ci.appveyor.com/project/zeromus/fceux/build/artifacts

melonDS aims at providing fast and accurate Nintendo DS emulation. While it is still a work in progress, it has a pretty solid set of features. Firmware boot (not direct boot) requires a BIOS/firmware dump from an original DS or DS Lite. DS firmwares dumped from a DSi or 3DS aren't bootable and only contain configuration data, thus they are only suitable when booting games directly. DS BIOS dumps from a DSi or 3DS can be used with no compatibility issues.

A PlayStation 4 emulator which was just started. A project done for fun, and for technical research. The only reason I have started this project is for learning 3D graphics. It's not intended to become a serious application. Support simple compute shader, compute ring, cube maps. For more details you could join our discord server to contact me, or if you are used to Tencent QQ/TIM, just join our group. There you can get more resources which are useful for contributing. To run or develop GPCS4, a CPU supporting AVX instruction set as well as a graphics card supporting Vulkan 1.3 are required.

On December 24th, 1996, Nicola Salmoria began working on his single hardware emulators, which he merged into one program during January 1997. He named the accomplishment by the name of Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, or MAME for short.

Researching Wii U emulation. Licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later (GPLv3+). The latest Windows and Linux binaries are available via Actions artifacts. You must be logged into GitHub in order to download the artifacts. MacOS builds are currently not provided due to complications with Vulkan. Run the decaf-qt executable, it is recommended to run the emulator from the root git directory so that it is able to access resources/fonts/*. Alternatively, set resources_path in the configuration file to point to the resources directory.

Experimental Symbian OS emulator, written in C++ 17. The emulator currently emulates Symbian OS's EKA1 and EKA2 behavior, and reimplement most of its critical app servers. It can already boot many EKA1 and EKA2 apps. For more discussion and support, please visit our Discord server. Artifacts for Windows, OSX, Linux and Android are provided through Github Actions. Click on the Releases section to get the newest stable build. Compatibility for the games and software that can (and can't) run on the emulator can be verified.

DuckStation is an simulator/emulator of the Sony PlayStation(TM) console, focusing on playability, speed, and long-term maintainability. The goal is to be as accurate as possible while maintaining performance suitable for low-end devices. "Hack" options are discouraged, the default configuration should support all playable games with only some of the enhancements having compatibility issues. A "BIOS" ROM image is required to to start the emulator and to play games. You can use an image from any hardware version or region, although mismatching game regions and BIOS regions may have compatibility issues. A ROM image is not provided with the emulator for legal reasons, you should dump this from your own console using Caetla or other means. DuckStation features a fully-featured frontend built using Qt, as well as a fullscreen/TV UI based on Dear ImGui.

xBRZ is a high-quality image upscaling filter for creating beautiful HD representations from low-resolution images. Reference implementations for common emulators can be found in the download section: ● DOSBox ● ePSXe ● HqMAME ● ScummVM ● Snes9x ● Kega Fusion http://sourceforge.net/projects/xbrz/files/ Test the xBRZ scaler with your own images and compare against other scalers with the "Scaler Test" tool: http://sourceforge.net/projects/xbrz/files/ScalerTest_1.1.zip

FEX allows you to run x86 and x86-64 binaries on an AArch64 host, similar to qemu-user and box86. It has native support for a rootfs overlay, so you don't need to chroot, as well as some thunklibs so it can forward things like GL to the host. FEX presents a Linux 5.0 interface to the guest, and supports both AArch64 and x86-64 as hosts. FEX is very much work in progress, so expect things to change. FEX has been tested to build and run on ARMv8.0, ARMv8.1+, and x86-64(AVX or newer) hardware. ARMv7 and older x86 hardware will not work. Expected operating system usage is Linux. FEX has been tested with Ubuntu 20.04, 20.10, and 21.04. Also Arch Linux. AArch64 hosts require a rootfs for running applications.

Mesen is a high-accuracy NES emulator for Windows and Linux. It offers numerous features, such as save states, video filters, netplay, rewinding, overclocking, cheat codes and HD packs. It also includes an extensive set of debugging tools for homebrew development or romhacking. Mesen-S is a high-accuracy SNES emulator for Windows and Linux. Game Boy and Game Boy Color games are also supported, along with Super Game Boy emulation. It contains most of the features found in Mesen, including an extensive set of debugging tools. These are development builds and may be unstable. Using them may also increase the chances of your settings being corrupted, or having issues when upgrading to the next official release. Additionally, these builds are currently not optimized via PGO and will typically run 20-30% slower than the official release builds.

Fuse for macOS is a macOS port of The Free Unix Spectrum Emulator (Fuse) (an emulator of the 1980s home computer and various clones).

Vita3K is an experimental PlayStation Vita emulator for Windows and Linux. The emulator currently runs some homebrew programs. It is also able to load some decrypted commercial games. Vita3K is licensed under the GPLv2 license. This is largely dictated by external dependencies, most notably Unicorn. Specify the path to a .vpk file as the first command line argument, or run Vita3K --help from the command-line for a full list of options. For more detailed instructions on running/installing games on all platforms, please read the #info-faq channel on our Discord Server. The project is at an early stage, so please be sensitive to that when opening new issues. Expect crashes, glitches, low compatibility and poor performance.

ASAP (Another Slight Atari Player) plays and converts 8-bit Atari music (*.sap, *.cmc, *.mpt, *.rmt, *.tmc, ...) on modern computers and mobile devices.

Yabause is a portable Sega Saturn emulator.