Introduction
What is this?

Nestopia is an emulator for the Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom (and Famicom Disk System). It is a computer program that acts like a physical piece of hardware. In other words, this is a method of preserving videogame history, with the welcome side effect of allowing you to play NES games on a modern computer.
History

Nestopia was started many years ago by Martin Freij, and quickly rose to fame for being one of the most accurate NES emulators around. Due to it being released as open source software, other people were allowed to enhance it. A Linux port was eventually done by R. Belmont, but the emulator, and the Linux port seem to have been abandoned since 2008.
What now?

A lot of bugs have been fixed and improvements have been made already. The emulator core is in pretty good shape already, so most of the improvements will be related to user-friendliness and modernity. Support for the BSDs is coming up, and there is a libretro port in the works. The Windows version is also being maintained, and will receive any updates to the core that may come, such as support for more mappers.


Changelog
Nestopia Undead 1.43:

Fullscreen mode defaults to native resolution
Completely rewrote the GTK+ GUI
More win32 stuff merged from Unofficial Build 1.41.1

Nestopia Undead 1.42:

Added native support for D-pads (Hat Switches)
Fixed the 100% CPU usage bug
Fixed the "Error writing setting!" bug (patch from Arch Linux)
Added an About dialog box
Added icons and a desktop menu entry

Nestopia Undead 1.41:

Fixed a braindead SRAM path issue
Merged win32 fixes from Unofficial Build 1.41.1

Nestopia 1.40-undead:

Ported to GTK+3
Added install/uninstall targets to Makefile
Changed default sound API to ALSA
Changed default renderer to OpenGL with a scale factor of 2
Changed binary name to "nestopia"
SRAM now saves to ~/.nestopia/save (for people who have roms on a read-only network share)
Automatically install a new nstcontrols file to ~/.nestopia if it doesn´t exist
Install NstDatabase.xml to a proper location on the filesystem instead of forcing the user to manually copy it to ~/.nestopia
Fixed numerous compiler warnings.

Features
Basic Features

All of the basic features you would expect are implemented:

Video Filters
Gamepad Support
Save States
Cheats
Soft Patching
NSF Player

Accuracy

Nestopia is extremely accurate, and as a result has very high compatibility. The NES hardware is emulated at cycle-by-cycle granularity.
Rewind

You can rewind your gameplay if you do something stupid. This is one of the coolest features ever, and helps prevent you from ruining your gameplay experience obsessing over save states.





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1.43
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Linux Shell:

Additions:
- Fullscreen defaults to native screen resolution

Changes:
- Completely rewrote the GUI (except for Cheat Manager and Archive Selector)
- More traditional look and feel
- Improved input configuration
- Keyboard shortcuts
- More functionality exposed directly through GUI
- Better looking icons

Windows Shell:

Changes:
- Updated icons, about dialog, copyright
- Merged the remaining features from Unofficial 1.41.1

----------------------------------------------------------------
1.42
----------------------------------------------------------------

Linux Shell:

Additions:
- Added native support for D-pads (Hat Switches)
- Added an About dialog box
- Added icons and a desktop menu entry

Fixes:
- Fixed the 100% CPU usage bug
- Fixed the "Error writing setting!" bug (patch from Arch Linux)

----------------------------------------------------------------
1.41
----------------------------------------------------------------

Linux shell:

Fixes:
- Fixed a braindead SRAM path issue

Windows Shell:

Changes:
- Merged win32 fixes from Unofficial Build 1.41.1

----------------------------------------------------------------
1.40-undead
----------------------------------------------------------------

Linux Shell:

Additions:
- Added install/uninstall targets to Makefile

Changes:
- Ported to GTK+3
- Changed default sound API to ALSA (SDL audio has problems on some computers)
- Changed default renderer to OpenGL with a scale factor of 2
- Changed binary name to "nestopia"
- SRAM now saves to ~/.nestopia/save (for people who have roms on a read-only network share)
- Automatically install a new nstcontrols file to ~/.nestopia if it doesn´t exist
- Install NstDatabase.xml to a proper location on the filesystem instead of forcing the user to manually copy it to ~/.nestopia

Fixes:
- Fixed numerous compiler warnings.

----------------------------------------------------------------
Unofficial 1.41.1 - by Geestarraw (geestarraw@gmail.com) (May 17, 2011)
----------------------------------------------------------------

Shell:

Changes:

- Added fullscreen support for non-primary monitor displays.
- Modified Video Options dialog component layout and added device index to
identify mutiple monitors.
- Refactoring.
- Code documentation.

Fixes:

- Fixed so menu is still displayed after fullscreen monitor to monitor switch.

Project:

Changes:

- Converted solution and projects to Visual Studio 2010.
- Improved version enumeration previously locked to x.xx (exactly 3 digits) to
be anything from y.y, y.y.y, and y.y.y.y (where y can be up to 4 digits).
- Changed build output target to nestopia.exe.

Fixes:

- Fixed bug in version enumeration always excluding highest version number.
- Moved unofficial 1.41 release notes to official changelog file.

----------------------------------------------------------------
Unofficial 1.41 - by Keith Kelly (c0d3h4x0r@hotmail.com) (March 29, 2010)
----------------------------------------------------------------

This is an unofficial maintenance release I created to fix an annoying joystick lag issue.
This lag was particularly bad when VSync was enabled. The original Nestopia author (Martin
Freij) appears to have abandoned the official Nestopia project on SourceForge and has not
responded to any of my e-mails, so I am left with no choice but to provide this unofficial
release as a public service to the emulation community.

Changes:

1. Removed manual option to set priority of Nestopia´s main emulation loop thread. Instead,
Nestopia now boosts its own process base priority AND its own main emulation thread priority
whenever it is the active foreground window (and/or running in full-screen mode). This brings
Nestopia much closer to real-time performance and responsiveness.

2. Removed some screwy input polling logic, and added some calls to input.Poll(), to ensure
that the input devices are always polled immediately before the input state is utilized.
This was the key change that got rid of most of the lag.

3. Removed some screwy input timing logic that was causing input polling to work only on
certain clock intervals, rather than allowing it to work every time it was called.

(As far as I can tell on my own hardware configuration, these three changes taken together
have completely eliminated the lag problems that have been present in Nestopia for several
releases. Your mileage may vary.)

4. Updated the Visual Studio solution/project to build successfully under Visual C++ 2008
Express Edition.

5. Added this releasenotes.txt file and bumped the version number to 1.41.

----------------------------------------------------------------
1.40 Release A-H - by R. Belmont
----------------------------------------------------------------

Linux Shell:

Additions:
- XML ROM support
- More flexible video configuration including OpenGL hardware scaling
- Input mapping in the GUI
- Cheat Manager with flexible support and import/export capability (win32 compatible format)
- Core logging is now enabled to the terminal you start NEStopia from for easier diagnosis of problems
- Automatic soft-patching added
- Coin inputs added for Vs. system
- Audio filters added for fun
- [Release C] Proper default nstcontrols file included
- [Release E] Added SDL audio driver, should be most compatible
- [Release G] Cheat Manager now shows descriptions on imported XML files. Also fixed a CM crash.

Changes:
- Complains more if it´s unable to write to the settings file
- Archive browser comes up automatically if you select a zip or 7zip archive with multiple NES files in it
- Option to select favored console
- [Release E] Refactored to get UI code out of main.cpp
- [Release G] Settings window auto-hides during emulation [enik]

Fixes:
- Fixed bug where keyboard input could stick
- [Release B] Cleaned up some crashy issues with the control configurator
- [Release D] Fixed ability to remap "meta" keys (keys that control NEStopia itself), fixed documentation on defaults.
- [Release E] Fixed quicksave/quickload
- [Release F] Fixed keyboard to ignore numlock/capslock
- [Release G] Taskbar description is set properly for the game window [enik]