ares is a multi-system emulator that began development on October 14th, 2004. It is a descendant of higan and bsnes, and focuses on accuracy and preservation.
It's worth noting that ares takes some uncommon design approaches that essentially trade speed for code clarity. We avoid state machines and bitmasks (when possible). Most cores end up being half the amount of code, but slower. The code is clearer and less spaghettified, especially for systems with lots of processors. C bitfields being non-portable incurs a speedhit. Windows also has a speedhit over Linux due to its ABI needing more instructions to switch contexts.
Official releases are available from the ares website.
Automated, untested builds of ares are available for Windows and macOS as a pre-release. Only the latest nightly build is kept.
ares supports building on Windows, macOS, and various Linux/BSD distributions. See build instructions for:
When started from the command-line, ares accepts a few options.
Usage: ./ares [options] game(s)
--help Displays available options and exit
--version Displays the version string of the application
--terminal Create new terminal window (Windows only)
--fullscreen Start in full screen mode
--pseudofullscreen Start in pseudo full screen mode
--kiosk Start in minimal UI mode (implies --no-file-prompt)
--system system Specify the system name
--shader shader Specify a slang shader to load (requires OpenGL or Metal)
--setting name=value Specify a value for a setting
--dump-all-settings Show a list of all existing settings and exit
--no-file-prompt Do not prompt to load (optional) additional roms (eg: 64DD)
--settings-file path Specify a settings file override (settings.bml)
--save-state slot Specify a save state slot to load (1-9)
The --system option is useful when the system type cannot be auto-detected. --fullscreen will only have an effect if a game is also passed in argument.
Example:
ares --system MSX examples.rom --fullscreen
Specifying multiple games allows for multi-cart support. For example, to load the Super GameBoy BIOS and a game in one command (to avoid a file prompt), you can do:
ares "Super GameBoy.sfc" "Super Mario Land.gb"
The --no-file-prompt option is useful if you wish to launch a game from CLI without being prompted to load additional roms. For example, some Nintendo 64 games optionally support 64DD expansion disks, so this option can be used to suppress the "64DD Disk" file dialog, and assume any secondary content is disconnected.
- ares: emulator cores and component implementations
- desktop-ui: main GUI implementation for this project
- hiro: cross-platform GUI toolkit that utilizes native APIs on supported platforms
- nall: Near's alternative to the C++ standard library
- ruby: interface between a hiro application and platform-specific APIs for emulator video, audio, and input
- mia: internal ROM database and ROM/image loader
- libco: cooperative multithreading library
Please join our discord to chat with other ares developers: https://discord.com/invite/gz2quhk2kv