iNES by
Marat Fayzullin, is, without a doubt the grandfather of the
emulators. In the beginning, there was
iNES... Pasofami came along shortly afterwards, but iNES was the pioneering
Nintendo emulator, and brought many other
emulators into the
public light. Without it, we would have been lost to many of the old game console classics.
At the time (around 1995), iNES made
barely playable a small selection of simpler
NES games to the public. The sound was not great, the
palette was not quite right, and the
speed was not 100% (at least on my old P100), but every little
advance at the time was
invigorating to the community, and very exciting to me
personally. People rallied around these
emulators and formed the better part of the
emulation community from this. iNES oftentimes finds itself
forgotten to the likes of
Nesticle, an
emulator that had a more rapid
development pace.
iNES brought
several innovations to
NES emulation. Besides being
first, and making many
pioneering advances technically, iNES established the format for
NES ROM images that we see today. Previously, you saw
ROMs that were in several
pieces, depending on what information those
peices contained.
Pasofami, a Japanese emulator, could run those
split images, but iNES (originally) could not. iNES came with a pile of tools to
compile and fix the ROM images as they were. Many advances were made in the
emulation, and many of the tools became
obsolete for the what they needed to do.
iNES has progressed since it's neophyte days as an emulator, and now includes many features and bug fixes from before. The sound is good, the palette is dead on, and the compatibility is huge. It comes in several
flavors, including binaries for
Linux,
BSD,
Windows,
Solaris,
SunOS,
AIX, and
DEC Alpha. A
Macintosh port is available from
John Stiles. The Windows port is good, but is
superceded by many other
free NES emulators in
compatibility and
features (such as
LoopyNES,
Nesticle, and
FWNES). iNES holds a place in the heart of those who have been around in the emulation scene. For these reasons, Marat is oftentimes considered the
godfather of emulation. He also wrote
fMSX (MSX emulator),
Virtual Gameboy (
Nintendo Gameboy emulator),
ColEm (ColecoVision), and
MasterGear (
Sega Master System /
Game Gear)
Some info taken from the iNES homepage at:
http://www.komkon.org/fms/iNES/