Mednafen (NES)

Revisit the NES classics with your favorite emulator. Mednafen is a portable multi-system emulator that utilizes OpenGL and SDL technologies while offering a command-line argument approach to emulating. Previously known as Nintencer, Mednafen can emulate a multitude of gaming consoles including the classic NES, Atari Lynx, GameBoy Advance (GBA), and PlayStation One (PSX/PS1).

Unlike many emulators with a friendly, easy-to-use UI, Mednafen showcases a shell-like interface that focuses on arguments, commands, and simple drag-and-drop gestures that may not appeal to everybody. However, this open-source emulator is packed with some helpful features such as the ability to remap hotkey functions and virtual system inputs to a keyboard, an external joystick, or both simultaneously.

Mednafen also supports save states, real-time rewinding, screen snapshots, audiovisual recording, and has experimental support for ST-V games that don't require decryption chips or any external special hardware. This free emulator also offers the best original cores for Apple II, TurboGrafx-16, Nintendo Virtual Boy, Sega Saturn, and PlayStation. However, it uses the core of FCE Ultra for playing NES games. Other than Mednafen's originals, it is sometimes better to use Standalone emulators to prevent the use of outdated cores.