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.

Official Releases

Official releases are available from the ares website.

Nightly Builds

Automated, untested builds of ares are available for Windows and macOS as a pre-release. Only the latest nightly build is kept.

Building ares

Build instructions are available on the ares wiki. See build instructions for:

• Windows
• macOS
• Linux
• BSD

For legacy Makefile build instructions, see here.

Command-line options

When started from the command-line, ares accepts a few options.

Usage: ./ares [options] game(s)

  --help                 Displays available options and exit
  --fullscreen           Start in full screen mode
  --system system        Specify the system name
  --shader shader        Specify GLSL shader name to load (requires OpenGL driver)
  --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)

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.

High-level Components

• 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

Contributing

Please join our discord to chat with other ares developers: https://discord.com/invite/gz2quhk2kv