higan

Higan is the most advanced emulator available for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Unlike most emulators, higan’s primary goal is accuracy at the cost of performance.

The higan emulator was previously known as bsnes, and is still actively developed. The code is available to view over on GitHub.

The aim is to emulate the SNES original hardware as accurately as possible through the use of low-level emulation. It has the added ability of also using cycle-accurate emulation.

Higan touts the ability to run every commercially SNES title that has been released without any bugs that were not originally in the game itself.

The higan emulator has grown to now experimentally emulate the NES, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and the Game Boy Advance. This wide range of consoles makes it one of the more versatile emulators around. However, the emulation outside of the SNES still needs more work to get to the same accuracy and capabilities.

The emulator also offers support for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux (Available from Debian packages).