NES Emulator for Apple platforms
Nesbit is a toy NES Emulator built from scratch in Swift, running on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.
Try it Out!
Nesbit is open source under the MIT License. You can check out the source code on Worktree or install a build directly:
How do I use Nesbit?
Once you've started up Nesbit, hit the Insert Cartridge button and select a .nes file to load a game.
Once a game is loaded, you can find and edit keyboard control mappings on the Settings screen, accessed from the gear button in the bottom toolbar. Clicking on the game picture hides and shows the toolbar.
What games can I play?
Nesbit supports a small subset of NES games - only those using mapper 0 You can download the open source game Thwaite if you don't have any ROMs lying around!
Features
- Runs at 60 FPS on M1 Macs and newer, and iPhone 14 Pro and newer. (It may run well on older devices; these are the ones I have available for testing.)
- Plays sounds from all four synthesized channels
- Provides an on-screen virtual controller on iOS and iPadOS
- Allows using hardware keyboards and gamepads as controllers on all platforms
Limitations
Since Nesbit is an in-progress side project, it doesn't support the full library of NES games, and is missing a few features of the NES hardware. For example, it currently only supports ROMs using mapper 0, only emulates one controller, doesn't play sampled audio, and doesn't implement illegal CPU instructions that some software may use to achieve specific effects.
There is a known issue where audio may crackle or skip from time to time.
Open Source
You can find the source code on Worktree, and I'm writing about my experience with Nesbit on my blog and on Mastodon.
Hire me!
I'm Jason, and I'm looking for work! I have 12+ years of experience writing software for Apple platforms, from line-of-business apps to consumer photo management. You can find out more about me, my portfolio, and my resume (PDF) on my website.