FAmiga 0.73 - a Nintendo Entertainment System emulator for the Amiga
====================================================================
FAmiga (Famicom + Amiga) is an emulator for NES and Famicom games. On a
68060 it offers a near-flawless emulation experience with most games running
at full speed and pixel-level accuracy. On a 68030 @ 50 MHz some games are
playable with frame skip, but slowdowns are very common. FAmiga is an
unfinished work in progress and still has not yet been tested with a 68040.
Please see the bottom of this file on how to submit bug reports.
Requirements
------------
- A 68030, 68040 or 68060.
- At least 1 MB of fast RAM (2 MB for rewind).
- Kickstart 3.0 or newer.
- ECS or AGA chipset (ECS is untested on real hardware).
- An NTSC game is shown on a 60 Hz NTSC screen when the OS has one (on a PAL
machine: the NTSC monitor in DEVS:Monitors); PAL games on PAL.
- Your own NES game files. No games come with FAmiga.
Installing
----------
Unpack the archive into a drawer of your choice and double-click the FAmiga
icon. This readme and credits.htm have no icons of their own: on Workbench
3.0 and 3.1, choose Window > Show > All Files to see them. The icon gives
FAmiga enough stack; from a Shell type "stack 32768" first. FAmiga keeps
two text files of its own beside itself (see below).
The ROM browser starts in a "ROMs" or "Games" drawer beside FAmiga, or in
the last drawer you used; the top level lists every volume.
FAmiga.config and FAmiga.log
----------------------------
The first time FAmiga starts, it creates two plain text files in its own
drawer, each with an icon that opens it in MultiView. (Save states and
battery saves are kept beside your games instead: save states in a "saves"
drawer, battery saves as name.sav.)
FAmiga.config holds your settings: frame skip, sound, sprites, player 2,
screen mode, the screen positions, the palette, which palettes P cycles
through, and the last drawer you loaded a game from. FAmiga saves it by
itself when you leave the menu or a game, or quit, and only when something
changed. You may edit it with any text editor: the choices for each setting
are listed above it, and a line FAmiga cannot read goes back to its default
(FAmiga.log says which). To skip a palette, change its line at the end from
"On" to "Off". To go back to all the defaults, delete the file; FAmiga makes
a new one. Settings given in a Shell count for that run only.
FAmiga.log records what happened: for each of the last five times FAmiga
started, the machine, the screen, a short speed test and the settings, then
one line for each game played (how long, how fast, how many pictures a
second were shown, how it ended), and the full detail of the last five
games. It is written when FAmiga starts, when a game starts and ends, and
when FAmiga quits, never while a game runs, so after a crash it ends with
"still playing". There is nothing to edit in it. If something goes wrong,
please send FAmiga.log with your report: it usually shows what happened.
If FAmiga cannot start at all, it leaves a file called badstartup.txt beside
itself, which says how far it got. Please send that file too.
Features
--------
- 61 cartridge boards (mappers), including MMC1, MMC3, MMC5, VRC2/4/6/7,
Namco 163, Sunsoft FME-7, Bandai and many multicarts. An unknown board
loads as the simplest one and the menu says so.
- Cartridge sound: VRC6, VRC7 (FM), MMC5 and Namco 163.
- NTSC and PAL games, each on its own screen (selectable in the menu).
- Four save-state slots and rewind (hold F5: up to 30 seconds back).
- Battery saves, written beside the game as name.sav.
- Joysticks, Sega Mega Drive / Genesis pads (two buttons), the keyboard; a
second player on port 1 or on the keyboard.
- 13 colour palettes (P in a game).
- Frame skip (automatic or fixed), a sprite limit of 8, 16, unlimited or
adaptive.
- A help screen that is also a live pad tester.
Keys in a game
--------------
Joystick, cursor keys, W A S D the NES pad
Shift B
Alt A
Return Start
Space Select
2 and 1 player 2's Start and Select
F1-F4 save the state to slot 1-4 (in a
"saves" drawer beside the game)
F6-F9 load slot 1-4
F5 hold to rewind
F10 back to the menu (Start game
resumes gameplay)
P next colour palette
Help the help screen (the game pauses)
Escape quit to Workbench
B and A are on Shift and Alt because an Amiga keyboard can lose a letter key
held together with the cursor keys; Shift and Alt are never lost.
Starting from a Shell
---------------------
From a Shell, give FAmiga a stack first, then start it with or without a
game. With a game, it starts the game at once; F10 still goes to the menu.
Put a path that holds spaces in double quotes:
stack 32768
FAmiga
FAmiga "Work:NES/Super Mario Bros. 3 (U).nes"
Any of these words may follow, in any order. They count for that run only:
none of them is saved in FAmiga.config.
NOSOUND sound off (the menu's Sound)
SKIP=n fixed frame skip, counted as the menu's Frame skip row:
1 = none, 2 = one skipped frame after each drawn one,
3 = two, 4 = three (without it, Auto)
SPRITES=8|16|64|A sprites per line: 8, 16, unlimited (64) or adaptive
PALSCREEN the 50 Hz PAL screen
NTSCSCREEN the 60 Hz NTSC screen (the way back if a PAL choice
leaves your display dark)
VSTART=n the picture's first screen line (the menu's Screen
position: 8 to 44 on NTSC, 8 to 56 on PAL)
LINES=n the 60 Hz picture's height in lines, 160 to 240
(default 218; the picture stays centred)
SYNC=16 the 60 Hz screen's vertical sync moved to the end of
the frame, for some flicker fixers (default SYNC=0,
the chipset's standard sync; some TVs read SYNC=16
as PAL)
NOLIMIT no speed limit: the game runs as fast as the
machine can
FILTER leave the Amiga's low-pass (LED) filter as it is
(FAmiga turns it off by default)
COPDIRECT FAmiga loads its display lists itself from the
start (try it if the screen stays black, e.g. with
a graphics card)
RULER line numbers down the screen, to see how much of
the picture your TV or monitor shows
Known limits
------------
- FAmiga draws the picture a line at a time. A few games that change the
picture in the middle of a line show small faults, and some games are
known not to work yet.
- No disk-based Famicom games (FDS), no NSF music files, no Game Genie.
- The speed figures above were measured on real 68060 and 68030 machines;
68040 machines have not been measured.
Testers - thank you
-------------------
DanyPPC tested on his A1200 with a Blizzard 1230 (68030 at 50 MHz). His
speed measurements calibrated the 68030 model that every speed change of
FAmiga has had to pass since, his reports put the NES buttons on Shift and
Alt and fixed the screen flipping between PAL and NTSC on his TV, and he
suggested many bugged games to fix. Early on, his reports of FAmiga starting
to a grey screen led to the fix in AfroNES 3.40, which changed how FAmiga
times its screen so that the picture shows on setups where it had stayed
grey. Thank you, DanyPPC.
kiwidea tested on his A1200 with a TF1260 (68060) on a TV. His report of the
picture's bottom cut off on the 60 Hz screen, with photos, led to the Screen
position setting that fixed it in 0.69, and his question led to the ROM
browser remembering its last drawer. Thank you, kiwidea.
Credits
-------
FAmiga was made by Afrotechmods, who designed it, tested it on his own Amiga
throughout and directed the work, and Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant), who
wrote the code. The full credits - the sources, the borrowed tables and
their licences, and what each of us did - are in credits.htm, which any
Amiga web browser shows (IBrowse, AWeb, Voyager).
FAmiga was written from scratch. It is not a port, clone or disassembly of
any other emulator and contains no code from one, including the Amiga's own
NES emulators A/NES, A/NES PRO, AmiNES, CoolNESs and DarkNESs. Its emulation
was written from public documentation, mainly the NESdev wiki. Where that
documentation was unclear about a few cartridge boards, the source code of
the open-source FCEUX and Mesen 2 emulators was read to see which register
bits those boards use, and FAmiga's own code was written to behave the same
way. No code from either was copied. The VRC7 sound follows the method of
emu2413, a sound-chip emulator (its notice is in credits.htm).
Nintendo, NES and Famicom are trademarks of Nintendo. FAmiga is not
affiliated with Nintendo or with any game's publisher.
Licence
-------
FAmiga is freeware. Copyright (c) 2026 Afrotechmods.
You may use FAmiga for free and copy it to anyone, as long as the archive is
passed on whole and unchanged, with this readme and credits.htm. You may not
sell it or charge for it, apart from the cost of the medium on a collection
such as the Aminet CDs. You may not change the program or pass on changed
copies.
FAmiga comes with no warranty of any kind. Use it at your own risk; the
authors are not liable for any damage or loss that comes from using it.
The notices of the two borrowed pieces of work (the VRC7 sound tables from
emu2413, MIT licence, and the Game Boy Color colour mix from ares, ISC
licence) are in credits.htm and form part of this licence.
Contact
-------
Afrotechmods: afro afrotechmods com (the first space is the at sign, the
second a dot). Feedback and bug reports are welcome. But with every report,
please attach FAmiga.log (and badstartup.txt, if FAmiga could not start and
left one) and a photo of the problem.
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