higan, the multi-system emulator¶

higan emulates a number of 2D video-game consoles, allowing you to play classic games on a modern general-purpose computer.

To get started with higan right away, see the Quick Start section of the documentation.

About higan¶

As of v107, higan has top-tier support for the following consoles:

Nintendo Super Famicom/Super Nintendo Entertainment System, including add-on hardware: Super Game Boy Sufami Turbo

Nintendo Game Boy Advance

It also includes some level of support for these consoles:

Satellaview add-on for the Super Famicom

Nintendo Famicom/Nintendo Entertainment System

Nintendo Game Boy

Nintendo Game Boy Color

Sega Master System

Sega Game Gear

Sega Mega Drive/Genesis

NEC PC Engine/TurboGrafx 16 (but not the CD-ROM² System/TurboGrafx-CD)

NEC SuperGrafx

Bandai WonderSwan

Bandai WonderSwan Color

Pocket Challenge v2

Note: Some consoles were released under different names in different geographic regions. To avoid listing all possible names every time such a console is mentioned, higan uses the name from the console’s region of origin. In practice, that means Japanese names: “Famicom” and “Super Famicom” instead of “NES” and “SNES”, “Mega Drive” instead of “Genesis”, “PC Engine” instead of “TurboGrafx-16”.

higan is actively supported on FreeBSD 10 and above, and Microsoft Windows 7 and above. It also includes some level of support for GNU/Linux and macOS.

higan is officially spelled with a lowercase “h”, not a capital.

About this document¶

This is the semi-official higan manual, a community-maintained introduction and reference. It may be out of date by the time you read this, and it may contain errors or omissions. If you find something that’s wrong, or you have a suggestion, post a message on the unofficial forum.

Official higan resources¶

Unofficial higan resources¶

Unofficial forum

Source code repository archives official higan releases and WIP snapshots since approximately v067r21.

Quark shader repository collects shaders that higan can use to add special effects like TV scanlines to its video output, or smarter algorithms for scaling up to modern PC resolutions. See Using video shaders below for details.

Mercurial Magic is a tool for converting MSU1 games and mods into a format higan can use. See Importing MSU1 games for details.

There are also other projects based on current or older versions of higan, in whole or in part, that you might want to check out.