ares is an open-source multi-system emulator with a focus on accuracy and preservation. It's source code is structured to be maximally readable and self-documenting.
The ares name was chosen as an homage to the protagonist of Near’s all-time favorite video game, Lunar: The Silver Star. In fact, most of the internal naming of ares falls in the same vein: hiro, nall, ruby, luna, lucia, mia and more are all from the Lunar universe, which is further reflected in ares’ icon.
Being able to play these great games today inside ares is the realization of a childhood dream for Near.
ares is the main project name and consists of the emulation cores for each supported system. The project as a whole consists of several additional components. They are:
This project began on October 14th, 2004 under the name bsnes as a Super Famicom emulator. It maintained this naming from v001-v090. Over the years,bsnes grew to emulate many additional systems.
On August 9th, 2012, the project was renamed to higan, to better reflect its new nature as a multi-system emulator. It maintained this naming from v091-v110. Over the years, higan grew in complexity to support more and more additional systems.
On February 22nd, 2019, bsnes was revived as a spin-off of higan, to once again focus solely on the Super Famicom – the project’s original claim to fame. The purpose of this was to restore the ease-of-use of earlier bsnes versions, and to provide additional performance boosts and enhancements that were not within the spirit of the new higan project. bsnes’ revival proved to be very successful, and led to a rethink regarding the project’s other emulation cores.
On March 25th, 2020, ares was created as a fork of higan. The reason for this was to build on the successes of the bsnes revival to create an easy-to-use multi-system emulator, as well as to begin adding more modern systems such as the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation, which simply cannot be emulated using the cycle-accurate model of higan.
On July 5th, 2021 ares became a public open-source project with Luke Usher (known for Cxbx-Reloaded, Insignia, PolyBlast) as the new project lead.
Presently, bsnes, higan, and ares are developed as public open-source projects under group management bsnes runs as its own project, having diverged too far from higan to share code any longer; whereas higan and ares continue to share code and bugfixes between the two projects.