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Top 23 C++ Emulation Projects
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Project mention: PS3 Emulator Devs Politely Ask That People Stop Flooding It with AI PRs | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-05-10
> If someone can’t write their own Agent.md for a project how are they going to validate the auto-completed text?
> This strikes me as the ideal LLM first contribution/PR, a file explaining the projects standards and testing and structure.
Why should the project maintainers write such a file, when the info already exists within the README? It is duplicated work at best, and a definitive sign of the incapabilities of the agent to properly parse the project's contribution guidelines.
https://github.com/RPCS3/rpcs3/blob/master/README.md#contrib...
https://github.com/RPCS3/rpcs3/wiki/Coding-Style
https://github.com/RPCS3/rpcs3/wiki/Developer-Information
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dolphin
Dolphin is a GameCube / Wii emulator, allowing you to play games for these two platforms on PC with improvements.
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In my case I'm a big fan of Ace Combat and PCSX2 has rendering issues in both software and hardware modes:
https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/issues/10976
https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/issues/12173
It's gotten better, but the best experience is still on original hardware.
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Project mention: Show HN: Xenia – A monospaced font built with a custom Python engine | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-01-18
There is a name collision with the Xenia emulator for the Xbox 360. https://xenia.jp/
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Project mention: FEX: A fast usermode x86 and x86-64 emulator for ARM64 Linux | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-11-21
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Your memory is intact :) Those were/are a thing.
The Xenia emulator handles them with symbolic links in its virtual-file-system: https://github.com/xenia-canary/xenia-canary/blob/70e44ab6ec...
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ares
ares is a cross-platform, open source, multi-system emulator, focusing on accuracy and preservation.
Or, thanks to bsnes/higan/ares[0], SFC accuracy is solved, thus it should be much easier, and not at all harder, for any new emulation to be accurate.
i.e. accuracy should be the baseline; I understand Super ZSNES is not there yet.
0. https://ares-emu.net/
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CEmu
Third-party TI-84 Plus CE / TI-83 Premium CE emulator, focused on developer features (by CE-Programming)
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gearmulator
Low Level Emulation of classic VA synths & effects of the late 90s/2000s by emulating the used ICs
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Gearboy
Game Boy / Game Boy Color / Super Game Boy emulator, debugger and embedded MCP server for macOS, Windows, Linux, BSD and RetroArch.
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NOTE:
The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars.
The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or
since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
C++ Emulation discussion
C++ Emulation related posts
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Porting 3D Movie Maker to Linux
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Dolphin PR: Add policy on LLM contributions
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Show HN: Xenia – A monospaced font built with a custom Python engine
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Dolphin Progress Release 2512
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Supermodel: Sega Model 3 arcade emulator
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Sony Playstation 2 fixing frenzy
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Shadps4 – A Playstation 4 Emulator
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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 12 Jun 2026
Index
What are some of the best open-source Emulation projects in C++? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | shadPS4 | 31,370 |
| 2 | rpcs3 | 18,936 |
| 3 | dolphin | 15,109 |
| 4 | pcsx2 | 14,939 |
| 5 | xenia | 9,462 |
| 6 | Cemu | 9,425 |
| 7 | FEX | 7,551 |
| 8 | Vita3K | 5,364 |
| 9 | desmume | 3,569 |
| 10 | Play- | 2,617 |
| 11 | flycast | 2,343 |
| 12 | strato | 2,335 |
| 13 | xenia-canary | 2,303 |
| 14 | EKA2L1 | 1,956 |
| 15 | bsnes | 1,946 |
| 16 | ares | 1,688 |
| 17 | Panda3DS | 1,370 |
| 18 | emuiibo | 1,366 |
| 19 | CEmu | 1,282 |
| 20 | gearmulator | 1,187 |
| 21 | WinDurango | 1,156 |
| 22 | Gearboy | 1,154 |
| 23 | Ymir | 923 |
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