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Top 23 C++ Emulator 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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Triton
Triton is a dynamic binary analysis library. Build your own program analysis tools, automate your reverse engineering, perform software verification or just emulate code. (by JonathanSalwan)
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Project mention: Show HN: Furnace – the ultimate chiptune music tracker | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-11-30
It's this time of year to discover cool projects bringing back memories of the good old days.
I am still learning ImGUI and this is a master piece in my opinion.
https://github.com/tildearrow/furnace
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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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pegasus-frontend
A cross platform, customizable graphical frontend for launching emulators and managing your game collection.
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dosbox-staging
DOSBox Staging is a modern continuation of DOSBox with advanced features and current development practices.
>install DOSBox for Mac
Mind you there are countless DOSBox forks out there and the vanilla original one is probably the least interesting one.
Nowadays the three most popular one would be DOSBox-X, DOSBox Pure, and DOSBox Staging
https://dosbox-x.com/
https://schelling.itch.io/dosbox-pure
https://www.dosbox-staging.org/
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++ Emulator discussion
C++ Emulator related posts
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DOSBox
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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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Alpine Linux on RISC-V virtual machine running in the browser via WebAssembly
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PicoIDE An open source IDE/ATAPI drive emulator for vintage computers
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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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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 13 Jun 2026
Index
What are some of the best open-source Emulator 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 | 9,442 |
| 7 | azerothcore-wotlk | 8,447 |
| 8 | FEX | 7,584 |
| 9 | Vita3K | 5,387 |
| 10 | melonDS | 4,778 |
| 11 | Triton | 4,191 |
| 12 | furnace | 3,671 |
| 13 | desmume | 3,569 |
| 14 | citra | 2,680 |
| 15 | Play- | 2,617 |
| 16 | flycast | 2,343 |
| 17 | strato | 2,335 |
| 18 | xenia-canary | 2,303 |
| 19 | GPCS4 | 2,015 |
| 20 | EKA2L1 | 1,956 |
| 21 | bsnes | 1,946 |
| 22 | pegasus-frontend | 1,815 |
| 23 | dosbox-staging | 1,724 |
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