The original game, and then some.

RetroForge is a hybrid NES and SNES emulator with an enhancement engine on top. The cores run your games exactly as the hardware did. Widescreen, de-flicker, full-level maps and scripting are opt-in layers that can never change the simulation underneath.

How it works See the specs

Four moments from a replay: on the left the console output, on the right the full level decoded from the ROM with the current viewport outlined in white and the player marked in red — Left: what the console shows. Right: the whole level decoded from ROM, with the live viewport outlined.

The idea

Accuracy first. Everything else is a choice.

Most enhancement emulators trade accuracy for features, and you can't tell which glitches are the game's and which are the emulator's. RetroForge keeps them apart: Accuracy Mode is the reference, a fresh install boots in it, and automated tests prove that turning enhancements on never changes a single frame of game logic.

It's also honest about limits. Scaling, shaders and map stitching work on any game. A full-level view of areas you haven't visited needs a per-game profile, and RetroForge makes those profiles cheap to author instead of pretending they're free.

What it does

Enhancements, on your terms

Play

Accurate cores

Deterministic, cycle-driven NES and SNES machines that run your own ROMs the way the original hardware did.

Enhance

Opt-in upgrades

GPU rendering, shaders, sprite-limit bypass, temporal de-flicker, ultrawide map stitching and profile-driven full-level views.

Extend

Scripts and profiles

Lua scripting, a plugin SDK, and a debugger that turns what you annotate into a shareable game profile.

How it works

A one-way boundary

The enhancement engine watches the cores through read-only views and only ever changes presentation. Anything beyond the original hardware lives on the emulator side: bigger render targets, decoded caches and reconstructed scenes.

App shellgame view · debuggers · profile editor · plugin manager

Enhancement engineobserves core events · overrides presentation only · trust ladder: shadow → advisory → active

Rendererwgpu · shaders · widescreen and level views

NES coredeterministic · indexed pixels + metadata

SNES coredeterministic · indexed pixels + metadata

Specs

What works where

The honesty contract
Feature	Any game	Needs a profile
Scaling, shaders, CRT	Yes	No
Sprite-limit bypass	Yes	Opt-out list
De-flicker	Heuristic	For tuning
Map stitching	Visited areas	No
Full-level view	No	Yes
SNES widescreen	Often	For clean edges

Compatibility in testing

1,233of 1,265 SNES titles boot

1,234of 1,281 NES titles boot

265of 274 tickets done

Built with

Rust, 16 crates
wgpu rendering and an egui interface
No telemetry: trust is measured on your machine
Bring your own ROMs. None ship with it.

Launching soon

MIT or Apache 2.0. Game profiles are facts and citations under the same license.

See what else is coming