BizHawk

BizHawk is a multi-system emulator written in C#. BizHawk provides nice features for casual gamers such as fullscreen, rewind, and joypad support in addition to rerecording and debugging tools for all system cores.

Installing — Windows 7/8.1/10

Released binaries can be found right here on GitHub:

Click BizHawk-<version>.zip to download it. Also note the changelog, the full version of which is on tasvideos.org. Don't mix different versions of BizHawk, keep each version in its own folder.

Before you start (by running EmuHawk.exe), make sure you have the Windows-only prerequisites installed: .NET Framework 4.6.1; Visual C++ 2010 SP1, 2012, and 2015; and Direct3D 9. If you have a few Steam games, chances are these are already installed, otherwise you can get them all at once with this program.

BizHawk functions like a "portable" program, you may move or rename the folder containing EmuHawk.exe, even to another drive, as long as you keep all the files together and the prerequisites are installed when you go to run it.

Win7 is supported from SP1, Win8 is supported from 8.1, and Win10 is supported from 1709 "Redstone 3", following Microsoft's support lifecycle.

Installing — GNU+Linux and macOS

Install BizHawk with your distro's package manager. The package name is given on each button below, and some buttons are links. For the changelog, see tasvideos.org.

If you run EmuHawkMono.sh from a terminal, note that File > Exit (Alt+F4) doesn't terminate the process correctly, you'll need to send SIGINT (^C).

Is your distro not there? Released binaries can be found right here on GitHub (same download as for Windows):

If you download BizHawk this way, don't mix different versions, keep each version in its own folder. Run EmuHawkMono.sh to give Mono the library and executable paths — you can run it from anywhere, so putting it in a .desktop file is fine. If running the script doesn't start EmuHawk, you may need to edit it (if you use a terminal, it will say so in the output).

Linux distros are supported if the distributor is still supporting your version, you're using Linux 4.4/4.9/4.14/4.19 LTS or 4.20, and there are no updates available in your package manager. Please update and reboot.

macOS is supported from 10.11 "El Capitan" (Darwin 15.6). Apple doesn't seem to care about lifecycles, so we'll go with 6 months from the last security update.

Building

If you want to test the latest changes without building BizHawk yourself, grab the developer build from AppVeyor. Pick the topmost one that doesn't say "Pull request", then click "Artifacts" and download BizHawk_Developer-<datetime>-#<long hexadecimal>.zip.

If you use GNU+Linux, there might be a bizhawk-git package or similar in the same repo as the main package. If it's available, installing it will automate the build process.

GNU+Linux and macOS

Compiling requires MSBuild and running requires Mono and WINE, but BizHawk does not run under WINE — only the bundled libraries are required.

Building is as easy as:

git clone https://github.com/TASVideos/BizHawk.git BizHawk_master && cd BizHawk_master
# or ssh: git clone git@github.com:TASVideos/BizHawk.git BizHawk_master && cd BizHawk_master
msbuild BizHawk.sln

Running is even easier, just execute EmuHawkMono.sh in the repo's output folder (this folder is what gets distributed in a Release build, you can move/rename it).

If your distro isn't listed under Installing above, you might get an "Unknown distro" warning in the terminal, and BizHawk may not open or may show the missing dependencies dialog. You may need to add your distro to the case statement in the script, setting libpath to the location of d3dx9_43.dll.so (please do share if you get it working).

Again, if your distro isn't listed above, libblip_buf probably isn't in your package repos. You can easily build it yourself.

Otherwise, see the Installing section above.

Windows 7/8.1/10

TODO

Usage and troubleshooting (casual)

TODO

Usage (TASing or romhacking)

TODO

License

TODO

junk

Here is a list of features offered by bizhawk.

• Nintendo Entertainment System / Famicom / Famicom Disk System (NES/FDS)
• Super Nintendo (SNES)
• Nintendo 64
• Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Super Game Boy
• Game Boy Advance
• Sony PlayStation
• Sega Master System, Game Gear, and SG-1000
• Sega Genesis / Sega-CD
• Sega Saturn
• PC-Engine (TurboGrafx-16) / CD-ROM & SuperGrafx
• Atari 2600
• Atari 7800
• Atari Lynx
• ColecoVision
• TI-83 Calculator
• Wonderswan and Wonderswan Color
• Apple II
• Commodore 64
• Sinclair ZX Spectrum

BizHawk homepage

FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions / Troubleshooting

Compiling - What is needed to compile BizHawk src

CompactDiscInfoDump - A concise explanation of compact disc CDs, gathered for the first time EVER in one location, and mostly inaccurate

Rerecording - (Work in progress) - Documentation of the rerecording implementation of BizHawk

• TAS movie file format - Mnemonic patterns for each platform for .tas (input) files.

Commandline - Documentation of the command line options in BizHawk