higan, the multi-system emulator

higan emulates a number of classic videogame consoles of the 1980s and 1990s, allowing you to play classic games on a modern general-purpose computer.

As of v102, higan has top-tier support for the following consoles:

• Nintendo Super Famicom/Super Nintendo Entertainment System, including addon hardware:
  • Super Game Boy
  • Sufami Turbo
• Nintendo Game Boy Advance

It also includes some level of support for these consoles:

• BS-X Satellaview addon for the Super Famicom
• Nintendo Famicom/Nintendo Entertainment System
• Nintendo Game Boy
• Nintendo Game Boy Color
• Sega Master System
• Sega Game Gear
• Sega Megadrive/Genesis
• NEC PC Engine/TurboGrafx 16 (but not the CD-ROM² System/TurboGrafx-CD)
• NEC SuperGrafx
• Bandai Wonderswan
• Bandai Wonderswan Color

higan is actively supported on FreeBSD 10 and above, and Microsoft Windows XP and above. It also includes some level of support for GNU/Linux and macOS.

higan is officially spelled with a lowercase "h", not a capital.

About this document

This is the unofficial higan README, a community-maintained introduction and reference. It may be out of date by the time you read this, and it may contain errors or omissions. If you find something that's wrong, or you have a suggestion, see "Unofficial higan resources" below.

Official higan resources

• Official homepage
• Official forum

Unofficial higan resources

• Source code repository archives official higan releases and WIP snapshots since approximately v067r21.
• Quark shader repository collects shaders that higan can use to add special effects like TV scanlines to its video output, or smarter algorithms for scaling up to modern PC resolutions. See Installing custom shaders below for details.
• Mercurial Magic is a tool for converting MSU-1 games and mods into a format higan can use. See Importing MSU-1 games below for details.

There are also other projects based on current or older versions of higan, in whole or in part, that you might want to check out.

• Mednafen is another multi-system emulator. Its SNES emulation is based on bsnes v059, from the time before bsnes was renamed to higan.
• BizHawk is another multi-system emulator, specialising in the creation of tool-assisted speedruns. Its SNES emulation is based on bsnes v087.
• nSide is a fork of higan that greatly enhances its NES emulation support, and adds minor features to the other cores too. It also restores the "balanced" SNES emulation core that was removed from higan in v099, which is less CPU intensive than the current accuracy-focussed core.
• bsnes-plus is a fork of bsnes v073 that adds improved support for debugging SNES software.

Installing and uninstalling higan

Installing an official release on Windows

Official higan releases are distributed in 7-zip archives. You will need to install 7-zip, or another compatible archiving tool, to install higan.

Compiling from source on Windows

Compiling from source on Linux

Installing the GBA BIOS

Importing games

What's a game folder?

Importing regular games

Importing games with co-processor firmware

Importing BS-X games

Importing Sufami Turbo games

Importing Super Game Boy games

Importing MSU-1 games

Configuring higan

Drivers

Installing custom shaders

Controls

Notes on specific emulation cores

The WonderSwan rotates!

Shaders look weird on SNES because of interlace/hi-res

GBA in-game saves are Difficult

Frequently Asked Questions

where is the vsync option?

exclusive full-screen?

phones and tablets