Jolly Good Emulation
Simple. Minimal. Unembellished. Yes, yes... Jolly Good!
Jolly Good Emulation is a preservation oriented emulation project with a focus on reusability. As a side effect, it offers emulation technology that extreme minimalists may find tolerable.
Mission and Goals
- Provide a minimalist emulation framework
- Create lean, high quality console emulators
- Build robust and reusable emulation components
- Strict adherence to standards to prevent bitrot
- Focus on simplicity and readability
Non-goals
- Frills and frippery
- Distribution of binaries
- Sacrifices to quality
- Ports to novelty hardware
Which systems are emulated?
| System | Emulator |
|---|---|
| Atari 7800 | ProSystem JG  |
| Atari Lynx | Mednafen |
| ColecoVision | JollyCV  |
| CreatiVision | JollyCV |
| Nichibutsu My Vision | JollyCV |
| Nintendo Entertainment System (FDS) | Nestopia JG |
| Super Nintendo Entertainment System | bsnes-jg Mednafen |
| Nintendo Game Boy/Game Boy Color | Gambatte JG SameBoy |
| Nintendo Game Boy Advance | mGBA |
| Nintendo DS | melonDS |
| Nintendo Virtual Boy | Mednafen |
| Sega SG-1000/Master System | Cega |
| Sega Mega Drive/Genesis (CD) | Genesis Plus GX |
| Sega 32X | PicoDrive |
| Sega Saturn | Mednafen |
| Sega Game Gear | Cega |
| NEC PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 (CD) | Mednafen |
| NEC PC-FX | Mednafen |
| SNK Neo Geo AES/MVS | Geolith |
| SNK Neo Geo Pocket Color | Mednafen |
| Sony PlayStation | Mednafen |
| WonderSwan/WonderSwan Color | Mednafen |
| Vectrex | Vecx JG |
Have you got a license for that?
The Jolly Good Reference Frontend, licensed under the BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" license, and the reference implementation of The Jolly Good API, licensed under the zlib License, are Free and Open-Source Software. Some emulators are not Free Software due to non-commercial clauses, but are compatible with these licenses.
In most jurisdictions, you are legally permitted to format shift the games you own to be played using emulators. There is also a wealth of free homebrew available.
What is the release status?
| API | 1.0.0 |
| Frontend | 1.2.2 |
The software and all components are considered stable unless otherwise noted.
Please do not report issues to upstream emulator developers, unless they are also in the upstream build.
Which host platforms are supported?
Technology
The language standard is ISO C99(ISO/IEC 9899:1999, POSIX.1-2001).
The reference frontend requires:
- OpenGL 3.1, 2.1, or GLES 3.0
- SDL2
- SpeexDSP