Nester is a NES emulator for Windows that emphasizes ease of use, stability, performance, emulation of many Multi-Memory Controller chips, and organized source code that is easy to maintain and port to other host platforms. Darren Ranalli started writing Nester in early 1999, and the emulator saw its first public release a year and a half later, in August 2000. Nester contains significant amounts of code contributed by Matthew Conte, in particular, the audio and CPU components of the NES hardware emulation.
Nester is an open-source project, under the GPL, written in C++. On September 1, 2007 the Nester source code was relocated onto Sourceforge.net in order to allow the open source community to continue work on the emulator.
Nester is able to run almost any NES game made by Nintendo, including Japan-only games. Nester is not able to maintain the correct-colored pixels if used in full-screen mode. It is also not capable of running cheats.