ares runs games for a variety of classic computers and game consoles on modern PCs. It is a fork of higan, made after higan's author byuu had handed higan over to the community to maintain, but needed to keep himself busy during the 2020 pandemic.
byuu developed higan up until v110, releasing it under the GNU Public Licence v3 to discourage commercial exploitation. When he stepped back from higan development, community members stepped up to maintain it, still under the GPLv3.
byuu renamed his personal copy of the code from "higan" to "ares", and kept developing it in private. When he retired fully in July 2020, he released ares v115 (and relicensed previous versions) under the more liberal ISC licence.
The community-maintained higan project has incorporated the improvements from ares v115, but since there have been other contributions since v110, higan as a whole is still under GPLv3.
This repository contains two main branches.
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original contains only code personally authored by byuu, released under the ISC licence. In the unlikely event that byuu returns to emulator development and publishes new versions of ares under the ISC licence, this branch will be updated to include those changes.
- Note: The code released by byuu includes copies of the "angrylion" and "angrylion-plus" Nintendo 64 RDP cores. The default ares build does not include N64 support, but if you choose to enable it and include the angrylion code, the resulting program would not be under the ISC licence.
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with-fixes adds small changes from other people, still under the ISC licence.
Like the main higan repository, these branches include development history as far back as v068. To go back further, use the bsnes history kit.
No contributions will be accepted to the "original" branch, except from byuu himself.
Fixes will be accepted for the "with-fixes" branch, as long as they are ISC licensed, and demonstrably increase emulation accuracy, code clarity, or fix obvious typos, etc.
For larger-scale contributions, refactorings, architectural or user-interface improvements, you are encouraged to contribute to the higan project, or fork ares under a different, unrelated name.