On August 9, 2012, the project was renamed to higan, to better reflect its new nature as a multi-system emulator.

Initially developed under a custom license, later releases were licensed under various versions of the GNU General Public License. Since then, it has been ported to Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD.

The early versions would require high-power hardware to run games in a consistent manner and therefore garnered controversy. The first version was released in May 2005 for Microsoft Windows. ares: A multi-system emulator that is a fork of higan, focusing on performance and adding experimental PlayStation and Nintendo 64 support in addition to the systems supported in higan.Дevelopment of the emulator began with the name bsnes on October 14, 2004.Supported systems include the Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Game Boy ( Color), Game Boy Advance, SG-1000 and SC-3000, Sega Master System, Game Gear, Sega Genesis, Sega CD, TurboGrafx-16 and SuperGrafx, MSX and MSX2, ColecoVision, WonderSwan (Color), and Neo Geo Pocket ( Color).

higan: A multi-system emulator that focuses on accuracy.

bsnes: A Super Nintendo Entertainment System emulator with Super Game Boy support.

Higan has been forked and renamed over the years, and consists of three sub-projects.

Bsnes emulator games for mac