FCE Ultra was forked from FCE (Family Computer Emulator). Its last full release was version 0.98.12 in August 2004, while a pre-release version 0.98.13-pre was released in September 2004 as source code only. After that, development appeared to stop and the homepage and forums for the emulator were taken down. In the absence of official development, many forks of FCE Ultra were created. Most notable are
FCEU-MM, which supports many new and unusual
mappers,
FCEU Rerecording, which incorporates many useful features for
tool-assisted speedruns, and
FCEUXD SP, which adds a number of debugging utilities. In March 2006 it was reactivated and shortly thereafter a project was initiated to combine all the forks into one new application called
FCEUX, which attracted collaboration from many authors of the various forks of FCE Ultra. FCEUX was first publicly released on August 2, 2008. This fork of the emulator has continued steady development since then, allowing the other forks to become deprecated, and now has features the original FCE Ultra does not, such as native movie recording support and the ability to extend, enhance, or alter gameplay with
Lua scripts. Thus it has become far more advanced than its predecessors. ==Contributors== FCE was written by Bero. FCE Ultra was written by Xodnizel. It was reactivated by Anthony Giorgio and Mark Doliner. The FCEUX project was initiated by Zeromus and Sebastian Porst. Additional authors joined the group prior to its first release, including mz, adelikat, nitsujrehtona, maximus, CaH4e3, qFox and Lukas Sabota (punkrockguy318). Other contributors have included Aaron O'Neal, Joe Nahmias, Paul Kuliniewicz, Quietust, Parasyte, bbitmaster, blip, nitsuja, Luke Gustafson, UncombedCoconut, Jay Lanagan, Acmlm, DWEdit, Soules, radsaq, qeed, Shinydoofy, ugetab and Ugly Joe. ==Reception==