ZSNES

For game console Super Nintendo Entertainment System (abbreviated SNES), there exists a variety of emulators.

Overview

First emulation experiments started around 1996 with the projects " VSMC " and "Super page Pasofami ". Both projects, however, were set in 1998. Also in 1996, development work began on the emulator SNES96, which was later developed as Snes9x.

A little later (1998) began other SNES enthusiasts with the programming of a free emulator called ZSNES, who is now with the widespread SNES emulator Snes9x. With two emulators in earlier versions it was possible to SNES games that support two - player modes to play across the Internet without resorting to external services (direct UDP or TCP / IP connection). For ZSNES there are now several ways to find other players. These are used, for example, programs zBattle.net and zConnector as well as the IRC script Z -Net. However, all three options are available from version 1.50 no longer feasible because the required Netplay feature has been removed from ZSNES. Here's a throwback to an earlier version (for example, 1:42 or even 1:36 ) is necessary. The Netplay action will be revised to be included in a future version again.

By emulators experienced many SNES games a big boost. The SNES console could count as even after the cessation of production on a large fan base. Meanwhile, there are SNES emulators for various systems, such as the Xbox ( ZsnesBox ) for the Game Boy Advance ( Advance SNES ) or Nintendo DS ( SNEmulDS, SnesDS ). In addition, there are now some ports the above-mentioned popular emulators eg SNES9xTYL for the PlayStation Portable, DreamSNES for Sega Dreamcast or OpenSnes9x for the GP32.

The software to be emulated is present here as an image file of the cartridges. Unlike a real SNES copying of games is so easy. No sooner were useful emulators to have, there was a lot of internet sites which offered the images illegally for free download. This was made ​​possible due to the small file size of the copied games, which was just a few megabytes uncompressed and compression ( eg ZIP) could be reduced again. Nintendo was very little action against such sites.

The emulation and fan base, it is also due to the fact that planned, but never published games were rediscovered. The most famous example is Star Fox 2 from Nintendo, which should have appeared in 1995, but was probably not published due to the Nintendo 64. The 2004 discovered prototype of the game is finished to 99 %, and can be played through completely.

It was also possible by the possibilities that brought the SNES emulation with it (debugging), also high quality, but only in Japanese available games like Star Ocean or Seiken Densetsu 3 by Fan localizations to a wider audience will be made available.

Emulators

ZSNES

ZSNES is a free project in terms of the Free Software Foundation. The emulator is considered to be highly compatible with most commercial games and has been on various x86 platforms ported ( as Windows and GNU / Linux). Thanks to an almost complete assembly language programming, and processor-specific instruction set extensions such as MMX, ZSNES works comparatively resources. However, the use of NASM also has disadvantages, so porting to other systems is a complex undertaking.

ZSNES supports both formats of Spieleabbildern which exist since the introduction of Duplicators. Also the loading is supported by ZIP compressed modules so that any collection not unnecessarily take up much space.

The emulator has its own interface, which is the same for all ports.

Snes9x

Snes9x also has a high compatibility, not least because the programmer ZSNES and Snes9x worked together often. In contrast to ZSNES, Snes9x is entirely written in C ( with a few optional parts in x86 assembly ) elements and is therefore also on other computer architectures such as Macintosh models with a PowerPC processor.

Snes9x was originally developed by Gary Henderson and Jerremy Koot, who previously worked with SNES96 or SNES97 on their own emulators. Later, Henderson and Koot joined forces to develop Snes9x based on SNES96. Other developers were temporarily Matthew Kendora and Brad Jorsch.

The emulator also supports the loading of compressed game modules ( ROMs).

The former closed-source project is now being developed as open source. In the meantime, also ports for other operating systems have appeared. Officially currently supports Mac OS X, Unix / Linux and Windows. The GTK port is available both under the SNES9x license and under the LGPL license.

Bsnes

Bsnes is an emulator, which is being developed with the aim to achieve the highest possible compatibility without particularly taking into consideration the performance. To achieve accuracy without sacrificing the size and readability of the source code for speed optimizations. Therefore it is for the most accurate program variant ( " accuracy core" ) recommended a computer with a 2 GHz CPU, along with a newer graphics card if shader -based graphics filter to be used.

Bsnes runs on Windows, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Linux, and according to the author on virtually any other system with SDL support.

The specificity and the aim of this emulator, the high compatibility, is shown in the experiment as closely as possible reflect the hardware of the system and so, unlike other emulators for the SNES to reproduce all the features correctly. The non-use of so-called hacks ( program parts, which return the correct information without having to really process ) is a basic goal for this project, so this project requires a more computational effort compared to the two references.

SNEmulDS

SNEmulDS is a SNES emulator for Nintendo DS. Since November 2007, there was no version update, which is why the development shall be deemed terminated.

DreamSNES

DreamSNES is a Super NES emulator for the game console Dreamcast. It is based on Snes9x for the PC and represents a port, but also has also its own specific features. There are, for example, a written in assembly language CPU core. Developed by Swedish programmer Comstedt Marcus and his team emulator works with most Super Nintendo games. There is the option to save Scores on the Dreamcast VMU memory card. DreamSNES has been downloaded over 300,000 times from DCEmulation.

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