The SNES Emulation War of 1997 | MVG

Brings back memories snes9x was really cool as was Zsnes recalling how it peaked and corrected issues as generational hardware os refresh’s took place it was inspiring from technology’s capabilities and it’s applications

It's interesting to hear about emulation in the 90's.
I stumbled on it in 2000 when I was 11, and had a Pentium processor.
First it was just Gens, 'cause I was amazed I could play sonic.
Then Nesticle, 'cause I could play Mario.
I had these systems in my bedroom, but it was so fascinating it worked.
Then ZSNES blew the doors open. I never had a Super Nintendo.
That is how I experienced Chrono Trigger, Mega Man X, Donkey Kong Country, Earthbound, and Bust-a-Move
I have more nostalgia for that colorful interface than I do a real Super Nintendo.
Seeing it again here just hits me right in the soul.

zsnes was capable of running games at full speed with transparencies later on with a simple p90

It reminds me of the competition between yuzu and ryujinx a bit lol

Thank you to all the brilliant people who made the emulation scene what it is today.

I love zsnes so much

Does anybody else feel that the narration seems somehow "AI"? It feels like an AI voice doing the narration.

I've used ZSNES since maybe 2007/2008 and still have yet to find a SNES emulator I prefer over it.

To me emulation has always been standard. As an 8 year old in 2005 i could pick from Project64 to play my favourite 64 games with gameshark codes, SNES 9x to play any SNES game I wanted and literally just go to a website to play NES games in browser. I never even knew that it was hard to achieve or that N64 emulation was deemed impossible for a while.

My earliest experience with emulators must have been near the very beginning. It was '94/95 and I used Gerton Lunters Z80 Spectrum emulator on DOS 6.x - at full speed it ran at 700% Spectrum speed on a 486 DX2-66. I loved the emulator so much I registered it to get the full unlocked version. The free version was shareware at the time. I could load my complete collection of ZX Spectrum cassette tapes from my childhood into the emulator using my old tape recorder. Such great memories of better times. EDIT: Nitpicking sure, but it was a DX2-66 or a DX4-100 always indicating the clock multiplier of the bus speed. The DX chips typically ran at 25,33 or 50 Mhz.

What would be the best snes emulator codebase to use for a limited system like a stm32 microcontroller to develop a port of a snes emulator?

I never owned an SNES growing up, so when I first learned there was a way to play those games on your computer I learned how to download and used Zsnes. Since I didn't have familiarity with the games on actual hardware I had no idea the inaccuracies. I remember playing Chrono Trigger and getting to the future where the transparency effects were broken, and assumed I just needed to find a way to clear the smoke. I did later realize you could disable layers and I remember transparencies being fixed in later versions.

I remember having to disable layers because transparency just did not work. We've come a long way.

I remember in like 99 or 2000 my dad called me over to the family computer (96ish Power Mac) and he had a game boy emulator with like incredible crash dummies and a couple other games I didn't even know were a thing. Within a few years of that he moved to the IT field and became more knowledgeable about computers than anyone I've ever met. The only thing he couldn't do was pirate shit. He was always pretty straight-laced, so I've always wondered how he managed to get ahold of an emulator and roms in the days of dial-up. I remember in his later years he was mad that TVLand and streaming services would air incomplete episodes of like Hogan's Heroes so I was like "Dude, I can get you pure, uncut tv shows from the 60s, gimme like 5 minutes and a portable HD"

Nothing to do with SNES just wanted to share a story about him. The superhero mystique always fades from your elders as you get older, but even when he was all drugged up and disoriented in his last days, you hand him his laptop and command line was as natural as breathing to him.

YES answer about commercial ROM's !!!!

First SNES emulator I played with was VSUN, played great but no sound 😔
SNESX9 is my go to emulator om Android, propbably the best emu out there.

lets be glad that the Brain left the emulation community

These days there's a modified version of BSNES that turns Mode 7 content HD. It makes me feel like I'm playing remastered versions.

Having to play Super Metroid in a calculator screen size window to get it to run at full fps... ah memberberries

I absolutely love these history of emulation/history of modding scene videos

The last words you say...theres more power emulator out there ,now what are those Bsnes is one what are the others?

I preferred ZSNES over SNES9x because it ran quicker and I could customize hotkeys for frame skipping and save states.

Interesting but it makes me wonder. Was I just in an odd loop or was znes the dominate one back in the 90s-early 00s? I only really heard and used that one until I basically moved on. It was a shock to see znes so vilified many years later when I started looking back into emulation later on.

I'm any case, I do thank everyone's work on emulation during those early days. So much of my best moments in gaming came from being able to finally play those old snes games I had missed.

I remember getting into some passionate and heated conversations about emulation on some bbs back in the day. It really was a great time.

I remember the day i god a cd with a Commodore 64 emulator. I'd never heard about emulators before this and it had a ton of the first games i ever played.
I played all night and when i turned my pc off the sun had just rose. Great time.

Goddamn I loved Nesticle and Zsnes

Zsnes is nostalgic to me

Axelay's first stage...

Zsnes will forever stay in our hearts

Man this was nostalgic. I remember Snesticle being promised and then seeing zsnes zip past everyone. Even on linux, I would compile zsnes. But it wasn't until I went to PowerPC Mac that I would embrace snes9x.
Since then, BSnes came out (bought myself the fastest 4 Ghz 4 core iMac at the time) and I felt we finally put the war to rest with accurate emulation for SNES. Now it seems accurate emulation of hardware thereafter is gonna rest on the Mister FPGA project (for at least the PS and Saturn consoles).
HLE is good enough so far for anything higher level.

But now I'm curious...how well (if at all) would Zsnes run on Windows 11 for ARM64?

I left my Super Nintendo in 1996 for my first PC, a Pentium 75, only to discover ZSNES and roms just a while later, running flawlessly on my machine. It was a mindblowing experience to see those cartridge based games reduced to tiny files that would just run like any other program. Good times.

Dont you mean, the "Emu War of 1997"?

I remember in the 90s there will playground rumors of emulators. When I get nes and snes running on my Pentium 100mhz I almost fainted.

snes9x is where I set records in Super Punch out... on a Gateway computer.

fun fact: vsmc requires a game with a header from a copier in order to run a game.

Nesticle and Genecyst were my very first experiences with emulation, followed by Snes9x. The first dos version of Snes9x I got ran full speed but the controlls couldn't be configured therefor I resorted to the windows version which had horizontaly squashed picture and didn't run full speed. There may have been problems with transparencies as well. Made it through Secret of Mana this way and I remember the save states got corrupted easily. Discovered Zsnes by version .400 if I remember correctly. Stayed with it till the end and nowadays the Snes9x core for retroarch is my go to.

I have a very strong memory that the sound fx of the wind blowing at the start of Final Fantasy 3(6) was not emulated properly and sounded like a weird howling instead. I need to install one of old releases of Snes9x to relive that sound soon!

I still used Zsnes up until about 2018 lol, any inaccuracies was just how those games were to me for a long time

I think if that war hadn't happened, the landscape of emulation would be entirely different today. It caused a sort of chain reaction in public interest to creating and using emulators. And SNES9x and ZSNES are legendary- people are still using them even now. It was a golden age of emulation, I guess you could say.

If you let the Leah Lipps phenotype suck you up you will become aware or if you let your bitch suck you up like the Leah Lipps phenotype you will become aware.

Ah, still got Nesticle (and Genecyst) away on my hard drive somewhere. Last I checked, they still worked too.

People were amazed at the time, nobody thought it could be done. At the time emulation needed at least 10x the speed of the target CPU.

Then Project64 came out, emulating the N64 on hardware only maybe twice as powerful, and with 3D! The first recompiler, people didn't believe it was real til they tried it. Anywhere where's my cocoa?

I've been out of the loop for so long that I was still using ZSNES until this year

Remember Nesticle? 🤣

"manslave!"

Never thought that emulation, especially Nintendo Console emulation, is THAT old..

Still get a kick out of those screen names - “The Brain” “The Teacher” those are old school 80’s BBS handles like “The Mentor” or “The Jolly Roger”

Lots of fond memories using ZSNES and eventually SNES9x back in the day.