ZSNES

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ZSNES
Logo
Screenshot
The GUI of ZSNES
Design by zsKnight, _Demo_, pagefault, and Nach
Developed by ZSNES Team
Latest release 1.51 / 24 January 2007
OS Cross-platform
Available in English
Development status Development
Genre Console emulator
License GNU General Public License
Website zsnes.com

ZSNES is an emulator of the Super Famicom and SNES video game systems.

ZSNES is largely written in Intel x86 assembly language, and is therefore not easily portable to other architectures, such as PowerPC. Due to being written in assembly, ZSNES is very fast, allowing it to run most SNES games at 60 frames per second on a computer with a Pentium II CPU and 64 MB RAM, with full stereo sound and basic graphics interpolation. It is known for its unique graphical user interface.[1]

ZSNES was originally DOS-based, but has since been ported to other systems, including Microsoft Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Xbox, and Intel Macs. Since 2001, ZSNES has been open sourced, under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Contents

[edit] History

ZSNES was first developed by pseudonymous programmers (zsKnight and _Demo_) and released on the Internet in 1997. The emulator was originally closed source, but on April 2, 2001, the source code was released to the public under the terms of the GPL and hosted by SourceForge.net.[2][3] In March 2006, the source repository was moved to BountySource.[4]

Since becoming open sourced, ZSNES has received a large number of contributions made by outside coders, among them pagefault and Nach. ZSNES is still in active development, although the frequency of official releases has fallen dramatically since its original developer, zsKnight, left the team for personal reasons. Semi-official releases, however, are frequent. These WIP releases are maintained by ipher, and come from SVN snapshots.

[edit] Features

Aside from emulation accuracy, which is being improved in future versions, many of the additional interface features first introduced in ZSNES have later been adopted in other emulators. Among them are:

  • Support for smoothing and dynamic image scaling.
  • The ability to take screenshots of currently running games.
  • The ability to "save" the game at any point by recording the console's state; commonly referred to as a "savestate".
  • The ability to record movies of gameplay which can be played back.
  • Support for rewinding and fast-forwarding in-game.
  • The ability to record and capture the console's sound output to a file, saving to the SPC700 sound format (.SPC).
  • Built-in support for Game Genie, Pro Action Replay, and GoldFinger cheat codes.
  • Support for the JMA compression format.
  • The ability to play multiplayer games with another person over a network. (Feature removed in version 1.5 due to incompatibility with other subsystems; v1.42n is still available for download and supports Netplay but without the improvements found in higher versions)

Today, ZSNES is considered to have the widest support for specialized SNES hardware, and is one of the most popular SNES emulators.[5][6] ZSNES and Snes9x were the first SNES emulators to fully emulate the Super FX, DSP-1, and Cx4 chips. ZSNES also has support for the DSP-4, S-DD1, and ST010 chips. As of version 1.40, the support for running interleaved SuperFX ROM images was removed due to the code implementation being "buggy";[7] the developers instead recommend that such images be "de-interleaved" with the utility NSRT.

ZSNES was originally designed to run on an Intel i486 as fast as possible, so many emulation shortcuts were taken. However, the current developers are working on improving the emulation accuracy.[8][9]

ZSNES was the first emulator to implement the HQ2X interpolation algorithm and the first emulator to offer any sort of support for the DSP-3 chip.[10]

[edit] Reception

Retro Gamer called ZSNES "very impressive".[11]

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ ZSNES Board: In development; ZSNES Board: Standard Windows GUI In The Future?
  2. ^ History - ZSNES Documentation
  3. ^ ZSNES Home Page - News
  4. ^ ZSNES Board: CVS->Subversion switch DONE !
  5. ^ The Emulator Zone - Super Nintendo Emulators
  6. ^ SourceForge.net: Project Statistics for ZSNES
  7. ^ History - ZSNES Documentation
  8. ^ ZSNES Board: SVN Sound Core Replacement
  9. ^ ZSNES Board: Status Report
  10. ^ ZSNES Board: DSP-3 Support
  11. ^ "Retro Coverdisc" (2005). Retro Gamer (15): 108. 

[edit] External links