ZSNES
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 The GUI of ZSNES | |
| Developer(s) | ZSNES Team |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 1.51
/ January 24 2007 |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Type | Console emulator |
| License | GNU General Public License |
| Website | http://www.zsnes.com/ |
ZSNES is an emulator of the Super Famicom and SNES video game systems. Since 2001, ZSNES has been free software, under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It was originally DOS-based, but has since been ported to other systems, including Microsoft Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Xbox, and Intel Macs.
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.
History
ZSNES was first developed by pseudonymous programmers (zsKnight and _Demo_) and released on the Internet in 1997. Originally, ZSNES was closed source. However, on April 2, 2001, the source code was released and licensed under the GNU General Public License.[1][2] The project was originally hosted by SourceForge, but as of March 2006,[3] the source repository has been hosted by BountySource. Since then, a large number of contributions have been 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 due to the death of his father. Semi-official releases, however, are frequent. These WIP releases are maintained by ipher, and come from SVN snapshots.
Features
ZSNES has historically been regarded as the most advanced SNES console emulator available; the emulator has pioneered software emulation of the system since originally released.[citation needed] 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).
- Enhanced audio capabilities, making the SPC700 audio of better quality on ZSNES than on the actual Super Famicom or SNES console.
- Built-in support for Game Genie, Pro Action Replay, and GoldFinger cheat codes.
- The ability to play multiplayer games with another person over a network. (Feature removed on version 1.5 due to incompatibility with other subsystems)
Today, ZSNES is considered to have the widest support for specialized SNES hardware, and is one of the most popular SNES emulators.[citation needed] ZSNES and Snes9x were the first SNES emulators to fully emulate the Super FX, DSP-1, and C4 chips. ZSNES also recently added full support for the DSP-4, S-DD1, and ST010 chips. As of version 1.40, the support to play "interleaved" SuperFX games was removed due to it being "buggy code".[4] The developers recommend de-interleaving SuperFX games with NSRT. ZSNES was originally designed to run on a 486 as fast as possible so many emulation shortcuts were taken, but the current developers are working on improving ZSNES' accuracy.
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.[5]
