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• How well does the emulation work? If there's any emulator for PC that emulates all the SNES games (or whichever kind) in existence, i've yet to hear about it.

Zsnes

and of course the sourceforge page for it.

Ok ok granted there are like three SNES games it does not fully emulate.

So freakin what.

But for portability you REALLY want snes9x

Unfortunately their provider is complaining to them about bandwidth usage, doh!

Luckily you can still download the latest binaries and source from Zophar's Domain

So, yah, the SNES has pretty much been owned by the EMU community. :) With brief periods of mad translation going on (followed by seemingly long fallow periods. . . .) a ton of the Japanese only games have come over to the SNES as well.

• And does it have enough processing power to run the non-native code without any slowdown or such?

I know the minimum requirements for most simpler SNES emulation are about a Pentium II 266mhz with 64 megs of RAM, the FPU seems to be rather important as I have heard of users with far faster K6-2s and K6-3s not being able to run very many games full speed.

Of course platform specific optimizations should take those requirements down even further, and obviously it was a fairly long time ago when I was using those system specs, so all the additional speed encasements that have made their way into both SNES9x and ZSNES may have brought the requirements down a tad bit more.

Reading around a bit seems to indicate that there ARE problems getting the SNES emulation on the GP32 up to full speed, and IIRC the GP32 does not have a dedicated graphics unit, making it unlikely to be able to ever accomplish all the nifty real time effects of the GBA or even the SNES.

Then again, it does have that rather fast main CPU. :) Nintendo tends to love their tricked out dedicated co-processors, the GP32 is more of a general purpose machine (as can be seen by the MP3 players and even video players out for it).

One must also take media costs into account though, Memory Cards are expensive!

Then again, at least with the GP32 you have the CHOICE of being able to play MP3s and everything, with the GBA you end up having to buy third party accessories to get those same types of options.

I am so tied to my desktop now days that (and this is a bit of a surprise given how much I used my original Game Boy and my Game Boy color 'back in the day') I do not even own a 'modern' portable gaming system. ^_^