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First ZSNES Release In ~2.5 Years
Anonymous Coward writes "The best SNES emulator, and the only GPL one -- ZSNES --
has had the first release in almost two and a half years!
Looks like those smart coders reverse engineered quite a few new special co-processors for this release as well."
Yesterday I tested zsnes first time on my linux laptop and was blown away - excellent emulator!
And now I read about a new release - even better!
Actually, there have been work in progress releases all along. This is the first non-"beta" release in two years.
:D!
See you in WoW, pagefault.
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... but we already got CVS builds once in a while from here:
http://www.ipherswipsite.com/
For anyone wanting to play SNES games I highly reccomend looking in your kernel documentation about how to hook up your SNES controller to work with the gamecon driver. Only takes about 10 minutes.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
I'll throw in a second vote for snes9x. As can be seen on their download page http://www.snes9x.com/downloads.asp they have ported snes9x to; Solaris, OpenBSD, Irix, N64, FreeBSD, AmigaOS, BeOS, RiscOS, SunOS, MS-DOS, HP-UX, MacOS, Linux and Windows.
It has a very easy to use and intuitive interface with all the options that one would expect from an emulator. It is stable and has played every single ROM I've thrown at it without a single problem. Whenever I set up a new USB thumbdrive with all my essential software, snes9x always goes on there.
A Linux port exists. Heck, there is even an Amiga port.
Thats unfair, it most certainly is close. Just because some perfectionists are unpleased...
Super Mario Kart has worked fine for years, your copy of SMK is probably no good.
The utility here http://nsrt.edgeemu.com/ is closed sourced but exists for a lot of platforms and can tell you if your copy of the game is good or not.
You have to keep in mind that back when ZSNES was first being developed, computers weren't fast enough to emulate a SNES properly. I recall first using ZSNES on a Pentium 2, 300 MHz; not top-of-the-line, but a pretty good computer for the time. As far as I can recall, there weren't any SNES emulators that would run games at full speed, but ZSNES came pretty close; SNES 9x was more accurate, but also considerably slower unless most of the features were disabled.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
It hasn't really been 2.5 years. There have been unofficial builds released every few months, they refer to them as "WIPs" or Work In Progres. The WIPs are awesome, each one fixed a bunch of bugs, and was rock stable.
bah, they still have that old "demo coder" interface. keyboard is qwerty even though i have configured otherwise in windows. no window borders, mouse speed is hardcoded. what a bullshit.
while it's nice and all that they further developed an app from the days where speed was crucial, they should at least adapt to some basic guidelines regarding gui design.
they may be talented in hacking year-old chips and code handoptimized assembly but they sure as hell have no clue about clean software design.
The game's manufacturer, Koei, still makes regular releases of their Romance of Three Kingdoms and Dynasty Warriors series. They are still known for their tactical strategy games. Aerobiz was a very unique game since it dealt with corporate strategy in a way very different from more comtemporary games of that ilk (SimCity, etc) but I haven't heard about any plans to bring it back.
For the uninitiated, Aerobiz and its sequel Aerobiz Supersonic were two games released on the SNES and Genesis. The aim of each was to become the most profitable airline in the industry. You could play the game at different points in time - the dawn of airplanes for business commutes all the way to Concorde-like supersonics. To win, you would have to oversee buying various real-life planes (Boeing, Lockheed, Airbus, etc), slots at worldly airports, and compete directly with three other companies who were also vying for the same assets. You would try to have a hub in each continent and grow the airline from there with large transoceanic flights. If a particular route was not profitable, you could alter its ticket prices, switch to a smaller plane, or other various options. The game actually had a board of directors you could meet with for advice (similar to SimCity's "Advisors"). Additionally, you could diversify your business by purchasing hotels or golf courses in respective cities. Various events, like the Summer Olympics and disasters, like fuel crises, war or worker strikes, would also influence your growing business. One of the features that made Aerobiz unique was that it was multiplayer. Although you had the option of making any number of them AI, the three other corporations could be other players. Granted, it's rather slow-paced and geeky, but it's arguably the closest thing there ever was to a competitive simulation game.
The issues about porting ZSNES are slowly being resolved. A lot of the work done for this release involved replacing a lot of assembly with C.
Since computers are so fast now, there is no need to try to squeeze every last bit of performance out of the processor by using assembly for SNES emulation. It may take a while, but I think the ZSNES may reach a point where it is written entirely in C.
untrue. Snes95/96 (which later became Snes9x) was able to run most games at full speed on a pentium 133. if you disabled transparency (or just didn't have a good DOS VESA driver), you could get it running full speed on a pentium 75Mhz.
not only that, but other SNES emulators like NLKSNES or ESNES were both able to run most games at full-speed on this hardware as well.
As you may know SNES9x is based on SNES96 (with Code from a different emulator called SNES97).
Here's a quote from the change log:
Initial release 0.1
- Ported Windows 95 version of Snes96 to Linux on a PC and Solaris on a
SparcStation.
I have a wildcard unit which can transfer roms from a cartrige. Even then there's a question of legality. Common sense says that there's nothing wrong with making copy of something I've purchased as long as there's no intent to distribute it, nintendo says there is.
Everything will be taken away from you.
No. These are just the instructions on which pins to solder to which pins of the parallel port. Most distros will probably have the gamecon module built and ready to use.
Troll.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
Uh... I don't think you quite understand what he's saying. There is NO GUI at all for anything other than Windows and Mac. Hardly what I'd call intuitive if you have to look up all the different switches to do anything other than play with the default config. I'd like to see you try to get it to run fullscreen with different key mappings without wasting 10 or more minutes on google.
Taken from the official site:
:D. [pagefault, _Demo_, Nach, TRAC, Overload, theoddone33]
ZSNES News
Dec 25th, 2004 - _Demo_
We are releasing the new ZSNES version 1.40 today. We hope you will enjoy it!
Merry Christmas
The ZSNES Team
------------
What's new:
DOS Only:
* - Fixed cublic spline interpolation. It should actually save the option now! [pagefault]
* - Fixed other various DOS sound bugs. [Nach, pagefault]
* - Fixed a frameskipping bug. [pagefault]
Linux/SDL/POSIX Only:
* - Updated icon. [cdbsi]
* - Updated Linux video code to Windows Version. [pagefault]
* - Fixed problems with nVidia cards. [Diablo-D3]
* - Fixed audio problems with broken drivers. [Diablo-D3]
* - Added 48khz sound support. [pagefault]
* - Updated joystick input support. [theoddone33, Sander]
* - Fixed Savestate incrementor, this caused some crashes. [pagefault]
* - Cleaned up the Linux Autoconfigure [Diablo-D3]
* - Added a couple of things for the start of BeOS compatibility. [theoddone33]
* - Fixed 16->32bpp LUT Related bug. [kode54]
* - Added hardcoded alt-enter fullscreen toggle. [theoddone33]
* - Added dialog for why the video mode couldn't be set. [theoddone33]
* - Added Circle buffer patch (savestate fix). [zinx]
* - Fixed problem with man page when installing (when man1 directory doesn't exist). [hpsolo]
* - Fixed cmd line sound quality. [pagefault]
* - Fixed zlib and libpng issues. [theoddone33, pagefault]
* - Updated libpng Version checking [theoddone33]
* - Added -lm to acinclude.m4 so AC_TRY_RUN doesn't return negative on some systems looking for libpng. [theoddone33]
* - Overhauled Makefile. [theoddone33]
* - Fixed install target, -D should not be used. [theoddone33]
* - Added the name of the start address to the error message, when mprotect fails. [theoddone33]
* - Update config.sub. This allows configuration on 64bit targets, and requires autogen.sh to be rerun. [theoddone33]
* - Added HQ2X filter! [MaxSt, pagefault, zinx]
* - Snapshots now use the full ROM file name. [Nach]
* - Prefixed Snapshots with leading zeroes. [Nach]
* - Renamed Linux Version to SDL. [pagefault]
Windows Only:
* - Updated icon with Windows XP compliancy. [cdbsi]
* - Added new disable screensaver code. [pagefault]
* - Added a CPU utilization fix. [kode54, pagefault]
* - Added 48khz sound support, updated sound code, and fixed sound bugs. [pagefault, Nach, ipher, StatMat]
* - Fixed a couple of input bugs, such as one concerning the 5th joystick and another that made the mouse get stuck in an endless loop. [pagefault]
* - Removed alternate timer. [pagefault]
* - Fixed Netplay freezing bug. [pagefault]
* - Many new video features, including (but not limited to): HQ2X, HQ3X and HQ4X graphic filters, support for hi-res and D modes in 32bpp windowed mode (now default), new aspect ratio code for scaling, and the KitchenSync (usable only via the commandline). [MaxSt, pagefault, Darkfalz]
* - Fixes for video code errors, such as those that occured when alt-tabbing in fullscreen, MMX interpolation fixes, and blitter fixes. [pagefault, zsKnight]
* - Snapshots are now numbered and use the full ROM file name. [Nach]
* - Renamed Windows version to Win32. [pagefault]
* - Win32 port can now also be compiled with MinGW (but we won't support it till the next release). [Nach]
All Ports:
* - Added multiple timing tweaks, fixed various emulation bugs, and many other technical updates, including (but not limited to): SPC core updates (with improved sound decoding), safer memory allocation in certain areas, HIRQ and VIRQ fixes, color add/sub and color bleeding fixes, HDMA improvements, sprite priority and flickering fixes. Many more games work
* - Overhauled a lot of code, such as checksum calculation and mirroring code. Overhauled and added much better EHi/Hi/Lo ROM code, improved reset vector, changed much hard coding to variables. Fi