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."

Comments

Best?

[SilentChris]

"The best SNES emulator"

Ho boy, flamewar. Personally I think SNES9x has been the best/most reliable, and has been updated far more frequently. And before people say "it's Windows only", it's not. I have a port sitting on my Mac OS X dock right now. Don't know if there's a Linux port.

Re:Best?

[stratjakt]

No need for a flamewar, the two teams put aside the moronic infighting years ago and have largely collaborated.

Back when, ZSNES was fast, because it was written in ASM. SNES9x was more compatable, because it was easier to tweak. And there was much boasting and bickering and it was basically an e-Penis contest between the two emus.

Eventually they came together.

Now, SNES9x got all its ASM code straight from ZSNES, ZSNES got its compatability and other features from SNES9x.

Both projects would suck without getting together. SNES9x would still be slow and chunky, ZSNES would be missing a lot of compatability and features.

Both are pretty good examples of what OSS projects can achieve when the authors put egos aside and focus on the end result.

Re:Best?

[Doomstalk]

they have ported snes9x to; Solaris, OpenBSD, Irix, N64, FreeBSD, AmigaOS, BeOS, RiscOS, SunOS, MS-DOS, HP-UX, MacOS, Linux and Windows.

You'll never see zsnes ports for most of those systems because large chunks of zsnes are written in x86 assembly. To me that's a plus, because its hard for a higher-level language to beat assembly in terms of speed. zsnes is much faster than Snes9x, and therefore I can run it on older systems. Its true that it does suck if you don't run an x86-based box, but that doesn't make it inferior, just different.

SNES9X

[acidblood]

I was always partial to SNES9X for some reason (perhaps it's the fact that they don't waste their time coding everything in assembly, as nobody should), and it's also open source. Whether it is GPL'd or not is just flamewar fodder -- most certainly the submitter's intention.

Re:SNES9X

[DarkHelmet]

One of the features in 1.40 is listed as:

• - Cleaned up, overhauled, removed, and ported a lot of code (asm to C). [pagefault, MKendora, Nach]

I think they're addressing that shortcoming.

Re:SNES9X

[moosesocks]

ZSNES ran at about 90% frame rate on my Pentium-100. I never even noticed the missing 10% until I actually checked the frame-counter -- it was still better than playing a 'real' SNES.

It's a real testament to their coding skills.

Re:SNES9X

[acidblood]

Regardless, I can assure you that it'd be just as fast if about 20% not 100% of the code were written in C. I'm not familiar with emulators, so maybe those 20% are actually 30 or 40%, but never 100%. I assert this as a speed freak and optimized assembly coder (did a couple of cores for distributed.net). It's just a complete waste of time to write, say, GUI code and file handling in assembly.

Actually, I'd go so far as to hypothesize that ZSNES would be faster if it were written in C/C++ with careful assembly optimization only where needed: the higher productivity associated with a high-level language would mean more time to optimize the parts of the code where speed really matters.

Re:SNES9X

[Anonymous Coward]

what a crock shit. dozens of banners and you have to use login/pass which you get by becoming a member at their (probably suckass) forum and post 10 posts.

use edonkey and let those fucking morons dry out.

Re:Excellent!

[Elektroschock]

I really wonder why emulators such as dosbox and Zdnes are not better integrated in your desktop environment. I mean KcontrolCenter configuration modules, I mean a "just run" environment, where the whole emulator is nidden as a background process. The main advantage of gaming consoles is that you just insert the disk7cardrige and start to play.

Re:Anything to warrant another glance?

[Andy Dodd]

ZSNES has had hardware scaling via OpenGL for quite a while. Although my favorite so far has been 4x software scaling with HQ4X (which is a scaling algorithm that is designed specifically for video games, which typically have lots of line art. HQnX attempt to perform pattern detection on the input graphics in order to guess what it's supposed to look like, and for most video games, the HQnX algorithms and their predecessor 2xSAI work quite well.) Of course, nowadays I follow HQ4X with further hardware scaling on my laptop's 1600x1200 screen. :)

Not sure how hard it would be to get the SDL Linux code to work under OSX... Might not be hard at all.

Re:Where are the ROMs?

[Anonymous Coward]

The legal details are not different from those of downloading movies or MP3s. Yes, it is illegal, but currently safer to download (from websites, or from a gnutella server - just do a search for: snes roms) as companies are currently not as adamant about protecting their old games.