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First ZSNES Release In ~2.5 Years

Posted by timothy on from the hobby-lobby dept.

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."

11 of 216 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Excellent! by Creepy+Crawler · · Score: 2, Interesting

    And if I recall correctly, Linux kernel does support MISC binaries.. Though Ive not looked far into it.

    It does seem to allow execution of a binary through an emulation layer, as you suggested.

    --
  2. Re:Excellent! by TravisWatkins · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If you mean binfmt then yes, it does support it. I use it to run Mono for .NET apps and WINE for Windows apps. Ubuntu set it up for me, I dunno if it would be hard to do elsewhere.

    --

    "But I'm still right here, giving blood and keeping faith. And I'm still right here."
  3. Re:Best? by phoxix · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    Who cares ?

    What you slashdot folks don't realize is that the maintainers of the various emulators are all sleeping in bed with each other. Maria Kendora* (snes9x), Nach, kode54, pagefault, _Demo_(zsnes) all work together to understand more about the snes because often the documentation and knowledge they have is so little about whatever odd chips were used in that one obscure game. They'll even resort to reading half-assed patent applications in hopes of sheding some light.

    You can even join #zsnes on Freenode, and watch the developement of zsnes right in front of your own eyes. The developement of one OSS emulator is the developement of another. Especially with the tight knit community of coders/hackers.

    ~sd

    * Yes, that isn't his name. Maria Kendora is just a joke about his real name.

  4. Re:Best? by NotAPirate · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've got a snes9x port working on my 'kube via GC-linux, runs fullspeed :)

  5. Re:Best? by incom · · Score: 2, Interesting

    i admit that I've never given snes9x much of a shot, mostly because I started with zsnes years ago, and it was fastest on my meager hardware, and so even though I don't need the most speed I can eek out to play snes games anymore(athlon64 these days) I'm still used to zsnes, and comfortable with it.

    --
    True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
  6. Anything to warrant another glance? by WWWWolf · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I see a lot of fixes in the list, but since it's getting late, I can't read well... =/

    Is there anything at all to warrant another glance at it? I used to think ZSNES was pretty damn cool, until I noted that SNES9X has actually working hardware screen scaling (through OpenGL - hardware scaling was pretty damn relevant on a P3-600 which I used until this month...) ...and another thing I had going for SNES9X was that there was an OS X port of it, too, so I could use the very same NVRAM files on all computers I could theoretically use. For me, it seemed like the best of the open-source SNES emulators, everyone said ZSNES was good on MS-DOS and not really anything else.

    So I suppose they're getting really great emulation quality now, though... is there hardware scaling now? Since it now seems to use SDL, will there be a Mac port?

    Just curious...

  7. Where are the ROMs? by kaedemichi255 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's good to see a solid GPL'ed emulator, but where does one get ROMs without running into legal issues? What are the legal details about attaining ROMs?

  8. Re:Best? by Zorilla · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Isn't there a non-asm version? I don't remember hacving nasm required to compile it. At least there used to be pre-compiled versions without it when I used the MS-DOS version back in my Pentium 133 days (DOS versions of emulators were always faster for some reason).

    --

    It would be cool if it didn't suck.
  9. Re:zSnes Dev team 3 by DrStrangeLoop · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This is the first non-"beta" release in two years.

    See you in WoW, pagefault. :D!

    could it be that the duration of the work being in progress is caused by pagefault's interest in on-line role playing? sure enough sounds that way :)
    makes you wonder how many great programs are still unwritten due to MMORPGS. or how many quests still need to be completed because of OSS.

    anyway, is there a mac port? or any non-i386 port, for that matter?

  10. Re:Best? by Eric+S+Raymond · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The Emulator created by an ex-nintendo employee while working at Nintendo for development on PPC is called Silhouette:
    http://www.google.com/search?num=20&h l=en&lr=&safe =off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aof ficial&q=Silhouette+nintendo&btnG=Search

    --
    Bypass Compulsory Web Registration -- http://bugmenot.com/
  11. Re:SNES9X by rreyelts · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I think the hardest part is trying to write code that is friendly to the host CPU's branch predictor.

    This is where dynamic recompilation comes in. When you dynamically recompile the target binary, instead of interpreting it, you can remove all of the unpredictable branches you get when you interpret. Dynamic recompilation allows your code to be clean and fast.

    I wrote a basic dynamic recompilation core for a Z80 emulator on the JVM.