ZSNES

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ZSNES is an acclaimed emulator for the Super Famicom and SNES video game systems. Since 2001, ZSNES has been free software, under the GNU GPL. It was originally DOS-based, but has since been ported to Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD. An Xbox port has also been created, by nes6502, called ZsnexBox.

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 with a computer that has a 400 MHz Pentium 2 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 GNU GPL was adopted and the project became open source, hosted on SourceForge. 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, in many ways, been a pioneer of SNES emulation. Many of the features first introduced in ZSNES have later been implemented 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 game state; commonly referred to as a "savestate".
The ability to record movies of gameplay that can be played back (although ZSNES has more movie capabilities than any other emulator as of this writing).
Support for rewinding in-game.
The ability to record and capture the sound and music, saving it to an SPC700 music file (or .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.

ZSNES also pioneered many libraries:

The parsegen library for the PSR language.
Source % counting tools.
Trimming whitespace off of source files.
CPU detection of all CPUs GCC supports (for optimization).
File dependancy generating on the fly.

Today, ZSNES is considered to have the widest support for specialized SNES hardware, and is one of the most popular SNES emulators around. ZSNES and Snes9x were also 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.

Also of note is that ZSNES was the first emulator to implement the hq2x interpolation algorithim and that it was the first emulator to offer any sort of support for the DSP-3 [link].

External links

[ZSNES Website]
[ZSNES Message Board]
[ZSNES Documentation]
[ipher's ZSNES WIP (Work In Progress) site]
[ZSNES Development Site]
* [ZSNES SVN commit log]
[ZSNES Bug Tracker]
[ZSNES Documentation Wiki]
You can also find help on the IRC channel [#zsnes], on irc.freenode.net.

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