7 ms·
Super ZSNES – GPU Powered SNES Emulator
- carrja99 6mo agoZSNES was a core part of my childhood. I downloaded it back when it was still fresh back in the late nineties / early aughts and used to emulate all matter of favorite games and homebrew translation projects for Star Ocean and Tales of Phantasia.
- BiteCode_dev 6mo agoAlso discovered the amazing Tales of Phantasia thanks to zsnes. The translation community did a bonker job bringing that from Japan, patching the game without even having the source code, like mad men. Without them, I would have never known such gems existed that were never sold on our market. The translation does take some liberties, but honestly, just for the boat scene, I feel like it's worth it. And being able to slow down or speed up the game at will, or quick save/reload at any second, thanks to zsnes, is just chef kiss.
- bitwize 6mo agoFavorite ZSNES moment: I took a math class in a lecture hall equipped with laptops in a year when my university was experimenting with laptops as a pedagogical tool, but hadn't yet pulled the trigger on requiring them or offering them for sale (as compared to the standard dorm room desktop). While the lecture was being given, we were supposed to have our laptops open with the lecture material up. But of course this one kid had installed ZSNES on his and was playing Killer Instinct...
- carrja99 6mo agohaha, I was playing Final Fantasy V during computer class in HS.
- pdntspa 6mo agoI beat Chrono Trigger on a 486 with sound and transparencies disabled. There were parts where I had to manually switch off the top layer because transparent stuff (such as clouds) would completely block my view When my parents weren't home I'd move to their pentium 166mhz with my savestates copied to a floppy and sneak some time playing the game with sound and transparencies. I think I also got through most of super mario world and some of the final fantasy games as well Fun times!
- butz 6mo agoThanks for reminding about missing transparency. I think seeing those games in emulator with transparency support had almost same impression as running Need for Speed III with 3dfx card for the first time :)
- zerocrates 6mo agoYeah, I want to say you could press the number keys or F keys or something like that to toggle layers on and off, and it was absolutely necessary in some misty forest/jungle/waterfall type areas.
- LarsDu88 6mo agoEmulating the SNES on contemporary PC hardware. For shame!
- pdntspa 6mo agoDude we were broke and my 486 was a hand-me-down from church. The first console I ever got was a Nintendo 64, and that was very late into its lifecycle. I can assure you that 486 was not contemporary, it was very much behind the times when I had it.
- hsbauauvhabzb 6mo agoI’d be curious if you could squeeze out better performance with a newer emulator. Either way, SNES games on a 468 is not shameful, it’s the pinnacle of hacker ethos!
- jamiejquinn 6mo agoNewer emulator or even a recompilation of an old one. I'd bet there are a few modern compiler tricks that would help even on decades old CPUs.
- isk517 6mo agoI gave up on my first play through of Chrono Trigger because I couldn't figure out how to progress in the future world. Didn't realize that the clouds in the dome were supposed to be transparent and not something that I need to trigger a different event to clear up.
- jmarcher 6mo agoTheir home page is underselling how cool this is: MVG did a great overview of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5twUkvYFpA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5twUkvYFpA
- AdmiralAsshat 6mo agoIt's understandable that they went in this direction. Higan/bsnes has already captured the market for "accuracy" on the SNES emulator front, so this is more going off and doing its own thing rather than re-treading familiar ground. I suppose my only concern is what it will do to the hardware requirements, since ZSNES' original claim to fame was how well it was able to run on limited hardware, even if it had to do a bunch of clever hacks to get there.
- snvzz 6mo agoOr, thanks to bsnes/higan/ares[0], SFC accuracy is solved, thus it should be much easier for any new emulator to be accurate. i.e. accuracy should be the baseline; I understand Super ZSNES is not there yet. 0. https://ares-emu.net/ https://ares-emu.net/
- pezezin 6mo agoAres is a seriously underrated emulator. I don't use it much now that I have a MiSTer, but it is by far my favourite emulator on desktop.
- rincebrain 6mo agoKind of? Accuracy is valuable, but as illustrated by the early days of people using buggy emulators for SNES games on phones and the DS/3DS, people will tolerate buggy but running on their hardware over correct but unplayable.
- PokemonNoGo 6mo agoI remember reading, back then, about the author byuu/Near going into future updates such as HD Mode7 and widescreen. Found it re-hosted on an odd site here: [1] It does seem like Super ZSNES in ways picked up these ideas (and torch) and went with them! Rather neat actually! RIP Near. [1] https://bsnes.org/articles/state-of-emulation-5 https://bsnes.org/articles/state-of-emulation-5
- kayson 6mo agoVery cool, especially the accuracy improvements. But is GPU really necessary? SNES is so old I wonder why you couldn't get away with CPU-only. Even if GPU is more efficient, is it worth the headache of supporting way more hardware combinations?
- aruametello 6mo ago> is it worth the headache of supporting way more hardware combinations? no. Probably is one of those of "because its fun" type of projects.
- ndiddy 6mo agoThe visual enhancements the emulator is capable of doing (high-res Mode 7, texture replacements, shaders, that sort of thing) wouldn't run well with software rendering. The emulator uses Unity so they don't have to do all the low-level GPU support work themselves.
- masklinn 6mo ago> SNES is so old I wonder why you couldn't get away with CPU-only. Depends what level of accuracy you want. higan (bsnes) does cycle-accurate SNES emulation on the CPU (and has for more than a decade) so that's definitely feasible. If you want accuracy beyond that things get dicey. AFAIK when you get down to transistor level emulation, you can do pong but MetalNES runs nowhere near real time, so the limit for that is somewhere between those two systems.
- firebot 6mo agoThis was always my favorite emu. No problems on a Pentium 60 MHz. Plus you can make your own cheat codes!
- zapzupnz 6mo agoSuper ZSNES and the original ZSNES are not the same emulator. Same developers, different codebases entirely. The linked website is about the newer Super ZSNES.
- firebot 6mo agoYea, I read the article. I'm concerned with all there 'super enhancements' while claiming far more accurate processing. Back in the day accuracy wasn't really possible with playable performance. These days I would hope they'll really try to go for fidelity and accuracy. But eh, there's plenty of accurate emulators out there so it might be fun seeing where they go with these super enhancements. Sounds like they're implementing some kind of sprite editor?
- yesman_x 6mo agoVery cool to see ZSNES back. The per-game enhancement approach sounds way more interesting than generic HD filters, especially with optional toggles.
- ranger_danger 6mo agoWas not expecting it to be using Unity. Also looks to be closed source for now.
- butz 6mo agoI see libsteam plugin in archive. Are they planning to release it on Steam?
- PokemonNoGo 6mo agoAre there any emulators on steam? I only remember the chaos that was Dolphin. Maybe its for the fancy controller?
- Dwedit 6mo agoUnity = Decompilable (except for IL2CPP or obfuscated binaries)
- miladyincontrol 6mo agoThats the part I'm a bit apprehensive for, rather I'd be curious what led them down that decision for an emulator of all things. Or is it just a bit of portability and shader technical debt?
- ndiddy 6mo agoIn general the way people make money off emulation is by selling it to iOS/Android users. In this case, it's free on PC and the Android version is $3. The emulator needs to be closed source for this business model to be feasible.
- ouraf 6mo agoWe are extremely well served in open source and free options for SNES emulation. The dev wants to make something new, is using Unity for multiplatform and gor partial shader code abstraction and he has proven he can deliver good stuff if properly funded. Let the man cook, and if you have some technical question, i'm sure Lord would answer you.
- bityard 6mo agoThe "uncompressed audio replacements" will be pretty nice, it will be interesting to see what comes of those. There is a guy, Mathew Valente (a.k.a. TSSF), who put in a surprising amount of effort tracking down the original samples used by the composer of the SNES and PSX Final Fantasy games, Nobuo Uematsu. Nearly all of the samples came from various contemporary hardware and software synthesizers. Mathew found most of them (possibly with community collaboration, no small feat either way!) and took those original samples and remastered Nobuo's tracks. If you watch his videos, this was not a simple drag-and-drop operation, there is quite a lot of technical, musical, and subjective work and decisions to be made. The results are just beautiful. If you liked classic Final Fantasy music, you'll love his channel. Here's one of my favorites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQhxNkZH-DE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQhxNkZH-DE
- ranger_danger 6mo agoJammin' Sam does the same thing with Donkey Kong games and some others: https://www.youtube.com/@JamminSamMiller/videos https://www.youtube.com/@JamminSamMiller/videos You can also find MSU-1 packs that include his tracks so you can play the games with the enhanced audio.
- philistine 6mo agoI hope you guys are aware of the Church of Kondo?
- bityard 6mo agoI am now!
- ranger_danger 6mo agoI was not, thanks! Username does not check out.
- christophilus 6mo agoUnfortunately not being updated anymore. :/
- the-golden-one 6mo agoIs this a ParaLLEl-like implementation? I couldn’t work it out from the video.
- jsd1982 6mo agoIt should be possible to have the PPU emulation capture all of the final register state per pixel (or scanline if accuracy isn't paramount) and have the GPU render each pixel using only that state, doing the layer blending, color math, and mode 7 calculations as necessary. Based on MVG's video breaking down the draw commands performed it doesn't look like that's how Super ZSNES have implemented their PPU - it seems to render tile by tile for BGs (and OBJ?) and line by line for mode 7. That'll be a bit inaccurate but it's likely necessary to implement some of their visual enhancement tricks.
- BearOso 6mo agoI came up with something similar to your idea, a GPU compute PPU for future Snes9x. What they're doing is using legacy fixed-function API to draw quads, then blend a bump map on with the final image. It's weird. We have the tools to do some really cool things with GPUs, but they chose this. I'm more impressed by all the post-processing shaders people have come up with for all the other emulators.
- itintheory 6mo ago> Currently implemented with support for 7 popular games. The enhancement engine sounds great, but it'd be nice to know which games it's for...
- bredren 6mo agoOne of the features is “no vibe coding, classic development style.” I think that’s kind of interesting, especially when building a retro enablement. But I wonder does this mean no AI was used at all? Even for say, code review? No judgment either way just curious for clarification.
- bowsamic 6mo ago> But I wonder does this mean no AI was used at all? Even for say, code review? Would that be surprising to you?
- bredren 6mo agoWhy do you ask?
- bowsamic 6mo agoI’m just curious if you are so dependent on LLMs that the idea of not using them at all seems extreme to you
- bredren 6mo agoI see, good to be curious. "No vibe coding" is an ambiguous claim. I was asking whether they meant no AI-generated implementation, no AI assistance whatsoever, or just "not primarily generated by prompts."
- llmssuck 6mo ago"no vibe coding" is different from "no ai". I'm not sure where the authors are going with this. No autocomplete? What level of autocomplete? No "deep learning"?
- xtracto 6mo agoFunny, we now enter the era of "Made with Handcrafted Code" or "Handmade" . Same way as furniture, carpets and any other "handcrafts" are made now... or Lamborghinis
- honkcity 6mo agoI remember my dad explaining that our computer was fast enough that we didnt even need to bother with the actual hardware SNES anymore because it could be run directly on the computer which I thought was pretty amazing. I think it must have been via ZSNES, so its exciting to see further development of it!
- arkensaw 6mo ago> No Vibe Coding. Classic development style. This is fast becoming a feature people want.
- llmssuck 6mo agoWhy is this using Unity? That's insane? How do we know this is not malware?
- pixelatedindex 6mo agoCan’t speak about the Unity part, but why would it be malware? If you’re a dev with street cred, I’d imagine you won’t hurt it by putting out malware.
- ouraf 6mo agodownload it and test on virustotal
- arecsu 6mo agoAbout the uncompressed audio replacements, it makes me wonder how difficult would it be to train a model with a huge (but simple) library of sound effects and samples of high quality, and also feed them their equivalents"low quality" sound signature close or identical to what SNES have. The technical data about the SNES limitations should be there to know how to process these effects as precisely as possible, right? I'm not really a sound guy, so I might be wrong. Maybe this could result in a much more automated way to re-sample many more sound effects from the SNES massively! Just a thought
- dueltmp_yufsy 6mo agoAh man, these guys rocked early on when I was younger. Still recall first booting up ZSNES to play a fan-translated Japanese-only RPG. It opened up a whole new world. Thanks, guys.
- anthk 6mo agoOld ZSNES was GPL. And it looks maintained and forked over. https://github.com/xyproto/zsnes/ https://github.com/xyproto/zsnes/
- LoulouMonkey 6mo agoThe creator of ZSNES did a very interesting interview a couple of months with Zophar from Zophar's Domain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG-oqvj4Tqk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG-oqvj4Tqk
- throwatdem12311 6mo agoWelp, guess I’m gonna do another speedrun of Super Metroid just like the good old days.
- add2 6mo ago"Wide Screen (where available) - We enable widescreen whenever the game is internally coded to support partial or full widescreen."
- alanwreath 6mo agoI wonder is there any way to use this or rather get games to play on the emulator legally???? It really is the only thing that keeps me from them. I’d pay to play quality retro games. Heck it would almost be educational for my kids.
- nout 6mo agoSearch archive.org. All old games are archived. Since the games are no longer selling, imo this is fair.
- opan 6mo agoThe most legitimate method would be to buy a physical cartridge and dump it with a cartridge dumper. You'll probably need to clean the pins with isopropyl alcohol and sometimes also a fiberglass pen to get them to read reliably. I don't have a specific cart dumper to recommend from experience, I have dumped GB/GBC/GBA games but not SNES. A quick search found some options, though. https://github.com/X-death25/SNES_Dumper https://github.com/X-death25/SNES_Dumper https://stoneagegamer.com/retrode-2.html https://stoneagegamer.com/retrode-2.html Also found some discussion here recommending the Sanni Cart Reader, but it's a 5 year old thread so there are likely cheaper or better options. https://www.reddit.com/r/Roms/comments/obrxg3/best_nessnesn64_cartridge_dumpers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Roms/comments/obrxg3/best_nessnesn6... That being said, I do not think there is really an ethical problem with grabbing someone else's cart dumps, whether you have a cart of your own or not, and legally I would be very surprised if you had any issues in the US at least. The coolest part about cart dumpers to me is for carts with save files, you can "rescue" them from the hardware and preserve your progress. In some cases the save relies on a battery that could go dead at any time. If you do end up collecting physical cartridges, I would also encourage you to get the actual console, and explore mods for it, get the best video signal out of it you can (RGB or component rather than composite). Playing on real hardware is cool. I'd also recommend getting a flashcart even if you do collect original cartridges, so you can try out homebrew, romhacks, fan translations, and ports. There's a guy who has been porting NES games to SNES. https://archive.org/details/@infidelity https://archive.org/details/@infidelity
- 6mo ago
- joemazerino 6mo agoI see ZNES and I upvote.
- HerbManic 6mo agoOne of those things where GPU powered seems odd at first but actually makes a lot of sense. Means you can work with more than just the final outputs but can link in a lot deeper on the overall pipeline. Very cool. Will probably be the first of many emulators to come. A bit odd they are using Unity but I guess that gets them multi platform easily. Would be nice if they went something a bit more open like Godot but sometime you have to be pragmatic not ideal.
- jbethune 6mo agoSick. Been meaning to replay Link to the Past.
- ohkaiby 6mo agosighs unzips ROM files...
- pelasaco 6mo agono source code available?
- maxglute 6mo agoWith how long SNES emulators been around, I sometimes wonder if more people played Nintendo games on emulators than actual Nintendo consoles.
- PokemonNoGo 6mo agoProbably and especially if you include Nintendos own emulators.
- _egtx 6mo agoWhen I was 12 (like around 2015) & able to install emulators on my laptop I wanted to play chrono trigger on an emulator (after already beating several other emulated games; but all on my phone) .. I picked ZSNES because I fancied the name more than Snes9x.. I'll never forget the snowy menu of ZSNES, it was so beautiful for me
- d1g174l 6mo agoCongrats @zsknight_dev on this amazing relaunch of my favorite emu! One feature request worth your consideration: MSU-1 support. The case for it: Super ZSNES already does sample-level audio replacement for the seven curated titles in the Super Enhancement Engine, which addresses instrument fidelity. MSU-1 is the natural complement — it addresses track fidelity, by letting ROM hacks stream full CD-quality compositions in place of the original SPC700 sequences. There are over 200 published MSU-1 ROM hacks already in the wild (Zeldix maintains the index), with an active community producing audio packs for them. Implementation is small relative to the DSP1 & SuperFX support already on your roadmap. MSU-1 is a memory-mapped register interface plus PCM streaming — no real silicon to emulate. Reference implementations exist in bsnes (open source), Snes9x, higan/ares, and the SD2SNES flash cart. With accurate CPU and audio cores already in place, the addition is largely a matter of wiring up the register interface and the streaming engine. The combination of Super ZSNES's sample replacement and MSU-1 track replacement would, as far as I'm aware, be unique among emulators. No other emulator does both.