Demolition-Man wrote on 2023-04-19, 17:37:

ZSNES has high requirements that are actually too extreme for DOS.

Hi again, I've found something from the late 90s that might be a bit shocking..
The arcade emulator M72 (emulates R-TYPE from 1987) does need these specs:

"The recommanded system is:

P2-266 with 64MB RAM
AGP video card with SDD6 installed
SoundBlaster16"

Then the emulator writer said (wrote):

"I had tested the emulator on 3 different machines.
The first one is a P2 clocked at 450MHz with Millenium PCI display card that I use to code the emulator, all games run extremely well, even after sample rate set to 44100.
The second one is a DELL P2-233 with built-in ATI 3D RagePro AGP video card. It runs well with vsync on and sample rate set to 22050, it only slows down when the vertical display option is turned on.
The 3rd machine is a P55C-233. It runs well with vsync set off. "

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/19990427085206/ht … 16.com/m72.html

Anyway, I've just found this archived page a few days ago when looking for Windows 3.1x compatible emulators and front-ends.
It reminded me of the days when emulators were primarily on DOS, still. Some required a Pentium II (or III, even).

Edit: The P55C is also known as Pentium MMX. The 233 MHz version was the fastest variant,
not supported by early (Super) Socket 7 motherboards (the P55C series topped out at 200 MHz, originally. The 233 MHz came afterwards).

I played and tested a lot. For the authentic SNES gaming experience with ZSNES, it has to be a faster AMD K6-2 or comparable. With only 8-bit color depth, the emulator also runs on slightly slower systems, but who wants 8-bit? It should be 16 bit. And that requires CPU power. The graphics card is almost irrelevant, more RAM doesn't change anything either, no, the pure CPU performance is important.

Curiously, the pure DOS version of ZSNES runs better than the Windows version, which is also based on DOS.

SNES9x 1.40 was a viable alternative for the thinclient and Win98, but doesn't really work on the other systems. But the emulator has its input and frame skip/limiter problems and resulting sound problems.
And not all games work.

The only recommendation I have is to use a fast CPU on a board with a 16-bit Soundblaster card, for he ZSNES 1.51 DOS version.
6-button gamepads work directly under DOS, while under Windows an additional (universal) driver is required, e.g. from Saitek.

The Retro PC community isn't big but it's alive, no idea why nobody wanted to develop the emulators further.

My theory is that a lot of these vintage emulators seemed to leverage a lot of old ASM knowledge, especially the DOS ones, and that the original developers moved on. This left a gap where a lot of performance work had to be reengineered for Windows using higher level languages.

This is all completely a guess, of course. I feel like there was a lot more innovation during the DOS years when programmers were more intimately familiar with interfacing directly with hardware, rather than the next generation that relied more on higher level APIs.

ZSNES used a lot of i386 assembler code, I remember. Even in the Windows version.
That was the official response when users asked for a MacOS port back in the day, before the switch to Intel CPUs had happened.

Edit: The sound system of the Super NES, the SPC700, is special.
It's essentially an independent computer system.
That's maybe the reason why there's a slow down happening.
Emulating both simultaneously needs multi-tasking/a lot CPU power.

Some users had turned the SPC700 module in a dedicated music player.
A bit like MOD player, I think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xkdcW9Gbao

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm9TLXRWUOY

https://andynumbers.wordpress.com/2015/03/20/ … nes-spc-player/

There's also a music player plug-in for WinAMP: http://snesmusic.org/v2/players.php

Thx, i will take a look.

Emulating both simultaneously needs multi-tasking/a lot CPU power.

Not on DOS or Win9X.
The sound worked fine even on a Pentium 120 with an ESS1868F card. But only with 22050 Hz.
SNES standard was 32000 Hz which can only (?) be provided by SB16 and compatible cards on DOS.

All the faster WIn98SE systems with AC97 Sound here (700MHz CPU from the ThinClient, 900Mhz Duron, XP2400+) have sound issues.
Way faster more modern systems with onboard, or even usb sound, work again.
Its strange...