ZSNES was a huge breath of fresh air with sound near the end of 1997, along with the brand new SNES9X with sound (anyone remember the UMK3 non stop laughing bug?). UNtil that point, I was just using Esnes without any sound and subpar framerates playing stuff like Final Fantasy VI at 7fps 😁
wrote:How hackish/inaccurate are the old versions of ZSNES? I'd love to see how one of the old versions runs on period hardware.
It worked just fine for the most part. A lot of newer versions just introduced incremental bugfixes and support for special chips; I remember SA1 support for Super Mario RPG coming out a little before 1.0.
wrote:I've always found it funny how Nintendo acts like they have this hardline stance on emulation, yada yada, but in reality they never seem to bother suing any of the major rom sites or anything. It's so easy to download roms of their games that literally a child could do it.
Streisand effect. Trying to take down all those ROM sites would only succeed in calling a whole lot of attention to them.
I love GoG.com just because they provide a legitimate option for playing many of these obscure old games that have been trapped in legal limbo.
The fact that GOG is able to offer them at all means they were never "trapped in legal limbo". The ones that are trapped in legal limbo (most of Legend Entertainment's catalog, for instance) have no chance of ever appearing.
Wasn't System Shock 2 trapped in legal limbo for a while? They somehow managed to get the rights to sell that, though I don't know if the same can be said for the first System Shock.
Back on the topic of ZSNES though, what system specifications would have been recommended for say Super Mario World on an older version? What about for more-demanding games like Super Star Wars? (From what I recall, Super Star Wars even has framerate issues on the real system.)
wrote:Wasn't System Shock 2 trapped in legal limbo for a while? They somehow managed to get the rights to sell that, though I don't know if the same can be said for the first System Shock.
It wasn't really in "limbo"; the rights in question were just tightly gripped by an insurance company that wasn't doing anything with it. See for instance http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/713030/ … f-system-shock/ .
Back on the topic of ZSNES though, what system specifications would have been recommended for say Super Mario World on an older version? What about for more-demanding games like Super Star Wars? (From what I recall, Super Star Wars even has framerate issues on the real system.)
It ran on whatever systems were around ten years ago. I had something like a P2-266 and everything was peachy; it could probably go a lot lower. I don't think emulation-wise that any particular game would be more "demanding" than another; if Super Star Wars has framerate issues on a real system, then a properly-emulated system will have framerate issues regardless of what computer the emulator is running on.
wrote:Back on the topic of ZSNES though, what system specifications would have been recommended for say Super Mario World on an older version?
A Pentium MMX @ 166MHz would be 'fine' for most of the SNES library played in 320x240x8 without transparency effects. MMX is essential, as ZSNES is heavily coded for it in the audio area.
A Cyrix 6x86MX is fine too.
How much do the transparency effects bump up the requirements?
You'd need a Pentium II 233MHz and a decent VESA 2.0 video card then. 15bpp additive/subtractive blending can be expensive, and since palettes are dynamic, there's no chance of doing lookup optimizations.
Oh geeze... have a headache for a day, come back, and this thread has really become derailed from my original question! :O
Although you guys did point out that the place is rife with ROMs among other things, which is good to know. Thanks, everyone!
I shall now leave you all to your continued derailment! :D
--- Kris Asick (Gemini)
--- Pixelmusement Website: www.pixelships.com
--- Ancient DOS Games Webshow: www.pixelships.com/adg
wrote:Oh geeze... have a headache for a day, come back, and this thread has really become derailed from my original question! 😳
Although you guys did point out that the place is rife with ROMs among other things, which is good to know. Thanks, everyone!
I shall now leave you all to your continued derailment! 😁
Sorry about that. 🤣 I can go on and on about ZSNES; it actually accounted for a good amount of my childhood gaming. 😁 I discovered tons of great games through it that I would later end up collecting the real carts for.
wrote:It wasn't really in "limbo"; the rights in question were just tightly gripped by an insurance company that wasn't doing anything […]
wrote:Wasn't System Shock 2 trapped in legal limbo for a while? They somehow managed to get the rights to sell that, though I don't know if the same can be said for the first System Shock.
It wasn't really in "limbo"; the rights in question were just tightly gripped by an insurance company that wasn't doing anything with it. See for instance http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/713030/ … f-system-shock/ .
Back on the topic of ZSNES though, what system specifications would have been recommended for say Super Mario World on an older version? What about for more-demanding games like Super Star Wars? (From what I recall, Super Star Wars even has framerate issues on the real system.)
It ran on whatever systems were around ten years ago. I had something like a P2-266 and everything was peachy; it could probably go a lot lower. I don't think emulation-wise that any particular game would be more "demanding" than another; if Super Star Wars has framerate issues on a real system, then a properly-emulated system will have framerate issues regardless of what computer the emulator is running on.
The strange thing is, I've noticed that I can run most games on version 1.36 just fine using a Pentium II/Celeron 300, but on this one particular system I noticed it had a hard time with Super Turrican and Sparkster, both of which don't slow down much on an actual system, if at all, despite the fact that they both have a crazy amount of stuff going on all at once compared to other SNES action platformers.
