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Super ZSNES – GPU Powered SNES Emulator

https://zsnes.com/
71•haunter•1h ago

Comments

carrja99•48m ago
ZSNES 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•30m ago
Also 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•23m ago
Favorite 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...
pdntspa•9m ago
I 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!

jmarcher•47m ago
Their home page is underselling how cool this is:

MVG did a great overview of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5twUkvYFpA

AdmiralAsshat•38m ago
It'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.

kayson•46m ago
Very 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•42m 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•32m ago
The 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.
firebot•42m ago
This was always my favorite emu. No problems on a Pentium 60 MHz.

Plus you can make your own cheat codes!

yesman_x•34m ago
Very cool to see ZSNES back. The per-game enhancement approach sounds way more interesting than generic HD filters, especially with optional toggles.
ranger_danger•25m ago
Was not expecting it to be using Unity. Also looks to be closed source for now.
bityard•18m ago
The "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

ranger_danger•13m ago
Jammin' Sam does the same thing with Donkey Kong games and some others: 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.

the-golden-one•14m ago
Is this a ParaLLEl-like implementation? I couldn’t work it out from the video.
jsd1982•4m ago
It 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.

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