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.

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!

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.

no.

Probably is one of those of "because its fun" type of projects.

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.

You can also find MSU-1 packs that include his tracks so you can play the games with the enhanced audio.