For many years the ZSNES emulator was the prime choice for playing SNES games on PC. Originally released in 1997 for DOS, it received regular updates and official ports to Linux and Windows, until development appeared to dry up around 2007. But now, nearly 20 years later, the two original developers have returned with the surprise announcement of Super ZSNES, an all-new version of the software designed for modern PC architecture, and to my eyes making classic SNES games look and run as if they were released for the Switch.
According to YouTube channel Modern Vintage Gamer, ZSNES played a pivotal role in the development of emulation software, running console games on PC at speeds that hadn’t been achieved before. It dominated for years, until the arrival of more modern emulators like higan around 2004, and while remaining a fan favorite ever since, it has certainly taken more of a back seat. That may be about to change, however, as revealed in Modern Vintage Gamer’s new video demonstrating what Super ZSNES is capable of.
It’s the result of a reunion between original developers zsKnight and _Demo_, brought about after an interview reminded zsKnight of the good times they’d had back in the ’90s and had him wanting to enjoy that all over again. The result is something that makes a big, significant change to how emulation is performed: it shifts a large amount of the handling over from the CPU to the GPU. This allows the massive advantage of simultaneous processing to hugely speed up the emulation, and then do all sorts of fun and fancy on-the-fly upgrades to the games’ art.
While many people want an experience as close to the original as possible when emulating, there are others who are delighted to see classic games running comfortable in widescreen formats, and with graphical tweaks that allow the 16-bit art to look suddenly so much more modern. It was really striking to me how much Super Mario World running on an Odin 3 looked like something you could have played on Switch without much complaint.
The video above contains far more technical details than I could hope to fathom, talking about how the new software is able to simulate 3D effects when reinterpreting classic SNES games and the complexities of its improved audio. But the long and short of it is: It’s prettier! Then of course you have the modern emulator standards like save states, cheat codes and rewind. And it’s all going to get a lot more exciting as modders start to play with the tools.