ZSNES is an acclaimed emulator for video games made to run on the Super Famicom and SNES. It was first developed by pseudonymous programmers and released on the Internet in 1997. One of the programmers, who goes by the Internet forum name of zsKnight, resigned in 2001, because of the death of his father. It is developed for DOS, Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD. ZSNES has largely been written in Intel x86 assembly language, and is therefore not portable to other architectures, such as Macintosh.

ZSNES has, in many ways, been a pioneer of SNES emulation features. Many of features first introduced on ZSNES have later been implemented in other emulators. It was the first emulator to support smoothing and anti-aliasing. It was the first to do rewinding. It has a better quality of sound output than the original console systems. In addition, it can create screenshots of games, it can "save" the game at any point by recording the game state, and it can capture sound files, saving them as SPC700 sound format files which can be read by an external player or a specialized Winamp plugin, such as Anti Resonance's SNESAmp. SPC700 sound format actually sounds more realistic on ZSNES than on the actual Super Famicom or SNES console. Also included is a built-in support for Game Genie and Pro Action Replay cheat codes. Due to being written in assembly, ZSNES is very fast, allowing it to run most SNES games at 50-60 frames per second with a computer that has a 400 MHz Pentium 2 CPU and 64 MB RAM, with full stereo sound and basic graphics interpolation.

Originally, ZSNES was closed source, however, in 2001, a new license was established and the project became open-source, and is being developed on a SourceForge project site. It is licensed under the GNU GPL. However, some of the modules have no surviving source code; in Debian version, and possibly some other "pure" Linux distributions, these have been removed since they aren't needed in Linux anyway. (Since ZSNES is in assembly language, it could be argued that the binary is source, but Debian maintainers wanted to avoid that debate.) Since then a large number of contributions have been made by outside coders. ZSNES is still in active development although the frequency of releases has fallen dramatically since its original developer left the team.

ZSNES was also the first SNES emulator to fully emulate the Super FX, DSP-1, and C4 chips. ZSNES also is capable of realtime S-DD1 decompression and it now has basic ST010 support. Today, ZSNES is considered to have the most wide support for special SNES hardware, and is one of the most accurate SNES emulators around.

External link

• ZSNES Website
• ipher's ZSNES WIP (Work In Progress) site