ZSNES is no longer in active development.

[blackmyst]

Oh nice. If I didn't already own the original cart of every special chip game I wanted to play, I would've bought it... maybe I still will if they ever get around to S-DD1 and SA-1.

[Gil_Hamilton]

Oh nice. If I didn't already own the original cart of every special chip game I wanted to play, I would've bought it... maybe I still will if they ever get around to S-DD1 and SA-1.

Yeah, if he can get SA-1 working on his FPGA, that'll be seriously hot.
He's not sure that's actually doable right now.

[pagefault]

Going to get the sd2snes then later when I have some money. I'm going trying to release an alpha in July hopefully so people can poke around with what is done so far.

[nintendo_nerd]

Going to get the sd2snes then later when I have some money. I'm going trying to release an alpha in July hopefully so people can poke around with what is done so far.

Wait, so, if that's the Zsnes beta...what's this secret project I've heard so much about? I also thought an Android port was gonna be made....?

[pagefault]

It works on every platform, except iOS and Mac since I don't have those but should work in theory if someone were to compile it.

[joe_devore]

It works on every platform, except iOS and Mac since I don't have those but should work in theory if someone were to compile it.

^_^ thx so much Pagefault ZSNES has brought me much happiness over the past decade+ ;^_^


so what are you using for a GUI?
Wx, qt, custom?

aside from the new versions would it be possible some day after you release the new version to go back and maybe fix a few bugs in the old v1.51 release so it keeps up a bit for Nostalgic sake O_O please =)

[pagefault]

No GUI right now, focusing on the emulator.

[nintendo_nerd]

It works on every platform, except iOS and Mac since I don't have those but should work in theory if someone were to compile it.

I'm confused now, so there's a new version or at least, updated code available via source ...? And something secret?

[odditude]

It works on every platform, except iOS and Mac since I don't have those but should work in theory if someone were to compile it.

I'm confused now, so there's a new version or at least, updated code available via source ...? And something secret?

pagefault is working on a new version, which is generally lacking platform-specific code. if one can build it on one's platform, one can most likely run it. however, as usual, there will be no distribution until it reaches a point at which pagefault is satisfied.

[Gil_Hamilton]

Or at least a point where it won't blow up in your face.

[pagefault]

sd2snes is a little rich for me so I'll go with something cheaper. Anyway I have a SNES finally now that works.

[grinvader]

aside from the new versions would it be possible some day after you release the new version to go back and maybe fix a few bugs in the old v1.51 release so it keeps up a bit for Nostalgic sake O_O please =)

Don't count on that. There's a reason we restarted from scratch.

[pagefault]

the new version is a complete rewrite it doesn't share anything with the old code base, still looking at a late July alpha as i'm the only one working on right now and progress is whenever I have time.

[badinsults]

The Super Everdrive is about half the price of the SD2SNES, and works quite well. The only negative is that larger games take 20-30 seconds to load, and it doesn't have DSPx and CX4 support.

[nintendo_nerd]

aside from the new versions would it be possible some day after you release the new version to go back and maybe fix a few bugs in the old v1.51 release so it keeps up a bit for Nostalgic sake O_O please =)

I personally wouldn't think that to be conducive, given how many changes are being made with the source code and all that

[pagefault]

The old code won't be maintained. As for copiers I don't care about the extra chip support since I manly just want it to run some basic tests on it. I'm still using a copier that is about 20 years old now with a floppy drive. Still works ok but floppies are getting harder to find lol.

I am happy to announce I have reached my first internal milestone of pre-alpha and mostly everything is basically working. The next step is to get a debugger up and running to debug any problems with games going forward since right now everything is dumped to a log.

The current build works on Android, Windows, Linux and Mac (in theory) and is available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions as well as support for ARM platforms like Raspberry Pi. Release timeframe is still probably end of July for the public as there still are a lot of important things missing.

I got a little sidetracked and started to add NES support, right now it does mapper 0 which is enough to run Super Mario Bros. But I don't think I will be spending too much time on this and work on the SNES portion of things. The two hardware do share some things in common but there are too many differences to maintain them simultaneously.

[nintendo_nerd]

The old code won't be maintained. As for copiers I don't care about the extra chip support since I manly just want it to run some basic tests on it. I'm still using a copier that is about 20 years old now with a floppy drive. Still works ok but floppies are getting harder to find lol.

I am happy to announce I have reached my first internal milestone of pre-alpha and mostly everything is basically working. The next step is to get a debugger up and running to debug any problems with games going forward since right now everything is dumped to a log.

The current build works on Android, Windows, Linux and Mac (in theory) and is available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions as well as support for ARM platforms like Raspberry Pi. Release timeframe is still probably end of July for the public as there still are a lot of important things missing.

I got a little sidetracked and started to add NES support, right now it does mapper 0 which is enough to run Super Mario Bros. But I don't think I will be spending too much time on this and work on the SNES portion of things. The two hardware do share some things in common but there are too many differences to maintain them simultaneously.

Wow, that's excellent news, happy to hear progress is coming along as smoothly as it is and can't wait to try this out on my Nexus 7 tablet

[Yoshiyuki Blade]

It's great hear about progress picking up again. It really warms my heart. Now I'm feeling nostalgic about an era of emulation which catered to one's nostalgia to begin with (hard to believe that the difference between the SNES release year and ~2001 when I joined was less than 2001 and today). Glad to see many familiar faces still sticking around too. Looking forward to see what comes next!

[Yuber]

Very excited to try the new ZSNES out when it's far enough along for a beta to be released. When I originally heard about ZSNES being worked on for phones, I thought it was just a port and nothing else tbh but this is a really pleasant surprise, and I can't wait to compare it to 9x and BSNES. Speed is the main thing I'm curious about(compared to 9x 1.53, or latest test build), plus what filters/shaders it'll support.

Thanks for all your hard work. Old-school ZSNES was my first exposure to emulation, and I'll never forget playing the FF5 fan translation for the first time in all its bleepy, bloopy glory

It's kinda sad that the fan translation on an old emu with bleep bloop attack sounds is still better than that awful PS1 port.

[nintendo_nerd]

Very excited to try the new ZSNES out when it's far enough along for a beta to be released. When I originally heard about ZSNES being worked on for phones, I thought it was just a port and nothing else tbh but this is a really pleasant surprise, and I can't wait to compare it to 9x and BSNES. Speed is the main thing I'm curious about(compared to 9x 1.53, or latest test build), plus what filters/shaders it'll support.

Thanks for all your hard work. Old-school ZSNES was my first exposure to emulation, and I'll never forget playing the FF5 fan translation for the first time in all its bleepy, bloopy glory

It's kinda sad that the fan translation on an old emu with bleep bloop attack sounds is still better than that awful PS1 port.

Yeah, it was pretty bad, the PS1 port was nice in that it introduced people to FF5, but the horrid translation (enemy names made me lul, I kid you not, they called "Wyvern", "Y Burn") among others. And "Lenna" "Reina" when the Japanese characters for her were レンナ (Renna or Lenna). The sound was heavily compressed, which made no sense as PS1 discs held up to 650 MB or so, and the game was 8 MB, well, there were FMVs, but still.

I remember Zsnes back in 1997, that was my first exposure, for a while there was no sound, then when sound worked, I nearly crapped my pants in excitement, it was glorious playing Final Fantasy IV with emulated audio

[Gil_Hamilton]

The sound was heavily compressed, which made no sense as PS1 discs held up to 650 MB or so, and the game was 8 MB...

Aye, but they couldn't load it all into RAM at once, arrr!
</Faris-official>

It's a more blatant issue in FF6, but it requires a lot of rework to get those games working reasonably with a disk drive and 1 MB of RAM instead of a ROM on the system bus.
Work that Square did not expend. You can actually hear the disk access as the game freezes to load data mid-animation in Sabin's aura bolt blitz... which was as far as I got before I decided this was a bad joke and not worth my time. That's an acceptable access on a ROM mapped into the system bus, but not even remotely acceptable on a CD-ROM.

(Seriously, he leaps forward, the game halts, the disk whirrs, he launches the beam. )

[Thalon]

Nice to return here and read that zsnes is coming back, faster and stronger than ever.
I was losing hope after the long lack of progress updates (and the lack of pagefault: I thought he dropped the project after I found that he got hired by a big name in the IT sector, thought they made him sign a "no piracy" agreement like EA did with Sardu, the author of Callus)...

[nintendo_nerd]

The sound was heavily compressed, which made no sense as PS1 discs held up to 650 MB or so, and the game was 8 MB...

Aye, but they couldn't load it all into RAM at once, arrr!
</Faris-official>

It's a more blatant issue in FF6, but it requires a lot of rework to get those games working reasonably with a disk drive and 1 MB of RAM instead of a ROM on the system bus.
Work that Square did not expend. You can actually hear the disk access as the game freezes to load data mid-animation in Sabin's aura bolt blitz... which was as far as I got before I decided this was a bad joke and not worth my time. That's an acceptable access on a ROM mapped into the system bus, but not even remotely acceptable on a CD-ROM.

(Seriously, he leaps forward, the game halts, the disk whirrs, he launches the beam. )

That is absolutely pathetic, I couldn't stand the PS1 ports of V or VI for that version reason, the loading times were ridiculous and the audio quality of the music was also somewhat degraded, but nowhere nearly as bad as the GBA ports (those were effing horrendous). Speaking of, it wasn't until ROM hackers released the sound restoration hacks for those games, FF5 Advanced now sounds strikingly close to the Snes version, a very good hack. IV and VI sound good now as well. I've wondered why the sound was garbage, but now I know why, I find it very ironic that a less powerful console handled the games better than a 32-bit CD-based console could.

[Yuber]

The PS1 ports were just quick, lazy ass cash-in ports and nothing else, but Anthology did expose more people to FFV which is good, but the hacked/restored GBA version or just the original SNES version are both vastly superior. GBA version has the best translation I assume, but I don't know Japanese.

ALL the PS1 SNES ports have AWFUL compressed audio, and I didn't know about the loading mid-aurabolt. I kinda blocked FF6 PS1 out of my memory I guess. Gil: Meteor causes massive amounts of slowdown in the PS1 port and the mode 7 effect of the spell is totally nerfed. FF6 Advance has so much slowdown that I find it hard to play through. I play FF6A in VBA-M 1.8; does FF6A have that much slowdown on real hardware, or is it partially an emulation issue? Flare and Meteor are so slow that it's comical. Guess I'm just spoiled by the silky smooth SNES version, and while interesting, the additional content doesn't interest me much because the dragon's den as a dungeon is annoying to navigate. Cool new bosses though, although they're still easy just like all of FF6.

I didn't play much of CT on the PS1 after experiencing the same awful load times as the FF ports, so other than severely compressed audio and FMV scenes, I don't know about the other flaws/bugs. Play the DS version if you care about the FMVs, although the DS version has a few sound issues as well.(Lavos' roar is seriously compressed to give 1 example) It's a solid port/retrans of CT though, and the DS port is what the PS1 version should've been.

[Gil_Hamilton]

Gil: Meteor causes massive amounts of slowdown in the PS1 port and the mode 7 effect of the spell is totally nerfed.

Which is odd since it's not a mode 7 effect, and shouldn't be particularly challenging to reproduce.