Both Higan and Snes9x have cycle-accurate S-SMP emulation, meaning compared to a real Snes, it should sound pretty bloody close to the real thing, so close, that one can't tell a difference. Zsnes has music, but most of the sound effects, including Jim's voice, are missing.Ī video showing the issues in Zsnes, skip to 1:41 to listen to how bad it sounds, games should not have missing sound effects. Some games used a form of audio streaming from the S-SMP (part of the SPC700 processor), Earthworm Jim 2 being one of those games. Most games on Zsnes sound horrible, music not so much, but sound effects stick out like a sore thumb.

Given the fact I have very sensitive hearing, I can pick out bad sound when it's emulated poorly. Third issue: Some games will lockup randomly after a long time of playing, for example Der Langrisser, Super Mario RPG will lock up after two or so hours for no reason at all, Snes9x, Bsnes/Higan do not exhibit this issue.įourth issue: Sound, this one's a real killer and hard to notice by many users. Second issue: Transparency, some games used pseudo hi-res mode 7, such as the forest levels in Kirby's Dream Land 3, in Zsnes 1.51, you have to use the old graphics engine by pressing 8, otherwise, trees and underwater levels are opaque and not translucent. Zsnes focuses purely on speed, accuracy is dead last, as it was written in pure ASM (assembly) to make it run as fast as possible on weaker machines, but this comes at a cost, many games have quirks that affect the experience.įirst issue: Games with co-processors, such as the Super FX/SuperFX-2, S-DD1, Cx4, DSP-1, SA-1, etc all have their sets of issues, listed here, Īll chips are clocked weirdly and some games run faster than they should, Star Fox, Star Ocean, to name a couple. Higan, many games do not behave normally at all. Without looking at it closely, most games appear to behave normally, but comparing it to a more accurate emulator, like Snes9x and Another reason, is people are comfortable with which they are used to and if they don't see a reason to change or upgrade, they likely won't, such is with the case of Zsnes. First and foremost, the GUI, it's old-school, second, it's a very very fast emulator and can run on anything that Windows 95 had as long as the processor was 200 MHz or so. It's come to my attention that, despite not having been updated since 2006, Zsnes remains to be the most popular emulator among gamers, the reasons for this are widely varied.

Zsnes vs snes9x