Unfortunately not open source from what I can see, at least not yet.
this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2026
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Unfortunately not open source from what I can see, at least not yet.
Unless they switch away from a Unity base, it'll never be fully FOSS because Unity isn't.
Wait, why does it matter if Unity is open source? Super ZSNES is its own project. I guess the runtime... oh wait the runtime, right.
Closed source emulator = Fake preservation.
Good for casuals looking to play maybe, but bad for the future of retro gaming.
This seems super bizarre in the face of bsnes. ZSNES as a name nowadays is basically nostalgia bait; base ZSNES – of the popular "big three" of bsnes, SNES-9X, and ZSNES – is the worst SNES emulator you can be using. Meanwhile, bsnes is fantastic (and even, for nostalgia pandering, has the falling snow as an option if that would break the bank).
"Who on Earth asked for this?", is my question. "Classic development style" in the case of ZSNES was shitty, highly inaccurate HLE that worked just well enough for popular titles. It's a honking heap of shit at this point that, in 99.99% of cases, you'd only use because you don't know better. I have no idea what this new version does that's remarkable enough to warrant its existence.
This seems super bizarre in the face of bsnes.
You clearly didn't even care to read the website. It has an entirely different focus than bsnes: https://zsnes.com/#super-enhancement
You clearly didn't even care to read the website.
I did, and it seems super "whatever", especially given it's closed-source. "No vibe-coding, but fuck you if you want to verify that."
I was a little worried this would be a continuation of the original codebase, because it's so far behind that it would be easier to throw it all out and rewrite from scratch. Thankfully, it looks like this is a rewrite from scratch that's only using the old name for nostalgiabait.
They are trying to bring something new to the table with hi-res Mode 7 and the Super Enhancement Engine, that actually sounds very cool. I'd still stick to bsnes for faithful 1:1 accuracy, but I'll keep an eye on Super ZSNES to see what kinds of mods and romhacks will take advantage of it.
I mean, it's also using the name because zsKnight and Demo are the devs.
Users didn't flock to zsnes because it was the most accurate, they used it because it completely nailed the user interface for loading, saving, input, and configuration.
And because it was the first SNES emulator to play SNES games full-speed on a 486.
And because it was the first SNES emulator to play games full-speed on a 486.
Things changed after 0.800. My Pentium PC struggled after the following release. IIRC it replaced some assembler code with C code that was less efficient.
It looks like 0.700 is actually when they switched to C.
https://zsnes-docs.sourceforge.net/html/history.htm
I believe it, though. SNES9X was coming into its own at about the same time period, and the inaccuracies were starting to catch up with ZSNES.
the inaccuracies were starting to catch up with ZSNES.
The inaccuracies made more demanding games work on my 133MHz PC, though.
Oh, absolutely. But other, more accurate, emulators started to take some of ZSNES's limelight away as hardware started to catch up to the demands.
It was a long time before a majority of PC owners could run BSNES at full-speed, but eventually it became one of the most well-beloved emulators. That same clock is what pushed ZSNES into obscurity over time.
What's wrong in a nostalgia bait?
Nostalgia just isn't what it used to be.
What is the falling snow thing anyway? I have an original snes that still works and I've never seen it there
It's a ZSNES UI effect, popularized because ZSNES was so popular. bsnes adding it was strictly avowed pandering.
At last, a version of ZSNES that runs worse than bsnes. We can finally have the worst of both worlds
I was surprised about the "with a native Linux version" part since I had recently checked the site and it was missing. That's cool that there's a Linux version now. At this point I'm not super interested in the feature set, but maybe something cool will come out of the modding capability (currently not available to users). Netplay is another future feature I'm interested in since the original zsnes had the best snes netplay I had tried.