New official version of ZSNES!

[Awakened]

Holy crap, how many years has it been? Anyways, check the news on the official site for all the changes and download it.

[BlazeHedgehod]

Aw... they removed netplay.

[kyon]

I'm going to go stand outside and defend the house from flying pigs now. As long as all my savestates port over, though, we're all good.

And did anybody really use netplay? Seriously?

[Mr. T]

awakened said:

Holy crap, how many years has it been?

None, considering there's been monthly WIP versions coming out for a while.
But, yeah, it's been a while since a proper release has been out.

[BlazeHedgehod]

kyon said:

I'm going to go stand outside and defend the house from flying pigs now. As long as all my savestates port over, though, we're all good.

And did anybody really use netplay? Seriously?

I honestly found ZSNES netplay to be one of the most stable and lag free I've ever used. Before Jackel went off to college, me and him would co-op a SNES game a night.

DKC1, DKC2, Super Mario World... all in a single run.

We tried doing some Genesis games, too, but Kalliera was actually MORE of a pain in the ass to get working properly than ZSNES netplay; and it had more lag, too, as I recall.

The only other netplay I've rarely had problems with is Mame32k's Kalliera implementation, but even that can be REALLY spotty at times.

[drak]

I could never even get ZSNES netplay to connect. The one time I did, me and Leo tried to play Seiken Densetsu 3... and went out of sync, like, every five minutes. It was MADDENING.

[BlazeHedgehod]

Yeah, whenever me and Jackel tried Secret of Mana, that's when we fell out of sync the most. Certain games just have more trouble, it seems.

[dead]

Netplaying all those games was fun.

[cake]

Well..what were the updates? And was the other version unofficial?

[BlazeHedgehod]

Loooots of updates. Too many to really name.

SuperFX support was updated. Starfox 2 runs pretty much flawlessly now. Other SuperFX games I tried:

• Dirt Trax FX: Shows a corrupt version of the licensing screen and then freezes.
  
• DooM: Doesn't even boot.
  
• Stunt Race FX: Palette problems from the last version of ZSNES are fixed. Collision detection in the semi-truck minigame freaks out from time to time, and certain sprites flicker, but none of this makes the game less enjoyable to me.
  
• VorteX: Perfect
  
• Starfox (the original): Perfect
  
• Yoshi's Island: In the level I tried (the one where you stand on top of the rising balloons) had no problems.

A lot of the emulator was ported to C, to make it easier to port to other platforms.

Lots of various little "hacks" and "tricks" to get games to work right were removed in favor of more accurate emulation. According to this changelog, ZSNES now has the fewest hacks/tricks out of any SNES emulator available (meaning it has the most accurate emulation, I assume).

A couple of bug fixes were implemented for certain games, and emulation overall was improved.

The Movie format (ZMV) was completely revamped and overhauled. You can now add stuff like subtitles, divide movies by chapters, and export them to AVI.

Really, just look at the changelog on the ZSNES website if you can make sense of it.

Though, it's still not perfect. There's still a great deal of lag in the intro sequence to Kirby Super Star, and the music/sounds in Earthworm Jim 2 mess up (causing the game to eventually freeze during the Larenzo's Soil level).

[Squiggles the Chao]

blazehedgehog said:

Loooots of updates. Too many to really name.

SuperFX support was updated. Starfox 2 runs pretty much flawlessly now. Other SuperFX games I tried:

• Dirt Trax FX: Shows a corrupt version of the licensing screen and then freezes.
  
• DooM: Doesn't even boot.
  
• Stunt Race FX: Palette problems from the last version of ZSNES are fixed. Collision detection in the semi-truck minigame freaks out from time to time, and certain sprites flicker, but none of this makes the game less enjoyable to me.
  
• VorteX: Perfect
  
• Starfox (the original): Perfect
  
• Yoshi's Island: In the level I tried (the one where you stand on top of the rising balloons) had no problems.

Which pretty much puts it on par with SNES9X's FX support.

blazehedgehog said:

Lots of various little "hacks" and "tricks" to get games to work right were removed in favor of more accurate emulation. According to this changelog, ZSNES now has the fewest hacks/tricks out of any SNES emulator available (meaning it has the most accurate emulation, I assume).

BSNES does this too, and it takes one hell of a good machine to run properly. To me, it doesn't really make sense. I mean, who's your target audience here? If it's developers or historians, then fine, but most people use ZSNES to emulate games they can actually play. This will either slow it down or break things for a neigh imperceptible benefit.

blazehedgehog said:

Though, it's still not perfect. There's still a great deal of lag in the intro sequence to Kirby Super Star, and the music/sounds in Earthworm Jim 2 mess up (causing the game to eventually freeze during the Larenzo's Soil level).

Not to start a religion war, but this is why I've never understood people pimping ZSNES as the greatest emulator of all time, and hardly ever mentioning SNES9X. Yes, SNES9X has problems with EWJ2's sound (and Clayfighter's sound), but it doesn't lock up. And Kirby Superstar works flawlessly. It's also written entirely in C, so it's more flexible and portable to a larger number of systems. This rewrite only got rid of 15% of the assembly. SNES9X has its flaws too: Its BS-X Support is very poorly implemented/documented, but in my experience, it has a higher compatibility with the games people want to play. Sure, the netplay mechanism needs a lot of work, but at least it's still in there. (Apparently this is disabled in the Windows builds, but it's still in the source code.) I guess what I'm saying is that both emulators have their uses, and it's really strange that people almost ignore SNES9X. There was no SNES9X topic when they released their version 1.5 earlier this year.

[王泥喜]

BS-X emulation?

(Last I checked, I could play the BS Zelda games pretty well on SNES9X, and I'm using 1.43)

[BlazeHedgehod]

squigglesthechao said:

Not to start a religion war, but this is why I've never understood people pimping ZSNES as the greatest emulator of all time, and hardly ever mentioning SNES9X. Yes, SNES9X has problems with EWJ2's sound (and Clayfighter's sound), but it doesn't lock up. And Kirby Superstar works flawlessly. It's also written entirely in C, so it's more flexible and portable to a larger number of systems. This rewrite only got rid of 15% of the assembly. SNES9X has its flaws too: Its BS-X Support is very poorly implemented/documented, but in my experience, it has a higher compatibility with the games people want to play. Sure, the netplay mechanism needs a lot of work, but at least it's still in there. (Apparently this is disabled in the Windows builds, but it's still in the source code.) I guess what I'm saying is that both emulators have their uses, and it's really strange that people almost ignore SNES9X. There was no SNES9X topic when they released their version 1.5 earlier this year.

SNES9x, at least the version I have (1.43) has the exact same lag issue ZSNES suffers with Kirby. It's only during the very short intro sequence before the titlescreen. I was just about to update to 1.5 when I noticed that there is no binary for the Windows version of SNES9x! Only Mac, Linux, and 64bit Linux.

Can't imagine why there wasn't a post on it. Nor can I imagine it has anything to do with the fact that 15% or less of Mooglers actively use the OSes 1.5 is available for, really! (No offense to those of us who choose an alternative OS, of course)

And While EWJ2 doesn't freeze at Lorenzo's Soil, it does feature a wholly new bug: The overlay effect present for the level doesn't display.

[Squiggles the Chao]

kiddocabbusses said:

BS-X emulation?

(Last I checked, I could play the BS Zelda games pretty well on SNES9X, and I'm using 1.43)

Mind sending me the copies you have? I can't get them to work on my copy, either with 1.43 or 1.5.

blazehedgehog said:

Can't imagine why there wasn't a post on it. Nor can I imagine it has anything to do with the fact that 15% or less of Mooglers actively use the OSes 1.5 is available for, really! (No offense to those of us who choose an alternative OS, of course)

Oops, I missed that. But the point still stands that SNES9X, back when it was still actively developed for Windows, was largely ignored in favor of ZSNES, considering they were pretty much on par.

And I just checked Superstar again, with no lag. It could be some call to a Windows API call slowing things down, something wrong with your ROM, or possibly related to your computer specs.

[王泥喜]

Squiggles: Anything I got that's BS-Zelda related is taken from

bszelda.zeldalegends.net/bszelda.shtml

In this specific case I was refering to their recently patched up "Kodai no Sekiban" fixes. "BS Zelda Remix" deosn't seem to work in 1.43 of SNES9x - although I believe it worked on an older version, as it runs on a specific port of SNES9x to the Xbox I got. BS Zelda Remix runs fine on ZSNES, though.

[Awakened]

Besides Netplay being disabled for now, the only other detractor for me so far in this new version is Chrono Trigger flickering during battle. Apparently that will be fixed when the emulation core is finished being rewritten. And I guess there will be a quick bugfix version released sometime soon.

[Keith T. Hemari]

On the other hand, I think Star Fox 2 is running smoother. Especially the later, more complete version.

[TonicBH]

blazehedgehog said:

Loooots of updates. Too many to really name.

SuperFX support was updated. Starfox 2 runs pretty much flawlessly now. Other SuperFX games I tried:

• DooM: Doesn't even boot.

You must have a bad dump or something, because I was able to get Doom SNES working just fine in the new version, and even in the previous build:

[BlazeHedgehod]

squigglesthechao said:

And I just checked Superstar again, with no lag. It could be some call to a Windows API call slowing things down, something wrong with your ROM, or possibly related to your computer specs.

I just want to make sure; you have played Super Star on real hardware, yes? This is the way the intro plays on both ZSNES and SNES9x:

blazefire.mooglecavern.com/temp/kss_c.avi

This is how it's more or less SUPPOSED to look (I had a hard time getting everything to match up properly):

blazefire.mooglecavern.com/temp/kss_c2.avi

(XVid 900kbps video, 32kbps MP3 audio, hopefully you have no problem playing these? Was it you or Discochao that had problems with AVI?)

[Agent BA-0 "ZZT"]

I was never able to get netplay to work under ZSNES. I always got an error that said "Could not connect to other side" when I tried TCP, and UDP did absolutely nothing. Period.