EMULATOR REVIEW - ZSnes 0.953
Rob takes a look at a new version of Snes emulator ZSnes.Oh dear, does that mean more playing of great games for hours on end. Theres a shame. I'll play these and get back to you. Later.... |
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Emulator Review - ZSnes 0.953 Lets see what Professor Coagulus has to say. "The SNES from Nintendo was a much more powerful machine than it's rival, the Sega Megadrive/Genesis but was equally popular in terms of game releases. Having much more powerful GFX and sound means than the SNES is a bit more of a git to emulate!". Hmmm... Very technical, thank you!
Well, this emulator does require a much more powerful machine then Kgen although a darn site less than most of the other Snes and Sega emulators. While you could play full speed Sega games on a P120, you would have a rate of about 10 or less frames a second with this. Anyway, enough of this, lets take a proper look. ZSnes has been updated at a very rapid and steady rate just like it's multi platform rival Snes9X. This, as I write, is the latest version for MSDOS. There are two main versions that you can get, the normal version which contains all options including SuperFX 3D emulation and an ASM version which, although it is faster lacks the SuperFX and Netplay options. I could'nt see and noticeable difference in speed between the two so I would just stick to the normal version. It is very thoughtful to offer a choice though. Muchos brownie points!
A minor niggle is that it first starts with no sound. This can be changed from the GUI easily enough but you then have to quit out and restart. Fine after that though. A nice option is an option to reinitialise the sound card after 30 second which help alleviate crackling which occurs on my PCI128 if left for a while. Another great feature is that the cheap 6-button pads (like my Logic3 SwiftPad) is used fully even though Windows will only allow it to use 4-buttons. All six can be used on this emulator, thank god! Anyway enough of the aesthetics, how do the games run. Very well thankyouverymuch! Vertical blank timing can be enabled allowing for supersmooth playing and very few of the games had any sort of graphic corruption so common with console emulators. While you can set the second (and third, and fourth!) player to use keyboard or joystick a great option is the link option. Local network, Internet or Null Modem connection can be used to play two player games remotely opening up the joyous (so I've been told!) world of online game. Having no friends with modems I couldn't test this though.
Although a DOS based emulator, Zsnes sports a great GUI by which to load and save roms and savegames. Multiple config windows can be opened (depending on resolution of course). Cheats can be entered and varous other things can be tinkered around with. It's much nicer than the old school DOS based emus which had about 40 characters worth of parameters to type in before you could play each game (Mame, Mastergear etc). It feels very intuitive and very rarely (Has happened to me but I was overclocked by a quarter at the time!) crashes. Coagulus/Rob 9/10 I think this is the best at the mo' closely followed by slightly less compatible but Windows available brother Snes9X. Give it a shot! |
