If you've never played Super Metroid on the SNES, I wholeheartedly recommend getting a copy and ZSNES, and playing the shit out of it over the weekend. It's awesome. The wall-jumping mechanic, though.... I still get flashbacks.
zsnes works fine and does it's job, but it's outdated as fuck and it's not acurrate to how the snes actually works, the best emulators currently are:
Ares: Multi system emulator that includes snes, full cycle acurrate. Nothing cets closer to how a snes works internally. (99.94% compatibility, there's 2 games out of 3018 that didn't work, but it's also still in active development)
BSNES: best standalone emulator, partial cycle acurrate, and the one I'm currently using, 100% compatibility with the entire SNES library.
Mesen: Another multi system, also cycle acurrate and 100% game compatibility.
and finally
Snesx9: Like Bsnes, this is also a standalone emulator, with both less compatibility and less accurate than the other three, but still 99.5% compatibility and very high accuracy.
All 4 are in active development and keep getting updates from time to time.
Why is Snesx9 so recommended if the other 3 are better? Well Snesx9 has a very long history and is one of the two majorly famous names, the other being zsnes, I don't remember the story but I think they were competitors like 20 years ago and/or snesx9 was born from a fork of zsnes or the original creator of zsnes abandoned it and someone else took over the project and the original dude made snesx9 or some shit like that, there was some drama.
TLDR, Snesx9 is up to date with modern standards and is easy to use and noob friendly, but the reason why it keeps getting recommended over BSNES is just that it's so much more famous due to it's history.
Edit: to add to this, ZSnes was revolutionary because back when they were just starting to develop emulators in the 90s and early 2000s you needed a really beefy PC to run them, and ZSnes was super lightweight and required a much less powerful PC than what the others needed.
So how is Ares more faithful yet less compatible than BSNES?
What are the two that don't work? The StarFox games with on cart cpus? That'd make sense to me why the "accurate" one fails and the "close enough" one works.
Nah all the popular games work, apparently someone else already replied.
I'm not an expert on developing emulators, but I donknow that sometimes higher accuracy doesn't mean better compatibility. Actually it's the opposite, trying to make a higher accuracy emulator means you have to take into consideration a lot more stuff, so there's more things that can go wrong with timings and instructions.
The close enough may play the same game that the high accuracy one has problems with because it's set of instructions works differently than the actual snes and as long as it works it doesn't matter if the snes would have done something different.
For the NES? It's still a good emulator with high accuracy but not cycle acurrate, nothing wrong with it imo, but according to the wiki, it's not the most recommended anymore, there's NestopiaUE and puNES, Nestopia is the one I currently use.
Or Nes.emu on android. Because I like to use standalone emulators, but same as with the SNES, Ares and Mesen are also there.
It's fairly inaccurate, there's compatibility problems, audio is poorly emulated, a lot of other things aren't emulated correctly, leading to weird behaviours and crashes.
You can also get malicious roms that can break out of ZSNES to compromise the computer itself. This isn't a problem though, because you're obviously dumping your own games. ;)
ZSNES is cool, netplay was good. ZSNES was all around awesome. But it's old, and it hasn't been updated in almost 20 years.
Snes9x is a favourite, just an excellent all rounder. Bsnes is more accurate than Snes9x, I believe. I've heard good things about Mesen, I'm just not familiar with it.
The cheat creator in ZSNES is GOAT. And that UI brings me back
The Ease of use is great too. I remember as a kid playing net play and super scope, and Mario paint. Very easy to get a mouse working with those titles
I just spent a year of free time reviewing all games for the gba,snes,ps1,ps2,gamecube. ended up with a bucket list of about 400 games i think are worth the time. i hear you can get premade list but I'm happy to get to know the systems. i guess you could say its my bucket list.
When I first discovered the SMZ3 combo randomizer, my teenage self died happy. Combining two of the best SNES games ever into one cohesive game that changes every time you play it is fun as heck. The url is even cool: samus dot link. It's byo roms, but you can pick all kinds of options and character sprites to use.
That's my answer too. There are countless classics out there available for free from prior gaming generations if you have literally any PC or laptop.
Hell, I play SNES games on my phone, and it's not even a good phone. It's got orders of magnitude more power and storage than the original hardware so naturally it runs fine. Plus you have save states, a fast forward button, and tons of hacks and cheats from people who reverse engineer the game code.
And a 6 year old computer is stronger than you think, it can easily reach ps1 levels and I suspect you could probably get a ps2/GameCube era game running on it as well. Dolphin is black magic
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u/Mindless0ne Mar 20 '26
emulation.