ZSNES

ZSNES is an acclaimed emulator for video games made to run on the Super Famicom and/or the Super NES (SNES for short). It was developed by anonymous programmers, and was first released on the Internet in 1997. One of the programmers, who goes by the Internet forum name of zsKnight, resigned in 2001, because of the death of his father. It is developed for DOS, Windows, and Linux.

ZSNES has several capabilities which its Super Famicom and Super Nintendo counterparts did not have; it can "smooth" the appearance of the screen through a variety of anti-aliasing schemes, and it has a better quality of sound output than the original console systems. In addition, it can create screenshots of games, it can "save" the game at any point by recording the game state, and it can capture sound files, saving them as SPC700 sound format files which can be read by an external player or a specialized Winamp plugin, such as Alpha-II SPC player. SPC700 sound format actually sounds more realistic on ZSNES than on the actual Super Famicom or SNES console. Also included is a built-in Game Genie, which allows users to enter cheat codes for their games. ZSNES runs at lightning speed, due to its code base. It is almost entirely programmed in X86 assembly language, allowing it to run any SNES game at 50-60 FPS with only a 400MHz Pentium 2 CPU and 64MB RAM, with full sound and basic anti-aliasing.

Originally, ZSNES was closed source, however, in 2001, a new license was established and the project became open-source using SourceForge, a branch of the Open Source Development Network, as a basis of operations. Since then a large number of contributions have been made by outside coders and assemblers alike. ZSNES is still in active development although the frequency of releases has fallen dramatically since its original developer left the team.

ZSNES was also the first SNES emulator to fully emulate the Super FX, DSP-1, and C4 chips.