It was late 1995 when I first saw an SNES emulator. VSMC was its name, if I am not wrong. Shareware. It could run Super Mario World at a laughable frame rate, with the strangest colors I ever came across. It had no sound. But I was amazed that it was possible to play an SNES game in my computer.
In the next year, Snes96 was released. That was a gigantic step forward in emulation. It still had no sound, but it ran at a reasonable speed and had a high compatibility rate. Its main competitors were Nerlaska, known for being entirely coded in ASM (and thus very fast, but that was its only quality) and Esnes, which was slow, but had good compatibility. Later Nerlaska and Esnes merged, creating NLKE, which I always called Nelke because it was cute. NLKE was not too good, however, so Snes96 remained as the best emulator that year.
It was in Snes96 that I first played Chrono Trigger, without sound. I remember it was quite troublesome, but I was fascinated. Frame skip of 1 to 4, I kept adjusting it via keyboard depending on what was on screen. The emulator had three methods to fool the game into thinking there was a sound chip there, and that was selectable in a command line parameter - there was no GUI yet. Chrono Trigger was an evil game, because in some screens it required bypass method 2 to be used, while in most of the game it was method 1. So each time I wanted to switch a character in my party, for example, I needed to save state, exit, restart with bypass 2, switch, save state, quit and restart with bypass 1, otherwise it would lock up. It took me ages, but I went very far with it.
That "it took me ages" reminds me of my experience with Genesis emulators, but that is another story entirely.
Back on topic, in spite of the new year being 1997, the emulator remained Snes96. Snes97 was the name given to its Windows version. Snes97 was always one version number behind, and it was very slow, so the only point of using it was for the GUI - but it was no good, anyway. There were also two versions of Snes96 at any given time: the latest, without GUI, and the one previous to it, with GUI.
At the second half of 1997, they merged the two emulators, creating Snes9x, both for DOS and Windows. It was great, it had reasonable sound. Every sword hit in Chrono Trigger sounded identical - in fact, everything in Chrono Trigger sounded like a bird with ashtma. But it was great and I finally finished the game that way, not having to restart each time I needed to switch a character. Oh, and Snes9x also introduced automatic frame skip. I was twice as happy.
1998 saw the dawn of zSnes, and a bad incident involving their team and the Snes9x team. Fortunately everything was cleared up, but the image of zSnes was scarred for a long time. In any case, the competition between these two emulators, and the French emulator SNeESe, made SNES emulation rocket up. In the two following years they covered nearly every basic aspect of the system. zSnes gained an advantage due to speed somewhere along the line.
Today, both Snes9x and zSnes have good Windows versions, using DirectX, running with no frame skip at full speed and terrific sound. The Snes9x GUI is a bit uglier and it tends to fail sometimes, though. Savestates are interchangeable, both support multiple graphical engines for beautiful screen output. In few words, SNES emulation is near perfect, with very few games and features not yet emulated, and with the right hardware it is a better experience than the actual console.
Then there was Playstation emulation. And instead of Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 5, the two games I suffered the most to play in Snes96 and 9x, I now have Final Fantasy Tactics and Valkyrie Profile.
Multiple problems are starting to appear in Valkyrie Profile, including one where I have to save state, exit, configure another sound plug-in, restart, and play around with in-game setup for half an hour until I get through some scene with spoken dialogue. Then I save state, exit, reconfigure and go back.
Also, today I ran into a strange problem, where sound gradually disappears. One spoken line here, then some drums from the background music, then the magic attack sound, and eventually the game is completely silent. I have no idea what is causing it, let alone how to fix it. Truth is I played through some dungeons four times today with multiple settings seeing if anything would solve the problem, and nothing did it.
This is all very nostalgic, but I am getting a bit too old for this kind of thing.
Posted by Etienne at July 26, 2003 09:53 PM