- The "uncompressed audio replacements" will be pretty nice, it will be interesting to see what comes of those.
There is a guy, Mathew Valente (a.k.a. TSSF), who put in a surprising amount of effort tracking down the original samples used by the composer of the SNES and PSX Final Fantasy games, Nobuo Uematsu. Nearly all of the samples came from various contemporary hardware and software synthesizers. Mathew found most of them (possibly with community collaboration, no small feat either way!) and took those original samples and remastered Nobuo's tracks. If you watch his videos, this was not a simple drag-and-drop operation, there is quite a lot of technical, musical, and subjective work and decisions to be made. The results are just beautiful.
If you liked classic Final Fantasy music, you'll love his channel. Here's one of my favorites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQhxNkZH-DE
- ZSNES was a core part of my childhood. I downloaded it back when it was still fresh back in the late nineties / early aughts and used to emulate all matter of favorite games and homebrew translation projects for Star Ocean and Tales of Phantasia.
- Their home page is underselling how cool this is:
MVG did a great overview of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5twUkvYFpA
- It should be possible to have the PPU emulation capture all of the final register state per pixel (or scanline if accuracy isn't paramount) and have the GPU render each pixel using only that state, doing the layer blending, color math, and mode 7 calculations as necessary. Based on MVG's video breaking down the draw commands performed it doesn't look like that's how Super ZSNES have implemented their PPU - it seems to render tile by tile for BGs (and OBJ?) and line by line for mode 7. That'll be a bit inaccurate but it's likely necessary to implement some of their visual enhancement tricks.
- Very cool, especially the accuracy improvements. But is GPU really necessary? SNES is so old I wonder why you couldn't get away with CPU-only. Even if GPU is more efficient, is it worth the headache of supporting way more hardware combinations?
- One of the features is “no vibe coding, classic development style.”
I think that’s kind of interesting, especially when building a retro enablement.
But I wonder does this mean no AI was used at all? Even for say, code review?
No judgment either way just curious for clarification.
- With how long SNES emulators been around, I sometimes wonder if more people played Nintendo games on emulators than actual Nintendo consoles.
by LoulouMonkey
0 subcomment
- The creator of ZSNES did a very interesting interview a couple of months with Zophar from Zophar's Domain:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG-oqvj4Tqk
by dueltmp_yufsy
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- Ah man, these guys rocked early on when I was younger. Still recall first booting up ZSNES to play a fan-translated Japanese-only RPG. It opened up a whole new world. Thanks, guys.
- I remember my dad explaining that our computer was fast enough that we didnt even need to bother with the actual hardware SNES anymore because it could be run directly on the computer which I thought was pretty amazing. I think it must have been via ZSNES, so its exciting to see further development of it!
- Congrats @zsknight_dev on this amazing relaunch of my favorite emu!
One feature request worth your consideration: MSU-1 support.
The case for it: Super ZSNES already does sample-level audio replacement for the seven curated titles in the Super Enhancement Engine, which addresses instrument fidelity. MSU-1 is the natural complement — it addresses track fidelity, by letting ROM hacks stream full CD-quality compositions in place of the original SPC700 sequences. There are over 200 published MSU-1 ROM hacks already in the wild (Zeldix maintains the index), with an active community producing audio packs for them.
Implementation is small relative to the DSP1 & SuperFX support already on your roadmap. MSU-1 is a memory-mapped register interface plus PCM streaming — no real silicon to emulate. Reference implementations exist in bsnes (open source), Snes9x, higan/ares, and the SD2SNES flash cart. With accurate CPU and audio cores already in place, the addition is largely a matter of wiring up the register interface and the streaming engine.
The combination of Super ZSNES's sample replacement and MSU-1 track replacement would, as far as I'm aware, be unique among emulators. No other emulator does both.
- Why is this using Unity? That's insane? How do we know this is not malware?
- One of those things where GPU powered seems odd at first but actually makes a lot of sense. Means you can work with more than just the final outputs but can link in a lot deeper on the overall pipeline. Very cool.
Will probably be the first of many emulators to come.
A bit odd they are using Unity but I guess that gets them multi platform easily. Would be nice if they went something a bit more open like Godot but sometime you have to be pragmatic not ideal.
by ranger_danger
4 subcomments
- Was not expecting it to be using Unity. Also looks to be closed source for now.
- About the uncompressed audio replacements, it makes me wonder how difficult would it be to train a model with a huge (but simple) library of sound effects and samples of high quality, and also feed them their equivalents"low quality" sound signature close or identical to what SNES have. The technical data about the SNES limitations should be there to know how to process these effects as precisely as possible, right? I'm not really a sound guy, so I might be wrong.
Maybe this could result in a much more automated way to re-sample many more sound effects from the SNES massively! Just a thought
- When I was 12 (like around 2015) & able to install emulators on my laptop I wanted to play chrono trigger on an emulator (after already beating several other emulated games; but all on my phone) .. I picked ZSNES because I fancied the name more than Snes9x.. I'll never forget the snowy menu of ZSNES, it was so beautiful for me
- Very cool to see ZSNES back. The per-game enhancement approach sounds way more interesting than generic HD filters, especially with optional toggles.
by itintheory
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- > Currently implemented with support for 7 popular games.
The enhancement engine sounds great, but it'd be nice to know which games it's for...
- sighs unzips ROM files...
by alanwreath
5 subcomments
- I wonder is there any way to use this or rather get games to play on the emulator legally????
It really is the only thing that keeps me from them. I’d pay to play quality retro games. Heck it would almost be educational for my kids.
- Old ZSNES was GPL. And it looks maintained and forked over. https://github.com/xyproto/zsnes/
by the-golden-one
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- Is this a ParaLLEl-like implementation? I couldn’t work it out from the video.
- Sick. Been meaning to replay Link to the Past.
by throwatdem12311
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- Welp, guess I’m gonna do another speedrun of Super Metroid just like the good old days.
- no source code available?
- "Wide Screen (where available) - We enable widescreen whenever the game is internally coded to support partial or full widescreen."
- This was always my favorite emu. No problems on a Pentium 60 MHz.
Plus you can make your own cheat codes!
- > No Vibe Coding. Classic development style.
This is fast becoming a feature people want.
by joemazerino
0 subcomment
- I see ZNES and I upvote.
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