Super ZSNES – GPU Powered SNES Emulator

carrja99

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.

jmarcher

Their home page is underselling how cool this is: MVG did a great overview of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5twUkvYFpA

kayson

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?

firebot

This was always my favorite emu. No problems on a Pentium 60 MHz. Plus you can make your own cheat codes!

yesman_x

Very cool to see ZSNES back. The per-game enhancement approach sounds way more interesting than generic HD filters, especially with optional toggles.

ranger_danger

Was not expecting it to be using Unity. Also looks to be closed source for now.

bityard

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

the-golden-one

Is this a ParaLLEl-like implementation? I couldn’t work it out from the video.

jsd1982

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.

itintheory

> 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...

bredren

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.

honkcity

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!

arkensaw

> No Vibe Coding. Classic development style. This is fast becoming a feature people want.

llmssuck

Why is this using Unity? That's insane? How do we know this is not malware?

arecsu

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

dueltmp_yufsy

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.

anthk

Old ZSNES was GPL. And it looks maintained and forked over. https://github.com/xyproto/zsnes/

LoulouMonkey

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

throwatdem12311

Welp, guess I’m gonna do another speedrun of Super Metroid just like the good old days.

add2

"Wide Screen (where available) - We enable widescreen whenever the game is internally coded to support partial or full widescreen."