What is the best Super Nintendo (SNES) emulator?

This is a question that has been directed at us numerous times through our email. Well, to give an exact answer, we have not tried all SNES emulators out there to come to a proper conclusion. Therefore our answer will be based purely on out (limited) experience with PC emulators for SNES.

First of all, what is a console emulator? An emulator is a software which emulates the console environment on the PC and hence allows console games to be played on the PC. If you have owned one of the earlier consoles, you may know that games came in game cartridges. Images of these cartridges (called ROMS) are fed into the emulator and the emulator allows the game to be run on the PC.

So what is the best SNES emulator? According to our experience, it is ZSNES. ZSNES is a Super Nintendo emulator programmed by zsKnight and _Demo_. On April 2, 2001 the ZSNES project was GPL'ed and its source released to the public. It currently runs on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and DOS. Remember that this is a public beta so don't expect this to run on your machine. The program was last updated in 1Q 2007 and utilizes DirectX 9. Unlike most other emulators, ZSNES allows the usage of 2X SAI, Super 2X SAI and Super Eagle engines. (make sure you use one of these engines while playing - enable one from video options since it may be disabled by default). These rendering engines mean less pixelation at higher resolutions and smooth playability. And there is not much configuration needed, just load a ROM and play!

Download ZSNES from following locations:

• http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/zsnes/zsnesw151.zip - Windows
• http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/zsnes/zsnes151.zip - DOS
• http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/zsnes/zsnes151src.tar.bz2 - Linux

Need SNES ROMS to play on SNES? Look here. - Also read the note on site "All roms are packed in 7Zip format, you may need to unzip them before you can play them with your emulator.".

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