Introduction
Snes9x by Gary Henderson and The Snes9x Team.
Snes9x is a Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) emulator. It basically allows you to play most games designed for the SNES and Super Famicom Nintendo game systems on your PC for Workstation. The games include some real gems that were only ever released in Japan. Snes9x is the result of well over three years worth of part-time hacking, coding, recoding, debugging, etc. Snes9x is coded in C++, with three assembler CPU emulation cores on the i386 Linux, DOS and Windows ports.
Snes9x is better than a real SNES?
Freeze a game at any position, then restore the game to that exact spot at a later date - ideal for saving a game just before a difficult bit. Built-in cheat cartridge. Built-in peripheral
emulation. The SNES mouse, Multi-player 5 and SuperScope external add-ons are all emulated, they cost extra money with a real SNES. Stereo sound - yes I know the SNES produced stereo sound, but who actually paid the inflated price for the special lead just so you could hear it? No more cartridge contact cleaning! Some SNES hardware features that be turned on and off during game play, games might be using one of these features to deliberately make a section of the game more difficult. Easy, just turn the feature off! Networked game play on some ports. Speed up or slow down SNES games. Save screen shots to impress(?!) your friends. Alt + PrtSc, then paste image into paint program, save or print from there.
Snes9x is worse than a real SNES?
Unless your computer is very fast (Pentium II+), some games just can't hit every frame being rendered and the emulator starts to skip the drawing of some frames to keep the emulator running at a constant speed - to you it appears as if the graphics aren't moving as smoothly as they could. Not all games work; bugs and missing features cause some games to fail to work or renders them un-playable. You have to wait for your computer to boot before you can play games, no waiting on the real SNES! The SNES has an analogue low-pass sound filter that give a nice bass to all the sounds and music - Snes9x doesn't emulate this. If you have a posh sound card, you could try fiddling with it mixer controls to produce a similar effect. Turning on interpolated sound helps a lot.
Snes9x System Requirements
Basics
Windows 95, 98, NT, ME, 2K, or XP with at least DirectX 6 and OpenGL installed running on a modern, fast (e.g. Pentium 200 or higher) computer with at least 32Mb of RAM. Some games require another CPU to be emulated and/or make heavy use of colour translucency effects, so an even faster computer may be required to get an acceptable frame rate.
If you're running the original version of Windows 95 you will need to download Microsoft's OpenGL upgrade kit. If you want SNES sound emulation, you'll need a DirectSound compatible sound card - virtually all modern PCI sound cards are DirectSound compatible - or use FMOD's older Windows WAVE sound driver. Snes9x's full-screen mode uses DirectDraw to switch to the required resolution and depth, but if you intend to use the Windowed mode, for maximum emulation speed you should have your desktop depth set to 256 colours if translucency emulation and 16-bit rendering are switched off and not required, or hi-colour
mode (32768/65536 colours) if translucency effects are required.
If you have a Voodoo 3dfx card, Snes9x can use this hardware to stretch and smooth the relatively lo-resolution SNES image to fill your computer screen. Newer nvidia cards can do the same trick, just select stretch image option. There is also an OpenGL display output mode that can stretch and smooth the SNES image. If your OpenGL hardware supports 16-bit textures (most do), OpenGL mode is as fast, or faster than Voodoo 3dfx mode. Note: Do Not ask Us or The Authors For Bios, Roms or CD Image Files.
