I still remember picking up a bootleg CD promising hundreds of games, and discovering a ton of ROMs with an executable only titled "genecy32". I didn't even know what it really was until a while later. Good times.
Zsnes was the first emulator I used on PC. Back then it was simply unbelievable to run the entire SNES catalogue of games on your computer. I would spend hours starting random games that sounded fun with a friend and discovering the unknown library of games. Simply unforgettable.
My first experience with emulation was playing Sonic the Hedgehog with Gens back in 2001-2002. Before then, I first heard about emulation though either Game Informer or Electronic Gaming Monthly's article about UltraHLE's impact on the emulation scene.
Nesticle was my first experience. Tossed my Zelda II cartridge back into my NES when I first emulated it because I thought the little red dot on the Wosu sprite was a bad ROM.
The first time I even learned about "emulators" was sometime between 1998 and 2001 (my high school era). In a C++ (?) programming class, I had noticed my classmate Greg playing...something...on a computer lab PC that I had never seen before. It was *ZSNES,* and he was playing *Seiken Densetsu 3.* Around that same time I also stumbled upon *NESticle* (aka "the emulator with the bloody hand").
The gui for zsnes brings back the feels. It felt like magic to be able to load so many games as a little kid - my brother had set it all up and dang, it was so cool. That was my first time having save states. Good times.
I still use that one now because the NTSC filter allows me to adjust pretty much everything possible. It's a lot more feature-rich than the SNES9X one that is just a shader file preinstalled to the emulator.
Right? When I first discovered emulation and that I could play some of my all time favorite games again it felt like a dream and even though this emulator is considered outdated, innacurate and obsolete these days it still has a place in my heart for being the first one that allowed me to relive the greatness of the SNES long after mine died.
@@linkthehero8431 Same, I really dig the ZSNES implementation of NTSC filter with all the adjustments. Also, before "Run Ahead" option appeared in RetroArch, ZSNES was the most input lag-free SNES emulator, basically on a CRT monitor it had almost as fast input response as the real SNES (unlike super accurate bsnes, which has always been an input-lag-fest).
God I remember playing Yoshi's Island in college in the computer lab and having the *entire* computer lab eyeing me playing it. I had headphones on and then suddenly find out everyone's cheering for me to finish each level, wonderful memories.
With the way these entitled people in gaming treat creators, it's no wonder it takes us so long to get good emulation sometimes. There's nothing wrong with selling your work if you aren't using copyright law, etc. to hinder other emulation projects. You're doing exactly zero harm to anyone.
@@ChadDidNothingWrong I would say if these projects are built on official technical documents etc. (like CEMU), there is definitely something wrong with selling their work.
ZSNES was where it started for me. I'll never forget the sheer joy I had when I finally got Final Fantasy IV, V and VI working. Being in the UK meant there was no easy way to play these games, which in a nutshell sums up why emulation is a good thing
I had never heard of Seiken Densetsu. But was a die hard fan... Secret Of Mana on SNES. My uncle had it and I played with my cousin on sleepovers and weekend things, eventually Zsnes came along in my life.. OF course I went for SoM and some FF"3" then I stubled across "Secret of Mana 2" like wait "whAaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? they made a second one?!" Then promptly found secret of evermore, another Seiken Densetsu title, learned that all the FF titles essentially are "SD" and what "Legend of the holy sword 2" AKA Seiken Densetsu 3 was.... Sadly it took until recently for this to make it to the states.... If it werent for emulation.... you never know...
Final Fantasy IV was the first one I ever booted up! I remember downloading it on my 14.4k modem and it took hours to download the ROM. I still remember seeing the Red Wings flying in on my old PC monitor.
Yeah I remember playing a lot of RPGs on early SNES emulators and having to toggle layers off and on at certain points due to the lack of transparency. Also remember finding it nice when toggling layers also revealed all the secret passages.
In A Link to the Past, with Snes9x and I think early versions of zsnes too, it was impossible to even find the castle at the start due to the rain effect not having transparency.
yeah exactly! The smog in the robot factory in Chrono Trigger was in the way so you had to turn that layer off. Haha, it's been a hot minute since I thought about that.
I remember waking up on Christmas in those early years and they released an update that allowed for transparency effects. This meant you could play a game with smoke, mist, or rain without having to turn off that layer. This was my favorite present that year.
I remember using ZSNES back in the late 90s when I was in college. Gave me a chance to play games I couldn't get otherwise, like Chrono Trigger. Getting the bad ending while in a giant room, by yourself, in the middle of the night was creepy as hell.
Same here! Us PAL-region gamers got shafted with some very high-profile games never making it to our shores, and ZSNES allowed me to play such classics back when they were part of the Zeitgeist.
It's crazy that emulation has been around long enough to get nostalgic about it. I tried most of these, but I was into arcade emulation more than anything else. The early days of MAME were amazing because there would be a batch of new games every week. I learned about a lot of games I never saw before.
It was around even longer than that: when I passed from the C64 to the Amiga I remember of having heard about a "commodore 64 emulator" for the Amiga. I'm not sure if it actually existed or if it was just a urban legend.
I certainly am. I never had a Playstation, I had Connectix Virtual Gamestation and a USB controller. I emulated some of these SNES games when they were still sold in stores.
Yeh I was emulating PS1, N64, Mame, Snes, Megadrive on my Pentium 4 PC since 2001. I also remember Bleem for the Dreamcast being controversial and sued by Sony.
Those were such exciting times for emulation, I remember running MAME and NeoRAGEX on our old Pentium II-400 as a young teen. Being able to run full arcade games on the PC blew my mind at the time, though they of course didn't run perfectly. Now it's trivial to run those games on even the lowest-power devices.
If you’re doing anything that needs to run 60 times a second with no hardware support, and all you have is a 486, things like structs and the heap are a hindrance.
C was much closer to the hardware than other high-level languages of the day. But nothing beats going straight for the metal, especially on the more primitive systems of yore.
ZSnes holds a lot of nostalgia for me - with each successive release, the accuracy of Chrono Trigger got better and better, and seeing that I'd never played on real hardware, each improvement was like a quality update for the game itself.
Not a perfect choice for Chrono Trigger and other advanced games, but perfectly fine for many other. Also has low input lag an lots of innovative features such as filters an fastforward. Too bad opensourcing basically killed it. It literally became worse.
@@noop9k at the time, I don't think too many options were available...I could be wrong with this failing memory of mine but I was just happy to have them work 🙂
except the dreadful cursor noise lol. I think that games cursor noise was a little annoying anyway though, idk why so many games have to have this loud beep. it just sounds terrible on zsnes but it had the best sound for everything else in the game for years
@@kaisersoymilk6912 You could make the background animate whether effects and ripples and stuff. Whatever happened to people adding nice touches like that?
@@KujaNiv100 How accurate are we currently anyhow? There seems to be a larger effort to get perfect emulation for N64 onwards, but the Snes and NES seem to barely have any attention anymore because "Already works pretty good, lol". To the point where there doesn't seem to be any documentation on if we even crossed the finish line already or not.
I remember the first time I saw someone playing Final Fantasy III on the SNES in the computer lab in high school around ‘97 or ‘98 it blew my freakin’ mind. I never heard of emulation before and I have been hooked since.
@@johnspartan6352 ZSNES not only runs worse than the competition regardless of game or hardware, it also has security issues. You should drop it ASAP in favor of bSNES if you have a modern device, or SNES9x otherwise.
@@hppvitor Unless things have changed I know at least a few years ago there were some old ROM hacks that were written with ZSNES's jank in mind and wouldn't work properly on more accurate emulators, so it might still have *some* use, but yeah, for general purpose use outside of that somewhat niche scenario should likely swap to a different one and only swap back when necessary
God this brings back so many memories. Especially that NESticle UI. So simple, yet so iconic. Zophar's Domain was freaking huge when it came to finding all those old emulators. The dark days of shareware emulators tho. *shudders*
Love these classic emulator retrospectives. It’s fascinating reliving this stuff. I was obsessed with the emulation scene as a kid, especially the ps1 scene. Getting My personal copy of MGS running on VGS was one of my favorite computing memories lol. Keep em up! Would love more about the snes (rip near) and all the other systems.
I think my first real efforts to mess with emulation was in 2006 or 2007 so most of these "historical" events happend before I was aware of anything. Therefore thank you for putting this together MVG and preserving not only the tools but also their history for all of us!
I was a Genesis kid so when my family got internet for the first time in 1997 the first thing I did was download ZSNES. It took like 3 hours to download 😂
@@timelymirror7826 Yep. A typical internet was 28.8kbps its like 3kilobytes a second. And that's on optimal scenarios. A bad / crowded ISP or a bad power line would make it bad to unusable.
@@zerocal76 Yeah its 28.8k with the only literal ISP in my area. However, they have real pisspoor bandwidth, so getting any better than 2 kilobyte per second download is very unlikely. And the phonelines do not support 56k modems.
I'd love to see you do a similar video talking about the 2000s N64 emulation scene, and how the good-idea-in-theory plugin approach ended up creating more problems than solutions.
Oh my gosh, this was the history video I didn't know I needed! I got into emulation in late 1996, so this is right when the scene starting making inroads for me. Thank you so much, MVG! I loved every minute of this!
Great job, MVG. I'm a casual PC user who wouldn't come to own my first computer until 2006, where a neighbor gave me and old Pentium III, Packard Bell PC that he had for ages after upgrading himself. He taught me about the fundamentals of emulation, starting me off with Nestopia, Gens, VisualBoyAdvance, and of course, ZSNES. ZSNES was a revolution for me. Getting the chance to play unheard of, patched Japanese games like Majuu Ou, Magical Pop'n, and Magic Knight Rayearth. Legendary translated works like Dragon Quest V, Tales of Phantasia, and Megaman & Bass. Getting to Try out hard to find classics like Hagane, Super Bonk, and Castlevania Dracula X. ZSNES still holds a very special place in my heart and it hurts me to play on a different SNES emulator because I have some much vested nostalgia for what that program did for me in my budding 20s. I may have more attachment to ZSNES in my 20s than I do for the real SNES during my childhood. For whatever inaccuracies it had, save for the slow runspeed of my early computer, which was replaced a year or so later with a much faster Pentium IV machine with twice the RAM, were neigh on imperceptible to me.
I worked with Icer Addis at EA I remember meeting Him and thinking he was one of the smartest people I had ever met. Eccentric but very smart. Hard to believe that he was one of the pioneers of emulators and without his work (which was stolen) emulation may not be in the state it is now.
I'm not really sure about pioneers of emulators. Maybe from the perceptive of console gaming for public use. But emulators have existed as long as computers have on the professional side of things for compatibility reasons. Though even the mid 80s computers had public software could emulate early to late 70s computer at home. And when it came to video games, devs did have their own that they build for testing because dev kits where limited, though many of those where not public because of legal reasons.
@@PriestessofGenbu Electronic Arts are known to start game jams or commission games just to take the provided code at the end. The first time this happened: Bethesda Softworks (you know, the Fallout 76 house ran by Mr. "Buy my 665th Skyrim release" himself Todd Howard) was commissioned by EA to make a gridiron football game. Bethesda's football game would never come to market, but the physics code would be harvested and re-used in John Madden Football. Every Madden game used Bethesda's physics code as a base since.
Man, I remember building my first PC in my youth (after the 80's and early 90's being dedicated to commodore 64 and Amiga), it must have been in 1997 . A Pentium 166MHz MMX + the cheapest case and components I could find. Although the machine was great the year I built it, computer performance just sky rocketed at the time. It was really hard to keep up in the computer space at the time. Thankfully nesticle and zsnes really became the saving grace for many years to come. I was never able to afford the nes or snes back in my childhood. So really it offered me a way to play through a huge back catalogue of games. :) I remember this part in life fondly and I still remember the fantastic ergonomics of the Gravis Exterminator. :) The beige 166MHz Pentium lived on until 2006. At the time, my mother used it only for internet banking. It was slow, TERRIBLY slow, surfing the web was a pain, no matter how much I tried to optimize the experience, The RAM, OS and browser wasn't really up for it anymore. :D
Zsnes.... my childhood wouldnt be the same. Same with some of the gameboy emu's... Was too poor at the time, family couldn't afford a gameboy handheld "just for me" when I had two younger siblings, but the computer.. thanks to rent a center... lol It opened doorways and windows galore.. Was playing pokemon on emulator while kids at school were playing it on gameboys lol.
SNES9X on a softmodded Wii is my fave way to play SNES games. I also have a pocketgo S30 but you can't beat the big screen two-player experience the Wii offers.
ZSnes and SNES9X were all the rage back then. while most people preferred 9x, I stuck to zsnes 'cause of its GUI, good performance, and also because it was the first snes emu I was introduced to. then ZSnesW came with other joystick support, and I made the switch.
ZSnes holds a special place in my heart, I got my first PC in 2005 as a gift for my good grades by my Mom (and it was pretty expensive for a single Mom at that time haha). I didn't get internet access until 2009 so all I had was a CD-Rom with a copy of ZSnes and a complete snes romset (US/EU/JP), as a kid I didn't get to play on consoles because it was way too expensive, so naturally I spent a lot of time playing almost every snes game, it also helped me learn English. Thanks ZSnes.
I remember talking to one of my neighbor's teenagers in 2007 about how I wanted to play EarthBound but had trouble finding a copy. He responded by showing me a 'free way' to play it on PC through an emulator and burned a CD for me containing SNES9x, EarthBound and a few other roms. My grandma later got me a copy of EarthBound for Christmas '07 but I'll never how happy I was to play it on PC.
@@LusRetroSource it was more being able to play everything, i remember i would bring floppy disk to the schools asking some friends of mine to put, ff5 or seiken desenstu 3... Etc it was like a dream
What got me was the VSMC developer getting miffed that his code was being leaked and cracked... while being part of the organisation that leaked and cracked Nesticle.
@@GeoNeilUK That's the ultimate irony. They were code thieves who went to war with stolen arms all while trying to push users to their website/forum/message board/irc/ect. In a way, nothing has really changed, lol.
I found zsnes in '99 or '00, right after I was introduced to emulation via Pokemon Red GBC. I played more snes emulation for the next few years than any other console. The plethora of jrpgs was such a magical time.
Excellent episode. I'd love to watch an episode documenting the decryption of cps2 hardware sometime in the future. I waited with baited breath for each new release, literally years before xmen vs Street fighter was released.
Ah yes, love it when I have to guess which version of a game I'm clicking on when the filenames are longer than four words. Why do ZSNES fanboys defend the worst things about it?
@@hppvitor I just like the look and feel, I don't even use ZSNES. Only SNES game I play is Super Metroid, so I use the emulator that supports widescreen (BSNES?) because wide Metroid is pretty awesome. Obviously the Z GUI would have to be modernized if included in other programs, but treating it like a war crime is pretty boneheaded.
My buddy and I would do point to point direct dial up gaming on ZSNES circa 1998. It was way more advanced than we deserved for the time, despite how primitive it was compared to now.
Wow I remember all of this going on. Man this is great stuff right here. Let me say all the plain boring text and backgrounds of websites brings back memories. Nobody knew emulation would ever go this far being ported on almost every platform 👍👍
Takes me back to the time where only the library had internet access, and I looked up fan sites of bands on Geocities or Angelfire, while chatting on Alamak in the Hot Tub room😂
"Plain boring text and backgrounds of websites"....literally every damn website out today. Nothing but whitespace, text and a hamburger menu ...and ads ....ads...and more ads everywhere plus GOBS of garbage scripts being run in the background. Yeah..I'll take the websites of yesterday over this ugly bloated BS. At least those websites had creativity and interesting designs. And didn't devour data just trying to open them.
Wow. I'm a bit stunned seeing a retrospective on this topic. I didn't realize there was much record of that era of emulation. I have incredibly fond memories of that era and community. I was a regular in #emu on EFNet at that time, and watched all of this go down. I remember how amazing it was when VSMC loaded the SimCity title screen for the first time. It didn't have the limited yellow palette at that time, that came a bit later. I remember he was targeting Final Fantasy II, and actually got it to run iirc. I believe it was around that time he took it commercial. Here's something I remember about SPW that wasn't mentioned. There was (of course) a patch made to remove the time-crippling feature from its demo version. In response, the author released a version that would eventually delete your C:\WINDOWS folder if it were cracked. For YEARS afterward, I renamed my Windows directory just to be safe. I had completely forgotten about using NLKSNES. I loved the early emulation scene. I made and released a number of backgrounds for VGB-DOS that were very popular at the time, and as a result MindRape asked if I'd like to release them under Damaged Cybernetics. I agreed, and as a result there are a few late .nfo files from DC releases that credit me as a member, under a different handle than I use today. But a few months later, MR stole and released the Nesticle source, and DC shutdown soon afterward. I also recall having a short conversation with him about how he went about that. Great video. I've got to check out more.
I'm pretty sure I just came into emulation as soon as it hit the golden age circa 97-98. It was such good timing. Snes games ran completely flawless, as far as my 11 year old mind could ascertain.
Damn, truly retro. Historical time piece of information on the emulation scene. I was just an end user but I remember back in my high school days (1999-2000) playing on zsnes and being passed off that chrono trigger didn't have transparencies until zsnes that had a build that could do such. Tales of phantasia and the subsequent English patch. It was a time of discovery for me. I never became a coder but I am still a lover of videogame games. Great idea to cover such a vintage thing. Who talks about old emulation code like this??? Oh, you do. The modern vintage gamer! Great piece my man
And I was pissed off because I played chrono trigger on its original hardware and knew how the experience should have been. Emulation finally caught up and then some nowadays
This was super interesting. Im curious how this compared to early Genesis/Megadrive emulation.
3 года назад+1
Your videos are amazing. I love how you tell the story behind the emulation/home brew scene. Could you please make a video about how to get started on writing emulators (where to get documentation, what system to start with, etc)? I guess many of your viewers would love this.
Love the channel, if you haven't already done it would love a video where you write a quick and dirty emulator to try and give an overview of what goes into making one.
I'd like an episode on Near's work on BSNES, Higan and Ares. Their work is extremely under-appreciated and they at least deserve to be remembered for their incredible efforts to preserve SNES games. RIP Near.
Man, this video is my childhood. I remember going in specific AOL chat rooms to find ROMs for emulators I found. I played games a lot with ZSNES and Genecyst back in the day. Great times. Great video.
The late 90s were a wonderful time for emulation. Thanks for the walk down memory lane. I was at university from 1996, and I remember running my own ROM site from the University servers, Data Potato. It was going great until, I managed to crash the network, with hosting one of the new NeoGeo ROM releases. It just couldn't handle all the traffic. Such an exciting time. Waiting for new releases, to see what features had been added, which bugs had been fixed, which games were now supported. Good times.
I was always amazed by the geniuses that could implement such great emulators without proper hardware specifications. To this day it feels like magic :)
I remember going to the library in 1998 to download ROMs and emulators so I could play SNES and NES games again. (didn't have internet access at home, the library had no content filter) Great video!
Heads up, bsnes is more accurate than snes9x and doesn't take much power these days. If you're not familiar with its lineage, it started as an attempt to make most accurate emulator possible, speed be damned, then was turned into Higan, which keeps that goal, but then was spun off of Higan with the goal of being as accurate as possible without sacrificing speed. So now it's like 99.9% accurate and the best snes emulator for the average user. Could be a good topic for a video tbh
Yeah but it's not nearly as user friendly as SNES9X and I've never seen a true need for it other than developers who wanna test their game on real hardware, but don't own an Everdrive.
@@ohnoitschris I would agree regarding old bsnes. Current bsnes actually has a great UI though. If you haven't checked it out in the past couple years, definitely take another look
I remember when ZSNES finally got Megaman X2 & 3 working. Although I have moved on to BSNES and SNES9x, I still fire up ZSNES from time to time for a rush of nostalgia. I'm grateful for all the hard work that went into it.
You shouldn't. ZSNES not only has terrible sound emulation across the board, it's also slower, doesn't run the entire library (which is the norm for current emulators) and even has security issues. Update to bSNES, or SNES9x if your machine is REALLY old.
@@R3TR0--93 It's just plain bad and obsolete. Not being updated for 15 years should be enough of a reason for anyone to stop using it altogether, especially when there are more up to date alternatives. Do you still use Internet Explorer as well?
@@ohnoitschris What a sad argument. It's like saying "Why would you want this 700W bluetooth stereo system over this 10W mono boombox from Wish? It's just for listening to music!"
One of your best videos yet! I’d be interested to see one about how netplay in emulators came about, who was first to implement it, get it working etc.
You're hitting that vocal compressor really really hard, turn your threshold up so that mostly your plosives are getting squashed. Love your videos, keep up the great work.
Its funny now though back then it was less impressive. In the 90s many of the programmers learned in the 80s where asm was the only way to do things. Writing an emulator at all requires intimate computer knowing and writing asm was seen was a tedious necessary evil that broke portability. It was more impressive to get something running fast in C back then.
What irony. Having a piece of crap computer with a piece of crap 1mb s3 virge. Then wanting to emulate it 20+ years on. Which I could see would be useful for old direct x / direct 3d titles.
Another wonderful video thank you very much, I was there in the 90s watching the emulation rise and testing these out as they became available on my BBS, I remember emulators going from 2 to 3 frames a second and then trying out zsnes and being blown away.
My interest in computing started when I discovered SNES emulation. This video brought back many fond memories. Hopefully you can bring us more videos about the beginnings of the emulation of different systems. Thanks!
That bloody UI brings back memories.
The first Genesis emulator I remember using.
Good Ole Bloodlust Software.
A ton of memories!
Oh yeah, memories.
I still remember picking up a bootleg CD promising hundreds of games, and discovering a ton of ROMs with an executable only titled "genecy32". I didn't even know what it really was until a while later. Good times.
Zsnes was the first emulator I used on PC. Back then it was simply unbelievable to run the entire SNES catalogue of games on your computer. I would spend hours starting random games that sounded fun with a friend and discovering the unknown library of games. Simply unforgettable.
You know what i loved about zsnes? The UI, it was so cool and retro, it felt really good to run it.
My first experience with emulation was playing Sonic the Hedgehog with Gens back in 2001-2002. Before then, I first heard about emulation though either Game Informer or Electronic Gaming Monthly's article about UltraHLE's impact on the emulation scene.
Nesticle was my first experience. Tossed my Zelda II cartridge back into my NES when I first emulated it because I thought the little red dot on the Wosu sprite was a bad ROM.
The first time I even learned about "emulators" was sometime between 1998 and 2001 (my high school era). In a C++ (?) programming class, I had noticed my classmate Greg playing...something...on a computer lab PC that I had never seen before. It was *ZSNES,* and he was playing *Seiken Densetsu 3.* Around that same time I also stumbled upon *NESticle* (aka "the emulator with the bloody hand").
The day I first discovered emulation it blew my mind. Wait, wait wait... I can play ANY NES game on my PC?!
The gui for zsnes brings back the feels. It felt like magic to be able to load so many games as a little kid - my brother had set it all up and dang, it was so cool. That was my first time having save states. Good times.
I still use that one now because the NTSC filter allows me to adjust pretty much everything possible. It's a lot more feature-rich than the SNES9X one that is just a shader file preinstalled to the emulator.
Right? When I first discovered emulation and that I could play some of my all time favorite games again it felt like a dream and even though this emulator is considered outdated, innacurate and obsolete these days it still has a place in my heart for being the first one that allowed me to relive the greatness of the SNES long after mine died.
Honestly I always liked the snowy option it had for the UI background. Very comfy feeling.
@@linkthehero8431 Same, I really dig the ZSNES implementation of NTSC filter with all the adjustments. Also, before "Run Ahead" option appeared in RetroArch, ZSNES was the most input lag-free SNES emulator, basically on a CRT monitor it had almost as fast input response as the real SNES (unlike super accurate bsnes, which has always been an input-lag-fest).
@@VexAcer it does have a special feel to it doesnt? I remember sitting there running through folders with the snow in the background. Fantastic!
God I remember playing Yoshi's Island in college in the computer lab and having the *entire* computer lab eyeing me playing it. I had headphones on and then suddenly find out everyone's cheering for me to finish each level, wonderful memories.
Sounds like heaven
Same but Fatal Fury 3 and people are like “wtf are you doing!?”
Yes More VSMC O/S Yes More Rebooting
And now we are spoiled with emulation with all the great people behind these emulators. A big thank you from me for them all.
With the way these entitled people in gaming treat creators, it's no wonder it takes us so long to get good emulation sometimes.
There's nothing wrong with selling your work if you aren't using copyright law, etc. to hinder other emulation projects. You're doing exactly zero harm to anyone.
@@ChadDidNothingWrong I would say if these projects are built on official technical documents etc. (like CEMU), there is definitely something wrong with selling their work.
👏🏾
@@ChadDidNothingWrong selling emulators is as unethical as selling pirated media.
ZSNES was where it started for me. I'll never forget the sheer joy I had when I finally got Final Fantasy IV, V and VI working. Being in the UK meant there was no easy way to play these games, which in a nutshell sums up why emulation is a good thing
I had never heard of Seiken Densetsu. But was a die hard fan... Secret Of Mana on SNES. My uncle had it and I played with my cousin on sleepovers and weekend things, eventually Zsnes came along in my life.. OF course I went for SoM and some FF"3" then I stubled across "Secret of Mana 2" like wait "whAaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? they made a second one?!" Then promptly found secret of evermore, another Seiken Densetsu title, learned that all the FF titles essentially are "SD" and what "Legend of the holy sword 2" AKA Seiken Densetsu 3 was.... Sadly it took until recently for this to make it to the states.... If it werent for emulation.... you never know...
Final Fantasy IV was the first one I ever booted up! I remember downloading it on my 14.4k modem and it took hours to download the ROM.
I still remember seeing the Red Wings flying in on my old PC monitor.
@@milesaway1980 😳 damn u talking hours
@@modifiedlandfish It was 140kb and I think the download speed was about 0.5 - 1 kb / minute.
It was so slow!
@@crisnmaryfam7344 --- Evermore isn't part of the Seiken Densetsu / Mana series. Evermore is its own separate thing.
Yeah I remember playing a lot of RPGs on early SNES emulators and having to toggle layers off and on at certain points due to the lack of transparency. Also remember finding it nice when toggling layers also revealed all the secret passages.
I also cheated in the Super Mario All Stars version of Super Mario 3. In the memory minigame you could reveal all the cards by disabling a layer :-)
In A Link to the Past, with Snes9x and I think early versions of zsnes too, it was impossible to even find the castle at the start due to the rain effect not having transparency.
Same! It was the golden age of jrpgs. Back when Square and Enix were not merged yet
On the original final fantasy on NES, I learned that secret passages could be exposed by turning the TV contrast all the way up.
yeah exactly! The smog in the robot factory in Chrono Trigger was in the way so you had to turn that layer off. Haha, it's been a hot minute since I thought about that.
I remember waking up on Christmas in those early years and they released an update that allowed for transparency effects. This meant you could play a game with smoke, mist, or rain without having to turn off that layer.
This was my favorite present that year.
I remember using ZSNES back in the late 90s when I was in college. Gave me a chance to play games I couldn't get otherwise, like Chrono Trigger. Getting the bad ending while in a giant room, by yourself, in the middle of the night was creepy as hell.
Loved ZSNES; nice UI + transparency for RPGs
Me too in early 2000,when i was i high school/
I'm still using zsnes today?!?! I didn't know there were others beyond ZSNES and SNES9x
@@RamjetX i only remember bsnes, zsnes and snes9x
Same here! Us PAL-region gamers got shafted with some very high-profile games never making it to our shores, and ZSNES allowed me to play such classics back when they were part of the Zeitgeist.
It's crazy that emulation has been around long enough to get nostalgic about it. I tried most of these, but I was into arcade emulation more than anything else. The early days of MAME were amazing because there would be a batch of new games every week. I learned about a lot of games I never saw before.
It was around even longer than that: when I passed from the C64 to the Amiga I remember of having heard about a "commodore 64 emulator" for the Amiga. I'm not sure if it actually existed or if it was just a urban legend.
I certainly am. I never had a Playstation, I had Connectix Virtual Gamestation and a USB controller. I emulated some of these SNES games when they were still sold in stores.
This really made me feel old, I remember reading the emulation news sites on a daily basis through those years, great times and a great video summary
Yeh I was emulating PS1, N64, Mame, Snes, Megadrive on my Pentium 4 PC since 2001. I also remember Bleem for the Dreamcast being controversial and sued by Sony.
Lol I used to go to zophars
Those were such exciting times for emulation, I remember running MAME and NeoRAGEX on our old Pentium II-400 as a young teen. Being able to run full arcade games on the PC blew my mind at the time, though they of course didn't run perfectly. Now it's trivial to run those games on even the lowest-power devices.
I used to read emulation news all the time. Fave's Classics wasthe shit
ZSNES was such a good Emulator - great video as always!
Would love to see one about NO$GMB
Wow, NO$. Now that really brings back some memories.
It's always fascinating to me hearing about software development in the 90s and how C was considered a "slow, high-level language".
If you’re doing anything that needs to run 60 times a second with no hardware support, and all you have is a 486, things like structs and the heap are a hindrance.
Relative the the machine code you'd have to bang out to run game console code cleanly? It was.
C was much closer to the hardware than other high-level languages of the day. But nothing beats going straight for the metal, especially on the more primitive systems of yore.
@@johnsimon8457: structs are fine if they're global; classes are worse
@@johnsimon8457 Uhhhh .... the heap still exists in assembly.
Zsnes almost utter lack of input latency was fantastic
ZSnes holds a lot of nostalgia for me - with each successive release, the accuracy of Chrono Trigger got better and better, and seeing that I'd never played on real hardware, each improvement was like a quality update for the game itself.
Right with you there...I never knew how great it was until much, much later...actually just started playing it again the other day 🙃
Not a perfect choice for Chrono Trigger and other advanced games, but perfectly fine for many other. Also has low input lag an lots of innovative features such as filters an fastforward. Too bad opensourcing basically killed it. It literally became worse.
@@noop9k at the time, I don't think too many options were available...I could be wrong with this failing memory of mine but I was just happy to have them work 🙂
My first time playing Chrono Trigger was with ZSnes and I still remember it to this day
except the dreadful cursor noise lol. I think that games cursor noise was a little annoying anyway though, idk why so many games have to have this loud beep. it just sounds terrible on zsnes but it had the best sound for everything else in the game for years
Wait, ZSnes isn't being updated anymore?
That's still my go-to emulator; it's still fantastic.
Yeah I always play snes rom hacks on it in Windows 10 now works like a charm never understood it was other new ones that are supposed to be better.
Nope, the emulation is inaccurate, especially the audio. The newer emus do it better...
I especially liked the interface, not the usual boring standard window.
@@kaisersoymilk6912 You could make the background animate whether effects and ripples and stuff. Whatever happened to people adding nice touches like that?
@@KujaNiv100 How accurate are we currently anyhow? There seems to be a larger effort to get perfect emulation for N64 onwards, but the Snes and NES seem to barely have any attention anymore because "Already works pretty good, lol". To the point where there doesn't seem to be any documentation on if we even crossed the finish line already or not.
Learning about emulation history never ceases to amaze me.
I remember the first time I saw someone playing Final Fantasy III on the SNES in the computer lab in high school around ‘97 or ‘98 it blew my freakin’ mind. I never heard of emulation before and I have been hooked since.
Ah yes, the Zsnes days. Loved every minute of it
I still use it from time to time
@@johnspartan6352 ZSNES not only runs worse than the competition regardless of game or hardware, it also has security issues. You should drop it ASAP in favor of bSNES if you have a modern device, or SNES9x otherwise.
Vimm's emulation lair
@@hppvitor Unless things have changed I know at least a few years ago there were some old ROM hacks that were written with ZSNES's jank in mind and wouldn't work properly on more accurate emulators, so it might still have *some* use, but yeah, for general purpose use outside of that somewhat niche scenario should likely swap to a different one and only swap back when necessary
Seeing SNES9X come into being from its former evolutions was interesting to see.
I was there, Gandalf. I was there 24 years ago.
hahah
I too was there back in '97 lol. Has it really been 24 years already? Damn.
God this brings back so many memories. Especially that NESticle UI. So simple, yet so iconic. Zophar's Domain was freaking huge when it came to finding all those old emulators.
The dark days of shareware emulators tho. *shudders*
amen
You mean like the excellent Bleem?
Always love seeing these "scene history" videos from MVG!
Love these classic emulator retrospectives. It’s fascinating reliving this stuff. I was obsessed with the emulation scene as a kid, especially the ps1 scene. Getting My personal copy of MGS running on VGS was one of my favorite computing memories lol.
Keep em up! Would love more about the snes (rip near) and all the other systems.
Loved the video. Would be awesome if you did a whole series on all the emulated consoles. Especially the history of the Dolphin Emulator
Seconding Dolphin
I think my first real efforts to mess with emulation was in 2006 or 2007 so most of these "historical" events happend before I was aware of anything.
Therefore thank you for putting this together MVG and preserving not only the tools but also their history for all of us!
I was a Genesis kid so when my family got internet for the first time in 1997 the first thing I did was download ZSNES. It took like 3 hours to download 😂
How good was it
🧐 internet in 1997 must've been slow as hell
@@timelymirror7826 Yep. A typical internet was 28.8kbps its like 3kilobytes a second. And that's on optimal scenarios. A bad / crowded ISP or a bad power line would make it bad to unusable.
@@StriderVM You had 28.5k in 1997 huh? I suffered with 56k up until like 2004 =O
@@zerocal76 Yeah its 28.8k with the only literal ISP in my area. However, they have real pisspoor bandwidth, so getting any better than 2 kilobyte per second download is very unlikely. And the phonelines do not support 56k modems.
Man I love the look of ZSNES’ menu. I’m reminded how cool it is every time TerminalMontage makes a video
I'd love to see you do a similar video talking about the 2000s N64 emulation scene, and how the good-idea-in-theory plugin approach ended up creating more problems than solutions.
I think he already did a video about that?, not sure though.
@@javierortiz82 He made a video about the first working n64 emulator.
Yes! I want this, I hope he sees this comment.
Anybody remember Corn? It was a mindblowing emulator nobody thought would be possible.
@@rage12345678 still have a copy of corn in my old n64 emulators, had decent framerate mario64 on my pentium 100
Oh my gosh, this was the history video I didn't know I needed! I got into emulation in late 1996, so this is right when the scene starting making inroads for me. Thank you so much, MVG! I loved every minute of this!
This was a great episode, almost felt like I was back in the 90s playing snes again
Great video. This needs to be a Series. Love hearing about the history of emulated systems and the individual projects.
We need to talk about SNES emulation in 1997
No we don’t lol
@@TheRealCaptainFreedom 😅👍🏾
Great job, MVG. I'm a casual PC user who wouldn't come to own my first computer until 2006, where a neighbor gave me and old Pentium III, Packard Bell PC that he had for ages after upgrading himself. He taught me about the fundamentals of emulation, starting me off with Nestopia, Gens, VisualBoyAdvance, and of course, ZSNES.
ZSNES was a revolution for me. Getting the chance to play unheard of, patched Japanese games like Majuu Ou, Magical Pop'n, and Magic Knight Rayearth. Legendary translated works like Dragon Quest V, Tales of Phantasia, and Megaman & Bass. Getting to Try out hard to find classics like Hagane, Super Bonk, and Castlevania Dracula X. ZSNES still holds a very special place in my heart and it hurts me to play on a different SNES emulator because I have some much vested nostalgia for what that program did for me in my budding 20s.
I may have more attachment to ZSNES in my 20s than I do for the real SNES during my childhood. For whatever inaccuracies it had, save for the slow runspeed of my early computer, which was replaced a year or so later with a much faster Pentium IV machine with twice the RAM, were neigh on imperceptible to me.
I worked with Icer Addis at EA I remember meeting Him and thinking he was one of the smartest people I had ever met. Eccentric but very smart. Hard to believe that he was one of the pioneers of emulators and without his work (which was stolen) emulation may not be in the state it is now.
I'm not really sure about pioneers of emulators. Maybe from the perceptive of console gaming for public use. But emulators have existed as long as computers have on the professional side of things for compatibility reasons. Though even the mid 80s computers had public software could emulate early to late 70s computer at home. And when it came to video games, devs did have their own that they build for testing because dev kits where limited, though many of those where not public because of legal reasons.
>man famous for stealing emulation code
>Electronic Arts
>EA Hires code thief
I'm not surprised, honestly.
Why doesn't he finally release SNESticle? I mean, it's only good for experimentation in DOSBox today anyways.
@@Code7Unltd You will have to refresh me on that, I though Addis was the one whose code was stolen by Mr. Moore.
@@PriestessofGenbu
Electronic Arts are known to start game jams or commission games just to take the provided code at the end.
The first time this happened: Bethesda Softworks (you know, the Fallout 76 house ran by Mr. "Buy my 665th Skyrim release" himself Todd Howard) was commissioned by EA to make a gridiron football game. Bethesda's football game would never come to market, but the physics code would be harvested and re-used in John Madden Football. Every Madden game used Bethesda's physics code as a base since.
Man, I remember building my first PC in my youth (after the 80's and early 90's being dedicated to commodore 64 and Amiga), it must have been in 1997 . A Pentium 166MHz MMX + the cheapest case and components I could find. Although the machine was great the year I built it, computer performance just sky rocketed at the time. It was really hard to keep up in the computer space at the time. Thankfully nesticle and zsnes really became the saving grace for many years to come. I was never able to afford the nes or snes back in my childhood. So really it offered me a way to play through a huge back catalogue of games. :) I remember this part in life fondly and I still remember the fantastic ergonomics of the Gravis Exterminator. :) The beige 166MHz Pentium lived on until 2006. At the time, my mother used it only for internet banking. It was slow, TERRIBLY slow, surfing the web was a pain, no matter how much I tried to optimize the experience, The RAM, OS and browser wasn't really up for it anymore. :D
Good old Zsnes, the fist emulator I've ever used followed by Callus.
Callus was really good in the early days of CPS-1 emulation, back when MAME CPS-1 was way slow.
Zsnes.... my childhood wouldnt be the same. Same with some of the gameboy emu's... Was too poor at the time, family couldn't afford a gameboy handheld "just for me" when I had two younger siblings, but the computer.. thanks to rent a center... lol It opened doorways and windows galore.. Was playing pokemon on emulator while kids at school were playing it on gameboys lol.
I absolutely love these history of emulation/history of modding scene videos
SNES9X on a softmodded Wii is my fave way to play SNES games. I also have a pocketgo S30 but you can't beat the big screen two-player experience the Wii offers.
Yeah same here, it's a great way to bring life back into your Wii
(viagra is too, but that's for a different kind of wii)
I was half expecting him to end it with: "and then I wrote the best emulator of them all"
Loved snes9x and Zsnes. Took me back through memory lane.
ZSnes and SNES9X were all the rage back then. while most people preferred 9x, I stuck to zsnes 'cause of its GUI, good performance, and also because it was the first snes emu I was introduced to. then ZSnesW came with other joystick support, and I made the switch.
And the ZSNES movies....and later eventually the SPC logger. Thought that was pretty damn cool (and convenient...).
Homebrew does what Nintendon't.
You mean the homebrew app nintendon't? that is used for playing gamecube games on a bc wii.
They used the emulation and homebrews to make some of the 30th anniversary games to work as of late. Such strange double standard of Nintendo.
Nintendon't plays GameCube Games Well.. Give it a Try..
@@thehopper3782 he is referencing to the famous ad "genesis does"
@@kahveciderin i don't know what you are talking about and sorry i don't know anything about sega genesis.
ZSnes holds a special place in my heart, I got my first PC in 2005 as a gift for my good grades by my Mom (and it was pretty expensive for a single Mom at that time haha). I didn't get internet access until 2009 so all I had was a CD-Rom with a copy of ZSnes and a complete snes romset (US/EU/JP), as a kid I didn't get to play on consoles because it was way too expensive, so naturally I spent a lot of time playing almost every snes game, it also helped me learn English.
Thanks ZSnes.
Loved every minute of it MVG. Your retro emulator overviews are one of my favorite type of video. Well done.
I remember talking to one of my neighbor's teenagers in 2007 about how I wanted to play EarthBound but had trouble finding a copy. He responded by showing me a 'free way' to play it on PC through an emulator and burned a CD for me containing SNES9x, EarthBound and a few other roms.
My grandma later got me a copy of EarthBound for Christmas '07 but I'll never how happy I was to play it on PC.
Zsnes was something back in the days...
Game changer, was able to play SNES games at full speed because of it.
I still have that on my old laptop.
@@LusRetroSource it was more being able to play everything, i remember i would bring floppy disk to the schools asking some friends of mine to put, ff5 or seiken desenstu 3... Etc it was like a dream
Came here to say this.
I was all about the snes9x
These emulation history videos are absolutely fascinating. Thank you for them.
Snes9x with ZSnes GUI mod. Maximum comfy nostalgia.
YES
bsnes with zsnes GUI mod
plus controller support plz
@MrFoxbody89 CRT, sure. but that's only because a previous roomie left it here🤣 ...SNES is staying in storage, tho, because bsnes is *that good*
@MrFoxbody89 have you *tried* bsnes? (even with input lag reduction if you must)
Still get a kick out of those screen names - “The Brain” “The Teacher” those are old school 80’s BBS handles like “The Mentor” or “The Jolly Roger”
3:47 man, the developer was angry at people xD
What got me was the VSMC developer getting miffed that his code was being leaked and cracked... while being part of the organisation that leaked and cracked Nesticle.
@@GeoNeilUK That's the ultimate irony. They were code thieves who went to war with stolen arms all while trying to push users to their website/forum/message board/irc/ect. In a way, nothing has really changed, lol.
Need more old-school emulation history videos, it deserves to be preserved.
Great video man.
these emulation history videos are my favorite, something so fascinating about the history of something i take for granted and use daily
I found zsnes in '99 or '00, right after I was introduced to emulation via Pokemon Red GBC. I played more snes emulation for the next few years than any other console. The plethora of jrpgs was such a magical time.
Like a warm blanket of nostalgia.
Oh man, ZSNES brings back so many memories. I used it on DOS for quite a while.
Excellent episode. I'd love to watch an episode documenting the decryption of cps2 hardware sometime in the future. I waited with baited breath for each new release, literally years before xmen vs Street fighter was released.
I learned about a lot of this when I was involved with SNES-Station for PS2 and this episode was a fun trip down memory lane. Thanks.
You know its going to be a great episode when Axelay's OST kicks off.
Thought the same ❤️
I recognized it immediately as well :)
yeah fantastic choice
This!
You had fun putting this episode together, we had fun hearing it.
A win-win situation.
I love the ZSNES UI and wish more emulators were like it.
MEKA is pretty cool
Except it's shit at supporting non-ASCII chsracters
Same
Ah yes, love it when I have to guess which version of a game I'm clicking on when the filenames are longer than four words. Why do ZSNES fanboys defend the worst things about it?
@@hppvitor
I just like the look and feel, I don't even use ZSNES. Only SNES game I play is Super Metroid, so I use the emulator that supports widescreen (BSNES?) because wide Metroid is pretty awesome. Obviously the Z GUI would have to be modernized if included in other programs, but treating it like a war crime is pretty boneheaded.
My buddy and I would do point to point direct dial up gaming on ZSNES circa 1998. It was way more advanced than we deserved for the time, despite how primitive it was compared to now.
Wow I remember all of this going on. Man this is great stuff right here. Let me say all the plain boring text and backgrounds of websites brings back memories. Nobody knew emulation would ever go this far being ported on almost every platform 👍👍
Takes me back to the time where only the library had internet access, and I looked up fan sites of bands on Geocities or Angelfire, while chatting on Alamak in the Hot Tub room😂
"Plain boring text and backgrounds of websites"....literally every damn website out today. Nothing but whitespace, text and a hamburger menu ...and ads ....ads...and more ads everywhere plus GOBS of garbage scripts being run in the background.
Yeah..I'll take the websites of yesterday over this ugly bloated BS. At least those websites had creativity and interesting designs. And didn't devour data just trying to open them.
Wow. I'm a bit stunned seeing a retrospective on this topic. I didn't realize there was much record of that era of emulation. I have incredibly fond memories of that era and community. I was a regular in #emu on EFNet at that time, and watched all of this go down. I remember how amazing it was when VSMC loaded the SimCity title screen for the first time. It didn't have the limited yellow palette at that time, that came a bit later. I remember he was targeting Final Fantasy II, and actually got it to run iirc. I believe it was around that time he took it commercial.
Here's something I remember about SPW that wasn't mentioned. There was (of course) a patch made to remove the time-crippling feature from its demo version. In response, the author released a version that would eventually delete your C:\WINDOWS folder if it were cracked. For YEARS afterward, I renamed my Windows directory just to be safe.
I had completely forgotten about using NLKSNES.
I loved the early emulation scene. I made and released a number of backgrounds for VGB-DOS that were very popular at the time, and as a result MindRape asked if I'd like to release them under Damaged Cybernetics. I agreed, and as a result there are a few late .nfo files from DC releases that credit me as a member, under a different handle than I use today. But a few months later, MR stole and released the Nesticle source, and DC shutdown soon afterward. I also recall having a short conversation with him about how he went about that.
Great video. I've got to check out more.
I'm pretty sure I just came into emulation as soon as it hit the golden age circa 97-98. It was such good timing. Snes games ran completely flawless, as far as my 11 year old mind could ascertain.
Damn, truly retro. Historical time piece of information on the emulation scene. I was just an end user but I remember back in my high school days (1999-2000) playing on zsnes and being passed off that chrono trigger didn't have transparencies until zsnes that had a build that could do such. Tales of phantasia and the subsequent English patch. It was a time of discovery for me. I never became a coder but I am still a lover of videogame games. Great idea to cover such a vintage thing. Who talks about old emulation code like this??? Oh, you do. The modern vintage gamer! Great piece my man
And I was pissed off because I played chrono trigger on its original hardware and knew how the experience should have been. Emulation finally caught up and then some nowadays
This was super interesting. Im curious how this compared to early Genesis/Megadrive emulation.
Your videos are amazing. I love how you tell the story behind the emulation/home brew scene.
Could you please make a video about how to get started on writing emulators (where to get documentation, what system to start with, etc)? I guess many of your viewers would love this.
Where ever you are arch-nacho and tortilla godzilla, shine on you crazy diamonds!
I can’t tell you how happy this video makes me. I mentioned this to you once in one of your live-streams.
Such great memories playing on these emulators. I just assumed it was magic.
Love the channel, if you haven't already done it would love a video where you write a quick and dirty emulator to try and give an overview of what goes into making one.
I'd like an episode on Near's work on BSNES, Higan and Ares. Their work is extremely under-appreciated and they at least deserve to be remembered for their incredible efforts to preserve SNES games.
RIP Near.
No
His*
Byuu
I do have to say his possible death is unfortunate.
Yes please !! Near needs an episode
I remember a lot of these emulators but never gave any thought to what was happening behind the scenes. Great video!
You are a god with this thank you for everything you do champ I love the show.
Man, this video is my childhood. I remember going in specific AOL chat rooms to find ROMs for emulators I found. I played games a lot with ZSNES and Genecyst back in the day. Great times. Great video.
This is incredible how emulation evole
Ah, the memories. Lived through all of this as a teenager in the 90's. Good times checking Zophar's Domain everyday for updates.
Where did they come up with such catchy names for these emulators though?!
I hope this one is sarcastic
A emulator called RAPE
@@rmg4152 rather (have) a Pokémon emulator?
The late 90s were a wonderful time for emulation.
Thanks for the walk down memory lane.
I was at university from 1996, and I remember running my own ROM site from the University servers, Data Potato.
It was going great until, I managed to crash the network, with hosting one of the new NeoGeo ROM releases. It just couldn't handle all the traffic.
Such an exciting time. Waiting for new releases, to see what features had been added, which bugs had been fixed, which games were now supported.
Good times.
I was always amazed by the geniuses that could implement such great emulators without proper hardware specifications. To this day it feels like magic :)
I remember going to the library in 1998 to download ROMs and emulators so I could play SNES and NES games again. (didn't have internet access at home, the library had no content filter)
Great video!
and i still use zsnes in 2021, especially with netplay
From the drop, the video starts off with “Unkai” from Axelay. Goddamn fantastic track choice, MVG.
Heads up, bsnes is more accurate than snes9x and doesn't take much power these days. If you're not familiar with its lineage, it started as an attempt to make most accurate emulator possible, speed be damned, then was turned into Higan, which keeps that goal, but then was spun off of Higan with the goal of being as accurate as possible without sacrificing speed. So now it's like 99.9% accurate and the best snes emulator for the average user. Could be a good topic for a video tbh
I look forward to seeing 99.9% accurate SNES emulation on the Steam Deck. Hopefully the battery will last a long time.
Yeah but it's not nearly as user friendly as SNES9X and I've never seen a true need for it other than developers who wanna test their game on real hardware, but don't own an Everdrive.
@@ohnoitschris I would agree regarding old bsnes. Current bsnes actually has a great UI though. If you haven't checked it out in the past couple years, definitely take another look
Mesen S is also a great emulator. Easy to use, yet super accurate.
@@fungo6631 and unfinished. It doesn't do Yoshi's Safari properly
I remember when ZSNES finally got Megaman X2 & 3 working. Although I have moved on to BSNES and SNES9x, I still fire up ZSNES from time to time for a rush of nostalgia. I'm grateful for all the hard work that went into it.
I still uses Zsnes, Thank you for making this video, really appreciate it!
You shouldn't. ZSNES not only has terrible sound emulation across the board, it's also slower, doesn't run the entire library (which is the norm for current emulators) and even has security issues.
Update to bSNES, or SNES9x if your machine is REALLY old.
@@hppvitor I like Znses UI, as for "security issues" I never had any problems.
@@R3TR0--93 It's just plain bad and obsolete. Not being updated for 15 years should be enough of a reason for anyone to stop using it altogether, especially when there are more up to date alternatives. Do you still use Internet Explorer as well?
@@hppvitor It's software designed to run games from the 90s. ZSNES is fine.
@@ohnoitschris What a sad argument. It's like saying "Why would you want this 700W bluetooth stereo system over this 10W mono boombox from Wish? It's just for listening to music!"
One of your best videos yet! I’d be interested to see one about how netplay in emulators came about, who was first to implement it, get it working etc.
God, ZSNES being considered “early” makes me feel so damn old, and I’M NOT EVEN THAT OLD
Same I'm just 39 😊
You're hitting that vocal compressor really really hard, turn your threshold up so that mostly your plosives are getting squashed. Love your videos, keep up the great work.
I love that ZSnes was written entirely in asm. That is just awesome 😊
Its funny now though back then it was less impressive. In the 90s many of the programmers learned in the 80s where asm was the only way to do things. Writing an emulator at all requires intimate computer knowing and writing asm was seen was a tedious necessary evil that broke portability. It was more impressive to get something running fast in C back then.
@@pleasedontwatchthese9593 Absolutely spot on!
Terrific video on a subject I've long been curious about! Would LOVE more videos that delve into the early history of the scene like this.
PCEM/86box is quite better at "simulating old PCs" as it emulate everything in it.
You can even emulate the dreaded (but good at 2D) S3 Virge
What irony. Having a piece of crap computer with a piece of crap 1mb s3 virge. Then wanting to emulate it 20+ years on. Which I could see would be useful for old direct x / direct 3d titles.
@@Crunchifyable2 well, it can emulate the voodoo 3 videocard as well if you want good retro performance
I'm guessing the ViRGE was selected because it was a long-running platform with high compatibility.
@@dycedargselderbrother5353 Probably due being well documented as well.
It's a pretty great 2D card with good VESA compatibility etc..
Another wonderful video thank you very much, I was there in the 90s watching the emulation rise and testing these out as they became available on my BBS, I remember emulators going from 2 to 3 frames a second and then trying out zsnes and being blown away.
He's wearing glasses to show that time has passed.
classic time skip lol
My interest in computing started when I discovered SNES emulation. This video brought back many fond memories.
Hopefully you can bring us more videos about the beginnings of the emulation of different systems. Thanks!
RIP Near
I learned a lot! Love Nintendo. I wish your lav mic hadn't gone sideways as we lost some high frequency in your voice. Thanks for the video!
Great video, thank you. Would be amazing if you made a part 2 someday about Nears emulator bsnes and their journey to become the best SNES emulator.
Excellent video!!!, brings many memories of those times, jumping from an emulator to another one, I loved the ZSNES emulator on DOS.