ROM sites/general links

SNES Emulation World (Nov 22)
SNESmerism (Nov 22)- Huge site, but unreliable and slow
Igb's SNES page (Nov 22)- a few ROMs, mostly for copiers
R.O.M. - SNES ROMs 4 Free
Sean's ROMs
Somebody's page - Who's? I dunno...
Shawn's ROM WareHouse - great site, unless you notice the misaligned ROM table.
My ROMs. <- New
Snes Emulation Centre - small info site
SNES Knowledge Base Home Page, from yours truly

Front9X - a utility I wrote to help manage all those switches for SNES9X.

Comprehensive Emulator Reviews

First of all you should know you need a fast computer to run a SNES emulator. You should also know none of the emulators can emulate the powerful FX chip or DSP chip, so no Star Fox, Stunt Racing or Mario Kart. There are now three emulators with sound, SNES9X, eSNES and zSNES. (SNES9X has the superior sound).

Ratings: F=Features minus annoying quirks, E=Emulation, S=Speed. Ratings are out of 10.

I now put in approximate minimum system requirements so you will get an idea of what class of system you'll need. Starting now, I will be testing the emulators with this lovely suite of games: Super Mario World, Super Mario All-Stars, Breath of Fire 2, Chrono Trigger, Contra 3, Donkey Kong Country 2, EarthBound, Earthworm Jim, Earthworm Jim 2, Final Fantasy 2, Final Fantasy 3, Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest, Killer Instinct, Megaman X, Megaman 7, Super Metroid, Ninja Gaiden Trilogy, Return of the Jedi, Secret of Evermore, Secret of Mana, Sonic the Hedgehog (you heard right), Super R Type, Tetris Attack, Super Turrican 2, Uniracers, Zelda: A link to the past, and Wolfenstein 3D.

SNES9X (formerly SNES96) Version 0.20; DOS, Linux and Win95 ports; Freeware; F=8 E=8 S=8 Sound=8
Minimum system: Pentium 90Mhz With sound: 120Mhz. Games not currently playable: Earthworm Jim 2 (black screen).
(This review is based on the DOS version. The Win95 version is slightly worse.)
* Note: Unfortunately, this emulator has been discontinued.
Now that this version is out it is hard to argue it is anything but the best. The most important new features are the GUI and the speed increase. With sound off and tile-based drawing on, it's speed is approaching that of NLKSNES. Since the sound code has been optimised, sound doesn't slow down your game as much any more. The GUI is nice, but doesn't include all the options that are available on the command line, and the keyboard interface is crappy (It's designed more for a mouse). This version includes the cheat patch finder from SNES97, though it's only slightly easier to use and the codes are not saved when you quit or change games (there is a archive of cheat addresses developing HERE.) Other cheat codes (Game Genie etc.) are also supported via command-line.

To-do list:

• Key remapping! This is a much needed feature, as the default mapping sucks dill.
• Optimise the sound code more
• MOD/S3M/XM/or whatever wavetable music logging
• Regular WAV logging, like in NESticle.
• Include more options in the GUI.

NLKSNES Version 0.15d; DOS; Freeware; F=6 E=7 S=9
Minimum system: 486 DX4/80. Games not currently playable: Mario Allstars (the ROM claims it wasn't designed for my SNES), Breath of Fire 2 (the menu screen is gibberish), Wolfenstein 3D (gibberish), Sonic (crashes after title page), Secret of Evermore (Gibberish), Return of the Jedi (gamepad doesn't work)
A while ago one pompous author of SNES9X said on IRC that the only reason NLKSNES was so fast was because it didn't emulate very much of the SNES hardware. HA! I would estimate this new version has about the compatibility level of eSNES, and the games that work run very beautifully. The only major missing feature is sound, and this edition comes with at least one feature that no other emulator (except zSNES, but zSNES does this slowly) currently has: Sub-screen addition/subtraction of color (or as I like to call it, ghostness.) This means that all the fog and transparency effects you see in various games work: In Zelda 3, the rain at the beginning and the fog in the enchanted forest and mountain area works. In Mario World the ghost house fog and the transparent ghosts work. And in all those other games where you had to fiddle with the BGs because the fog made it impossible to see... problem solved! But, In a few games it's buggy or slow so you have to turn it off (press '0') but sometimes it gets fixed if you turn it off, then back on again. Nlksnes now has FAST mode 7 support. SNES9X said its support was fast, but apparently they haven't bothered to see how fast NLKSNES is in comparison! On my computer I can play f-zero at full speed with only one frame skip (in SNES9X, I would have to put it at about 8 frame skip.) Also, the "blur" effect (Mario World, when you start a level, for example) works perfectly.
Nlksnes's compatibility is way up. Unlike Snes9X, Nlksnes allows key remapping (and the default layout is so weird you will need to remap them.)

Anyway, I think it's time for a to-do list. I only do these lists for the best emulators, because just because it's the best doesn't mean it's GOOD... anyway I hope the author reads it hehe...

• Fix the Windows 95 bug!
• Add a frame-regulator, and make it so you can press +/- to change speed
• Add a in-game user interface
• Sound
• A cheat finder utility
• MOD/S3M/XM/or whatever wavetable logging! This would be a wicked feature (and would save those game music composers a lot of trouble). I am surprised no emu for any system has such a feature yet, except Pasofami, but it has crappy sound anyway and it's really buggy. I know it would be difficult, but it would be worthwhile.

• It has sound support (which doesn't slow down the emu much). The first release played everything at the wrong pitch so the music was irritating. The latest release is much better - most music plays at the right pitch - although it still doesn't sound very 'authentic'.
• It runs under Windows 95 just fine
• It has auto frame-regulation (keeping the speed at 100%)
• 16-bit color for color add/subtract... this could be considered a disadvange as well though, because 16bit mode is slow, and in my case, it is unsupported on my video card. :-(

eSNES Version 0.14a; DOS; Freeware; F=6 E=7 S=8
Minimum system: Pentium 90Mhz With sound: 120Mhz. Games not currently playable: Secret of Mana (blank screen), Super Metroid (freezes), Megaman 7 (joypad malfunction) <Not finished>
A fairly good Emulator written by a cool spanish guy. After several months of dormancy, there has been a big update. While it is still a crappy command-line interface, it is much, much faster than the previous version. I would now say that it is a tad faster than SNES9X. However, the graphics engine is very bad, and most games are severly visually impared. There are at least two graphics engines, the faster tile-to-tile engine and the slower line-to-line engine. The line-to-line engine works better, but is noticibly slower. The graphics modes are still limited to Mode X and VESA, but I feel that if LordESNES would optimize his graphics engine for Linear mode 256x256x256 it could be as fast, or faster, than NlkSnes. It has Mode 7 support, but only using the quite slow C grfx engine. The sound doesn't work very good on most games, but sounds almost perfect in Super Mario World. The SPC emulation crashes in Super Metroid when you try to start a game, but if you disable the SPC it freezes after the Nintendo logo. DOH! I can't get it to work on my favorite Adventure-RPG, Secret of Mana, either. In Megaman 7 there is a really odd problem: 90% of the time you can only make tiny, pathetic jumps.
Conclusion: eSNES has become a good competitor to SNES9X.

SNEmul Release 3; DOS; Freeware; F=6 E=5 S=7
Minimum system: Pentium 100Mhz
This is a nice emulator with a GUI, but no features. Everything about this emulator is bare-bones, but you can expect that from an alpha release... ROM support is low, only Mario and a couple others work.

Super Pasofami Version 1.2d/1.3a; Windows+WinG; Shareware (but the reg. code is everywhere); F=7 E=3 S=7
(Old emu) This is a Japanese emulator but a translation is available. When you run it, you'd better have at 16 megs of RAM at least and not have any big programs like Netscape running, or you'll be sorry. It can thrash so bad that you might go for the red switch rather than wait for it to start or stop your game. The emulator is much faster than SNES97/9X for Win95 (and sucks up all CPU time), but the emulation of most games is very bad, and may require a lot of tweaking of options to get it to work. It has a single slot of instant save, and "remembers" the save before the last save. I can't remember but I heard on some computers it deletes Windows files... beware! But that may only be for the NES emulator, Pasofami. One nice thing about this emulator is that it supports many unusual file formats, and can play games in zip files.

VSMC Version 0.9702d; DOS (not a Windows DOS box); Shareware $25 (I think); F=0 E=2?! S=8
(Old Emu) This expensive emulator is supposedly has the best emulation around, and runs Crono Trigger, F-Zero, and Super Metroid. Well, I had to go through hell to get it working at all. First of all it doesn't like Windows and second of all it requires all the conventional memory you have and a lot of EMS too. Since I use DriveSpace (I need the space, okay!) I have to press F8 on startup to bypass it (which means I had to move some games and the program to an uncompressed drive), bypass all device drivers that were not absolutely neccesary, manually run the required mouse driver, and pray that it will run something. Well, the shareware version has eight colors, and either this emulator can't emulate anything it claims it can, or the shareware version is much more crippled than just the colors. I got it going and found that Super Mario World, Super Metroid, F-Zero and Chrono Trigger were messed up beyond playability. F-zero's title page was all gibberish, Mode 7 effects were practically non-existant, Super Metroid flickered and was really, really screwed up on the opening action scene (it was a nightmare trying to get out of that exploding space station since the room was randomly scrolling gibberish), the cinemas were messed up and the main game was usually a wash of ugly yellow and you couldn't see the ground. Chrono trigger began with a screwed up pendulum and a screwed up opening prompt. covered in seemingly random letters. Super Mario World wouldn't go past an opening screen of gibberish. However, on the up side it's very fast and could probably play okay on a lower-power Pentium or 486 DX4/100. You can actually select what keys you want to use. I couldn't find any save features.

SNES97 Version 0.0.1.5; Win95 (with ports to DOS); Freeware; F=7 E=7 S=6
(Old emu) A fairly nice DirectX emulator. The save files take only about 50 K each, with 10 save slots. Annoying is that you have to choose the game from the open dialog and set up all the options before playing, every time you start the program. Most games can safely be set on "Very Fast" which helps a bit. It has an interesting "cheat finder" feature, which is frustrating and cumbersome to use, but I did manage to find the address where the number of lives are stored in Super Mario World ($7E0DBE). In my opinion, the key mappings, which are not customizable, are horrible.

SNES Games!

Well, everybody's doing it so I decided to get in the act too... I don't have much web space, but here's some ROMs :). This is not just a ROM leeching place but also a Review place. If a game name is not a link then I have not posted the ROM. Sorry but I don't take requests for SNES ROMs as they are just too big.

• Super Mario World: in my opinion SMB3 is a better game in every way except graphics. But this is fun too! Side-scroller/Action game.
• Metroid 3: If you hated Metroid, there's still a good change you will like this game. It said in the manual that the faster you beat it, the better ending you will get. Well, I've beaten it so fast that motion was a blur... (1 hr 50 min, 76% items) and all I was rewarded with was Samus Aran in a Bikini for about 3 seconds. Lame!!! Use it in Snes9X or Nlksnes.
• Secret of Mana: (Now I uploaded a noninterleaved version :) Like Zelda, this is an adventure-RPG. It's not really easy to get in to, but I promise you will like it after playing a while, especially if you play with sound... It only works in SNES9X, and the text is screwed up at the beginning (The text is horizontally squished, which I guess is not quite supported by SNES9X.)
• Megaman 7: This Megaman has only 4 initial levels, but hey, it's still fun...
• Megaman X: This one has eight levels, and you have the ability to slide and jump off walls too.
• The Legend of Zelda: A link to the past. An excellent adventure-RPG from the maker of Mario.
• F-Zero: Since Mario Kart doesn't work, here's a different kind of racer. Best played on zSNES or NLKSNES, since those are the emu's with REALLY fast mode 7 support...
• Final Fantasy V (Japanese): I uploaded this one cuz the translation is complete! To get the translation patch, try looking around on this RPG emulation page.

More reliable counter - since November 18 Unreliable counter - since August 16

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