A major contributor from the early days of emulation finally gets his flowers.

In 1997, two young hobbyists released two pieces of software that more or less prompted a new wave of interest in “retro” games—which were, at that point, really just a few years old. The first punch was Nesticle, a Nintendo Entertainment System emulator that quite suddenly made it free and easy to play Nintendo’s '80s and early '90s games on a PC. The second punch, delivered near the end of the year, was ZSNES, which did the same for much newer Super Nintendo games. And it was fast—even on the modest PCs of the era.

  • CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world
    1·
    7 days ago

    I used to have a copy of ZNES on my college network drive so I could play it in any of the department computers. Doubt they’d allow such a thing today.

  • glorkon@lemmy.world
    25·
    7 days ago

    Well, people who create emulators have really deep knowledge of not one, but two systems. The one they’re emulating and the one emulating it.

    They are Chris Sawyer type “I do everything in ASM” level programmers. I can do some low level shit in Zig and C too, but these people scare me.

  • salacious_coaster@infosec.pub
    181·
    7 days ago

    I fondly remember playing Gundam Wing: Endless Duel with my friend online in ZSNES. Oh, the deafening silence after he rage quit. People don’t forget, Alex, you fucking coward

    • mysticpickle@lemmy.ca
      4·
      7 days ago

      Dude I loved that game! The game has so much movement and awesome super abilities.

      Some of the gundams were op af. I remember playing online through an early matchmaking service in the early 2000s where the game was pretty popular. Like a good player could totally dominate you with shenlong using only jump kicks o.o

        • mysticpickle@lemmy.ca
          3·
          7 days ago

          Epyon could just keep spamming that super and win 😅

          Heavy Arms could get some redic 20+ hit combos if you could link a missile hit at range with vulcans

  • rozodru@pie.andmc.caEnglish
    16·
    7 days ago

    still use ZSNES to this day, hell it’s the only SNES emulator I’ve used for some 20+ years. nothing can top it. works on everything. the netplay was amazing. playing fighting games with friends from IRC and ICQ was peak.

    • Dionysus@leminal.space
      2·
      7 days ago

      My 5 digit ICQ number went offline a year ago or so finally, some Russian company had ICQ until recently and shut it down after the Ukraine invasion.