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.
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.
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
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
Word. Shenlong and Death Scythe were my go-tos. And of course Epyon if that was allowed
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
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.
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.
ZSNES is the GOAT. I have so many good memories with it.
Hahaha I remember Nesticle. That fucking icon was legendary.
What was the icon?
It was legitimately a hairy pixel art scrotum.
Adult me knows how dumb that is, but 90’s high school me made it a core memory lol. It was peak 90’s. The pointer was also a like severed hand with the bone sticking out the back.
I found an image. But, remember… hairy pixel art scrotum should say NSFW all by itself: https://i.warosu.org/data/vr/img/0009/43/1375451168991.jpg
Thanks, shitman!
I love it.
According to Wikipedia, it was a representation of a pair of testicles, but a cursory search isn’t finding any immediate results and the website on Wikipedia appears to be down (perhaps not surprisingly).
It was two ellipses side by side, with NS on them iirc. A gray blue? It’s been 20 years so I may be misremembering
I still use zsnes on PC.
Same! It still works great and I just got used to the interface
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.
