SNES Emulators for Dos/Windows
| Name | Links | Last Updated | OS | Description |
| ESNES | v0.14a | 08/05/97 Discontinued |
DOS | Lord ESNES and Ishmair made a great SNES emulator. It is written in assembly and has sound support, thanks to Ishmair's efforts. It was one of the best. Now, it has merged with NLKSNES to become NLKE. |
| NLKE | v0.05b | 01/01/00 Discontinued |
DOS | ESNES and NLKSNES joined forces so the authors could work on one emulator together. NLKE was born. This emulator has all the features of ESNES along with the speed of NLKSNES. Transparencies are also available, although unoptimized rather slow. There's also a simple GUI as well. NLKE is better than many but ZSNES is faster and more compatibible. |
| NLKSNES | v0.15d | 09/16/97 Discontinued |
DOS | This emulator was one of the fastest SNES emulators there was, and it even featured Mode7. There's no sound support, though. It merged with ESNES to because NLKE. |
| SNEeSe | v0.735 | 10/16/02 | DOS | This emulator can play many commercial games, and also has Mode7 scaling effects, along with HiROM support, decent sound, and more. It is written in a mix of C, C++ and assembly. Most emulation routines are done in assembly. It's quite slow, so brace yourself. It was discontinued by Savoury SnaX, but TRAC never stopped working on it, so private betas were still being released. This is one of only five active SNES emulators. |
| SNem | v0.011 | 09/14/02 | DOS | This brand new SNES emulator is very incomplete, only runs a few games and is for DOS. It's just above the level of USNES and is one of the few active SNES emulators. It's also open source. One to watch for progress. |
| SNEmul | v0.9 | 08/02/99 Discontinued |
DOS | SNEmul hasn't been updated in a long time now and is assumed to be discontinued. It has sound, decent compatibility, doesn't require VESA2 and has one of the best GUIs ever. This is a good emulator but nowhere near the quality of newer emulators. |
| SNEqr | v0.340 | 06/23/98 Discontinued |
DOS | This emulator has been discontinued. It has some useful features, such as automatic state saving and cheat searching and a good GUI. However, it has medium compatibility and lacks sound, 16-bit color mode and other advanced features found in more popular emulators. The source code is available for anyone to look at and play around with. |
| Snes9x | v1.26 | 10/12/99 11/11/02 09/19/01 11/11/02 05/15/00 |
DOS Windows Windows DOS/Windows Wind9x |
Snes9x's cpu is written in assembly, and its graphics
engine and SPC700 engine are well optimized. Both versions sport very nice
GUIs. Snes9x supports graphics modes 0-7, 2 joysticks, transparencies, Super
FX support and has real time save/loading. This is now one of the best SNES
emulators around, and it stands only second to ZSNES in terms of compatibility.
This is the source code. Kreed has made a version of Snes9X which uses OpenGL instead of Glide to do fullscreen bilinear filtering. It looks nice, but there's no GUI yet. |
| SNESGT | v0.06 | 10/06/02 | Windows | SNESGT is a fairly new emulator from GIGO and Hii (who also made G-NES and TGB Dual). It's fairly advanced now but the GUI is still in Japanese. This most recent update seems to have added some new features and corrected some bugs. |
| SNEShout | v3.2 | 04/02/01 Discontinued |
Windows | Based on the Snes9x (1.37) core, this emulator features a few few minor tweaks and one major improvment; SNES games cna be played using the Japanese version of ViaVoice. It comes with voice mappings for Street Fighter 2 and Puyo Puyo 2 but more can always be made. This version comes with the option of making the interface in Japanese, Chinese (BIG5), or English. |
| Super Pasofami | v1.3a | 06/10/96 Discontinued |
Windows | Little is known about this emulator, except that it's in Japanese, it's crippleware (black and white video only until registered), it has no sound, and it's very unstable. It also hasn't been updated since 1996. Don't waste your time with this one. |
| TheSE | v0.14b | 07/31/98 Discontinued |
DOS | TheSE, which stands for The SNES Emulator, is an emulator from the same team that created the now dead USNES. It hasn't been updated in a long time, the website is down and it's probably discontinued. |
| USNES | v0.1b | 04/27/97 Discontinued |
DOS | If there is a more useless SNES emulator than VSMC this has to be it. It only had two releases, both which were slow and buggy. The USNES team is now programming the emulator TheSE, but progress on it seems to be stalled. This one is simply here for nostalgic reasons, as it only runs a few demos. |
| VSMC | v9702d | 10/21/96 Discontinued |
DOS | VSMC was pretty good for its time, but many emulators cam out after it that were far better and free too. Now ZSNES and SNES 9x are in a completely different generation than this. Don't bother with it. |
| ZSNES | DOS v1.36 | 07/15/02 07/15/02 06/28/00 02/27/00 07/03/01 07/30/01 |
DOS Windows DOS Windows DOS/Windows Windows |
This is the fastest SNES emulator in existence. It features
all SNES screen modes as well as add/sub transparencies in 16 bit graphics
mode (VESA2 support is required), mosaic effects, Super FX emulation (Star
Fox, etc), DSP1 emulation (Mario Kart, etc), C4 emulation (MegaMan X2/3),
real time saving, and a really great GUI which lets you configure the emulator
to your heart's content. It has interpolated sound, and it will really blow
you away! It also supports the snes mouse, and has a slew of other options
as well including movie recording and modem to modem netplay! zsKnight,
_Demo_, and Pharos have certainly outdone themselves. This is the SNES emulator
of choice! Check out the SourceForge site for a copy of the source code. zbattle.net is a multi-player service for ZSNES. zbattle.net uses a centralized server, which means everybody using it will be able to join your game. zbattle.net currently only supports the Windows version of ZSNES. |