this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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I remember getting one of these. Looks like absolute garbage to my 2023 brain, but in 1998 I was just happy not to be using my keyboard to play pirated ROMs on ZSNES any more.
ZSNES in 1998? Did they even have sound working then? IIRC it wasn't until 2000 or so that SNES emulation really became playable.
Yep in 1998 IIRC there were ZSNES and Snes9x. ZSNES was written in assembler and performed very well. I read later that the emulation performed well but wasn’t “accurate”. But at the time I didn’t care. I just cared about playing the games.
Sound was working, but transparency wasn't, so in certain parts of certain games e.g. 600 AD in Chrono Trigger where there was a fog effect, it would be opaque, and you'd have to go into the emulator menu and switch that layer off to see what you were doing.
But hey, it ran at playable speeds on a Pentium 1 / 100Mhz so it wasn't all bad.
Yeah, I remember seeing those weird "skirts" that the cave entrances had in FF6 since they were meant to use transparency to show a glow effect. I guess sound might have mostly been working by then, but it still had problems (like, again in FF6, the wind effect at the beginning of the game being done as a weird high-pitched tone instead.)
Yeah, the SNES sound chip is notoriously difficult to emulate and even now it's not perfect, especially with things like wind sounds. The water rushing sound in Zora's Waterfall in Link to the Past sounds really harsh and distorted on emulation compared to original hardware.