I try not to gatekeep gaming too hard. I don't necessarily succeed at that, but I have only two lines in the sand in truth:
ZSNES is back, baby! Complete with two original developers, now you too can relive the bad old days of the early aughts - or at least that's what I think when I see it labeled as being Super ZSNES. Typically it's probably not a good idea to brand your new thing with the name of something we generally regard as a poor choice nowadays. If you tried to sell me a beverage named "Radithor," I'd have to take a big ol' Pasadena on that. In this metaphor, ZSNES is Radithor, at least compared to Snes9X or bsnes or practically any other option. Okay, fine, this is a bit of an overstatement; while ZSNES is widely remembered for its questionable quality, I found that it was lessbad than a lot of folks remember, but not without problems - the one I remember most was some sound glitching in Super Mario RPG (which I most remember from both watching YouTuber brisulph trying to play it on ZSNES a good ten years ago, and attempting to mod the game using the tool Lazy Shell and testing the changes out with ZSNES... which it probably chose to do on its own). However, I wasn't super-experienced with high-accuracy emulators, I don't exactly have an eidetic memory, and I didn't really play too many odd games. I suspect there were some inaccuracies with EarthBound, as there were when playing the game in Snes9x, but I don't recall.
In any case, we probably don't need another SNES emulator. Bsnes still works pretty well. It has some small problems in terms of basic function that make streaming with it a pain in the ass for me, which is part of why I don't stream much SNES content these days. I forget if the requirements for bsnes are still considered hard to meet, but it used to require what one would politely call a "husky PC." Unfortunately, bsnes is, uh, not likely to get a whole lot more updates. (Never forget that Near was bullied to death and by whom.) Something that cleanns up the minor usability issues and, if anything is not perfectly emulated in bsnes, emulates those games perfectly, might be a good thing, right? Change is good if the change is good. Unfortunately, Super ZSNES ain't it, and not just because the emulation is extremely buggy.
So, as you can expect, I was not super interested in downloading this myself, because I have an extremely good emulator already that I use regularly enough when I want to play SNES games. Especially because the marquee features are a variety of "enhancements," and by now you should recognize my feelings on these. I think they're bad! One of my friends keeps trying to get me to run various graphical enhancement filters and stuff when I stream retro game randos, and they look like hot buttered ass (and the same is true of all of the re-shaders he has used through the years on Final Fantasy XIV, by the way, but I suppose I also think current-day FF14 graphics look shitty too, thanks a lot Dawntrail, especially because it also makes my GPU turn into an air fryer now). You can go ahead and say that I would way too easily turn into a hipster for lower-quality formats. You would probably not be wrong!
Thankfully, a friend uploaded a video of him testing out Super ZSNES, which allowed me to skip out on bothering for a little while. To start out, the rewind feature that he shows off is quite nice. I remember ZSNES's rewind functionality and I think that was pretty useful back in the day, too, and I think it was a very good feature that feels quite rare on emulators nowadays. In any case, he tested Super ZSNES out with Mega Man X and encountered... a not-small amount of weird instability, especially while running in "overclocked" mode. Okay, fine, that's probably a consequence of the emulator being in super-early beta. It definitely is worse than vanilla ZSNES in that regard, but I assume this is being fully recoded from the ground up, right? That much is excusable, and I'm not even going to roast it too hard.
The enhancements, though...
Okay, the graphical changes are subtle. I actually didn't even notice the road retexturing most of the time, but if you were full-screen, you probably would notice it very easily. If there's anything more, I have no idea what it is offhand. The sound, though, that part sucks. For a start, it seems like the music starts dropping instruments when you turn on the enhancement. Then there are the sound effects. Those are flat-out wrong. I obviously didn't hear everything from the video clip, but a couple of them are seriously messed up; the sound design of Mega Man X is one of the things I remember best from the game, so this made me make a face like I just ate something that tasted like it had started to rot. Some, at times, reminded me of the level of crunch I used to hear in old ZSNES with Super Mario RPG - most notably with the text sound effects, which are normally kind of crunchy, but sound way too much so here. And according to this admittedly horribly error-filled article from Time Extension, Mega Man X has bespoke enhancements! Perhaps this only applies to the graphics, but what's written here isn't very specific on the matter.
I left a comment on it and got this reply: "I think it tries to do automatic replacement of sound samples but also gives you the ability to change them manually. The community will probably put together good sound sets for individual games." I really hope so, even if I'm not going to use this feature.
I 100% agree with him that the hi-res mode is disgusting. Why would you do this, guys.
In any case, I'd really rather be working on playing out that BALL x PIT update today, but... sigh, I guess I'll download this and do some personal investigations.
Okay, fine, I downloaded Super ZSNES and got my extremely legal copies of Super Metroid and Super Mario World - the two games I remember best from the set of seven (the other four are F-Zero, Gradius III, Super Castlevania IV, and Super Ghouls 'n' Ghosts). Let's dig in.
For a start, I had my Xbox Series X controller connected via Bluetooth, and Super ZSNES detected it and immediately set up the most sensible input scheme for it immediately. This is a minor-sounding thing, but some programs are quite bad about this. This also included putting rewind on the left trigger and fast-forward on the right. Additionally, clicking the right stick opened the emulator menu. Sadly, there is no screenshot hotkey available yet.
To start with, I booted Super Mario World, which started out with all six of its enhancement options on by default - texture, audio, overclocking, hi-res, widescreen, and border. I immediately turned off hi-res mode. These do in fact always look bad; it looks like the graphics have been run through some sort of automated vector graphics creator. I almost want to say iit looks like it's AI-generated, but... not quite, and also let's be more specific about the whole thing, right? Looking at this in full screen makes the texturing look significantly more obvious. It's extremely ugly and I'm not sure what they're going for here at all. The audio tweaks were fine on the attract screen and basically right up until I got to the map screen, after which point it started to feel wrong, like the music was being doubled in a very simple way.
Widescreen did not matter until I entered the first level. At that point, the level perspective is widened... so you have a big wide pit off to the left on the area you can't walk to. The border functionality is very useful when using the widescreen so the color is not the same as the rest of the gameplay (the border is just like a... thing on the left and right sides that darkens the rest of the expanded game graphics over there. It's like overlayiing a black rectangle with an opacity around 25% or so. This also means that it moves with the gameplay, which is a bit distracting. Nevertheless, I played several minutes of these games in widescreen with borders due to a sense of dedication, even if I hated it. At least it wasn't stretched aspect ratio. If you set the option in the Config menu, you can play the games in the proper 8:7 aspect ratio instead of the slightly-off 4:3. Better that than not giving the option at all, I guess, but why is this not on by default?
This all helped me realize... I don't remember Super Mario World that well. I don't like it very much, to be totally honest; it's just kind of a generic platformer and a biit bland, especially as compared with Super Mario Bros. 3. However, I saw no notable performance issues while in overclock mode. Then again, I highly doubt Super Mario World needs that, and if you're releasing a SNES emulator for modern hardware that cannot properly play Super Mario World, well, all I can say is don't quit your day job.
Loading Super Metroid reset all the options, including reactivating hi-res mode, which looked like absolute ass-candle in the intro. The text was fine (until the copyright line), as it should be, but the rest looked absolutely horribly off. So I turned that off immediately.
Super Metroid supports widescreen but not a border. This looks horrid on the title screen, where you now have the gradient extending past the edges and nothing else. Audio "enhancements" do very little, mostly making the more upper-register instruments of most of the music sound like they were in the wrong pitch. If it does anything "positive," it makes the trumpets in the intro cutscene sound a little more "natural" (read: not really, they sound like a synth trying to sound natural, but you get what I mean). I also noticed a shadow image of the THE BABY in the egg before the egg starts to hatch in the cutscene, which I don't believe is normally there. So that was the first thing I could really call a bug.
I kept the audio "enhancements" on to further diagnose the weirdness for the short bit that I played. The music for Ceres Station sounds different, with the replaced instrument meant to sound like machines in the background instead sounding like a synthesized voice. That almost made me switch it off entirely because I thought I was having a fucking stroke. Combine this with the sound of the boss music, and I would describe the overall effect that this "enhanced" music goes for as a kind of "smoothing" effect. Say what you will about this overall, but the end result for any particularly heavy track is that it sounds utterly toothless. If I played Super Metroid for the first time with the music sounding liek this, nonoe fo these bosses would feel threatening in any way. This feature, more than perhaps any other that Super ZSNES has to offer, needs a little more time in the oven. (Unlike the hi-res filter, for which that statement is only true if yout ake it to mean that it should be thrown into a fucking furnace.)
During the Planet Zebes intro cutscene, Samus's ship was seen stuck in place on the very edge of the widescreen before it showed up in the scene... and not where it shows up normally. There were a few visual effects that might be the consequence of the overclock option or might be just the way the game always looks. First, areas in the blue part of Brinstar light up way more when you get an item or get seen by a scanner. Secondly, when you transition between rooms, the background doesn't go pitch-black (the terrain does, however) as you transition. Once you arrive in the room, everything briefly blacks out before fading in. Like I said, I haven't played Super Metroid in a minute (I was even trying to control it like Metroid Fusion! Ugh, embarrassing!) and I never paid that close attention to it anyway.
Defeating Torizo felt like enough of a test to see how it worked. After this, I cracked open Super Smash T.V. briefly to see if the emulator would try to do anything for a game with no enhancement support yet. Unsurprisingly, it did nothing extra, but the game ran fine, with, as far as I could tell, only a minor graphical issue on the menu. If I'm wrong, well, I didn't play a lot of it. This was just supposed to be a quick look at this anyway because, if I haven't made it clear yet, there's already a perfectly good SNES emulator out there that doesn't include these needless bells and whistles, which I presume to be the main cause of any notable instability with the emulator.
Yes, of course. I'm just saying that for now, this is not necessary and that I sincerely hope they change up the style of how these "enhancements" work. Again, I'm not the target audience for this, obviously, but some people will want to goof off with this.
However, for folks who want good, accurate SNES emulation, there's already an option for that which, funnily enough, rhymes with ZSNES. If Super ZSNES gets as-good-or-better performance, or is overall as accurate of an emulator (when you turn off the intentionally-inaccurate aspects that exist for fun), then that's great - otherwise, this doesn't feel like a serious gaming platform. So far, the emulation accuracy without the bells and whistles feels pretty decent, so I feel like there's a fair chance of this being decent in that regard.
I really do hate the hi-res filter, though.