[windlep]

Yea, I've had too many issues with imprecise SNES emulation, so I only wanted to use bsnes. I get why people skimp and go for a less precise emu that can handle their hardware, but its too frustrating to me to invest time into a game to be thwarted by emulation failures.

[rangibaby]

What games? Maybe I was too young or simply didn't care, but every game I tried that ran at all (without immediately obvious bugs) in ZSNES were playable and fun with modest hardware even in the 1990s. Of course I would use BSNES now, or just a real SNES. But back then it was like magic.

[JonnieCache]

Depends when you used ZSNES. There have been times in its history when it's been broken on some very popular games, eg. Yoshis Island, Chrono Trigger, DKC2.

The really frustrating thing was that the bugs wouldn't show up until about halfway through the game, usually when some nonstandard transparency effect was applied. Right at the point when you'd really invested in the game, very annoying.

The other common one was timing problems (ultimately, they're all timing bugs.) Starfox for example used to run something like 20% faster than on hardware. It looked fine, and if you grew up with the PAL version you might assume that the speed increase was just down to version differences, but the game was unplayable.

[Aeolos]

> Starfox for example used to run something like 20% faster than on hardware/

Make that 200%. I own the original and it's indeed unplayable on zsnes.

Zsnes is a horrible SNES emulator all around. It was decent when it came out 15 years ago, but it mis-emulates so many things it's just not worth bothering with it anymore. Square games (Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Rudra no Hihou) all have wrong sound effects; anything with SuperFX is totally broken; Tri-Star games crash and lock-up randomly (Tales of Phantasia, Star Ocean). And the list goes on and on.

It's sad, because zsnes really has the best UI of the lot, but in 2016 there is simply no reason to use it. Use either bsnes/higan (for 100% accurate emulation) or snes9x (if you want to run it on an underpowered tablet.)

[ashark]

It seems like a lot of the "lesser" emulators have improved now that higan/bsnes is around to show them how it ought to be done. There's a stronger focus on getting the little things right, even if higan-level accuracy isn't achieved (or even desired, given the performance cost and the hardware many of these target—like the Pi)