[aidenn0]

I love Chrono Trigger; it's also what got me into emulation. I wasn't allowed to have an SNES but my 486 could just manage to run an emulator (esnes I think it was called?) that could do SNES with no sound or translucency (there were keyboard shortcuts to toggle the layers so e.g. you could hide fog that would otherwise make the whole screen gray).

[isk517]

I remember playing Chrono Trigger on a emulator and it took me a while to realize that the fog in the future era was not suppose to be completely opaque.

[hotnfresh]

Oh man, no sound on Chrono Trigger is a shame. The music’s great.

[fbdab103]

I also vaguely recall a few of the puzzles used sound ques to note there was a hidden button.

[zerocrates]

zsnes is an older SNES emulator that definitely in its earlier days had some issues with transparent/translucent layers and had keys to turn each layer off. I think I remember needing to use those toggles for the same fog layers in Chrono Trigger that you're talking about (though I definitely wasn't on a 486). I think esnes may be a little bit older?

[gavinray]

When I was about 9/10, my grandfather put ZSNES on my computer, along with ROMs for most SNES games ever made.

ZSNES gave me some of the best memories of my childhood.

The coolest bit was that he had soldered a real SNES controller so that it worked with those old-school trapezoid 9-pin keyboard input things. I still think that is pure magic, to this day.

[zerocrates]

Probably the old "game port." That's cool. My experience was definitely more in the "use the A, S, Z, and X keys for the face buttons" realm.

[hotnfresh]

Serial was my guess, if it was in fact 9-pin. I don’t think I ever had a serial-port keyboard, but I did used to have a serial-port mouse.

Game port had more pins.

[aidenn0]

Just a tiny bit older: https://archive.org/details/ESNESv012a