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Emulation (Games) Classic Games (Games) Entertainment Games

First ZSNES Release In ~2.5 Years 216

Posted by timothy from the hobby-lobby dept.
Anonymous Coward writes "The best SNES emulator, and the only GPL one -- ZSNES -- has had the first release in almost two and a half years! Looks like those smart coders reverse engineered quite a few new special co-processors for this release as well."
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First ZSNES Release In ~2.5 Years More

First ZSNES Release In ~2.5 Years

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  • Excellent! (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 26, 2004 @02:57PM (#11185830)
    Yesterday I tested zsnes first time on my linux laptop and was blown away - excellent emulator!

    And now I read about a new release - even better!

    • Re:Excellent! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Elektroschock ( 659467 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @03:18PM (#11185938)
      I really wonder why emulators such as dosbox and Zdnes are not better integrated in your desktop environment. I mean KcontrolCenter configuration modules, I mean a "just run" environment, where the whole emulator is nidden as a background process. The main advantage of gaming consoles is that you just insert the disk7cardrige and start to play.
      • " I really wonder why emulators such as dosbox and Zdnes are not better integrated in your desktop environment. "

        Well, as long as you can disable that integration... =P I like to use a front end to encompass all my emulators on my MAME arcade cabinet, and the emu's with their own gui's can tke away from the cohesive feel of the system i'm going for...

        *Shrug*

        rampy
      • Because you can do that now as well. Just edit in you DE that SNES ROM files should be opened with Zsnes, et voila :)
    • where is one supposed to find the roms? I can find 4 of them, all of which I have never heard of. Also, can I play without a gamepad, instead with the keyboard?
      • yes, you can play without a gamepad... there are several sites that have SNES roms... torrent sites (that are still alive) for one, or Cherry roms. (I think its www.cherryroms.com... but not sure, just type in cherry roms in google) I think you have to sign up there, but unless things have changed, it's an easy sign up... I've run across others as well, if you go to www.zophar.net and check out their links, they typically link to a few different rom sites.
      • Try this link out. This is one of the FEW weblinks that still offer really good roms. And I do mean good... from SegaCD to SNes etc, all working. Someone from slashdot recommended this to me way back.

        http://www.emuparadise.org/roms/

  • zSnes Dev team 3 (Score:5, Informative)

    by Tasy ( 410890 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @02:57PM (#11185832)
    Actually, there have been work in progress releases all along. This is the first non-"beta" release in two years.

    See you in WoW, pagefault. :D!

    • This is the first non-"beta" release in two years.

      See you in WoW, pagefault. :D!

      could it be that the duration of the work being in progress is caused by pagefault's interest in on-line role playing? sure enough sounds that way :)
      makes you wonder how many great programs are still unwritten due to MMORPGS. or how many quests still need to be completed because of OSS.

      anyway, is there a mac port? or any non-i386 port, for that matter?

  • 2.5 years.. gad (Score:4, Funny)

    by cente ( 785332 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @02:58PM (#11185839)
    Gee, I thought snes emulation was perfect already! What a long time to put something out though... Everyone get out your "archived" snes games again!

    • Re:2.5 years.. gad (Score:5, Informative)

      by BradleyUffner ( 103496 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @03:40PM (#11186015) Homepage
      It hasn't really been 2.5 years. There have been unofficial builds released every few months, they refer to them as "WIPs" or Work In Progres. The WIPs are awesome, each one fixed a bunch of bugs, and was rock stable.
    • ZSnes was nowhere near perfect. I remember playing with it awhile ago, and getting angry while it crashed -- it made me use SNES9X (which was also a great emulator). ZSNES was just more compatible with all of the ROMS I had though, so I loved it more. I can't wait to check out this version. Harvest Moon time!

  • Best? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SilentChris ( 452960 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @02:58PM (#11185842) Homepage
    "The best SNES emulator"

    Ho boy, flamewar. Personally I think SNES9x has been the best/most reliable, and has been updated far more frequently. And before people say "it's Windows only", it's not. I have a port sitting on my Mac OS X dock right now. Don't know if there's a Linux port.
    • snes9x has a GNU/Linux port indeed. Not Free Software though, but (beer-)free and works fine.

      Haven't managed to get the previous version of zsnes to work on my PPC GNU/Linux box, I should try this one when the ebuild is available.

      • Re:Best? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Eric S Raymond ( 234230 )
        The Emulator created by an ex-nintendo employee while working at Nintendo for development on PPC is called Silhouette:
        http://www.google.com/search?num=20&h l=en&lr=&safe =off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aof ficial&q=Silhouette+nintendo&btnG=Search

    • Re:Best? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Horse Rotorvator JAD ( 834524 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @03:10PM (#11185898)
      I'll throw in a second vote for snes9x. As can be seen on their download page http://www.snes9x.com/downloads.asp [snes9x.com] they have ported snes9x to; Solaris, OpenBSD, Irix, N64, FreeBSD, AmigaOS, BeOS, RiscOS, SunOS, MS-DOS, HP-UX, MacOS, Linux and Windows.

      It has a very easy to use and intuitive interface with all the options that one would expect from an emulator. It is stable and has played every single ROM I've thrown at it without a single problem. Whenever I set up a new USB thumbdrive with all my essential software, snes9x always goes on there.

      • Re:Best? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by phoxix ( 161744 ) * on Sunday December 26, 2004 @03:58PM (#11186089)
        I'll throw in a second vote for snes9x. As can be seen on their download page http://www.snes9x.com/downloads.asp they have ported snes9x to; Solaris, OpenBSD, Irix, N64, FreeBSD, AmigaOS, BeOS, RiscOS, SunOS, MS-DOS, HP-UX, MacOS, Linux and Windows.

        Who cares ?

        What you slashdot folks don't realize is that the maintainers of the various emulators are all sleeping in bed with each other. Maria Kendora* (snes9x), Nach, kode54, pagefault, _Demo_(zsnes) all work together to understand more about the snes because often the documentation and knowledge they have is so little about whatever odd chips were used in that one obscure game. They'll even resort to reading half-assed patent applications in hopes of sheding some light.

        You can even join #zsnes on Freenode, and watch the developement of zsnes right in front of your own eyes. The developement of one OSS emulator is the developement of another. Especially with the tight knit community of coders/hackers.

        ~sd

        * Yes, that isn't his name. Maria Kendora is just a joke about his real name.

        • Re:Best? (Score:1)

          by Mr Z ( 6791 )

          This doesn't surprise me at all. As an emulator author myself ( jzIntv [spatula-city.org]), I've worked closely with other emulator authors to reverse engineer and understand all the corners of my chosen system of interest.

          I've worked with the authors of Bliss [retrogames.com], IntvWin/IntvDos, Nostalgia [shiny-technologies.com], IntvPC, Kinty [ac.free.fr] and the MESS Intellivision driver [emulator-zone.com] to work out emulation bugs and understand the various odd machine details. The authors of those emulators also have worked with each other--it's not like I'm some central focus here. It'

      • Re:Best? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by incom ( 570967 )
        i admit that I've never given snes9x much of a shot, mostly because I started with zsnes years ago, and it was fastest on my meager hardware, and so even though I don't need the most speed I can eek out to play snes games anymore(athlon64 these days) I'm still used to zsnes, and comfortable with it.
      • i don't know if Snes9x is truely better than ZSNES, but it's certainly better than most people give it credit for. Things that Snes9x has that ZSNES doesn't have include the ability to make tool assisted speedruns [wikipedia.org], output to AVI, and better memory mapping for BS-X roms. Also, Snes9x featured SDD-1 emulation (used in, among other games, Star Ocean) about a year before ZSNES did.

      • Re:Best? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Doomstalk ( 629173 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @04:52PM (#11186311)
        they have ported snes9x to; Solaris, OpenBSD, Irix, N64, FreeBSD, AmigaOS, BeOS, RiscOS, SunOS, MS-DOS, HP-UX, MacOS, Linux and Windows.

        You'll never see zsnes ports for most of those systems because large chunks of zsnes are written in x86 assembly. To me that's a plus, because its hard for a higher-level language to beat assembly in terms of speed. zsnes is much faster than Snes9x, and therefore I can run it on older systems. Its true that it does suck if you don't run an x86-based box, but that doesn't make it inferior, just different.

        • Re:Best? (Score:2, Informative)

          by paladin217 ( 226829 )
          The issues about porting ZSNES are slowly being resolved. A lot of the work done for this release involved replacing a lot of assembly with C.
          Since computers are so fast now, there is no need to try to squeeze every last bit of performance out of the processor by using assembly for SNES emulation. It may take a while, but I think the ZSNES may reach a point where it is written entirely in C.
          • It depends on what computer one's talking about. On your computer, or mine, or that of most geeks, the speed isn't going to make much difference. There's still a massive amount of older systems out there though, which haven't been upgraded simply because the owners don't feel there's enough incentive to do so. I'm heading out on a post-christmas vacation in a couple days, and am defenitly going to be taking advantage of zsnes's extra speed on the older comuter in the mornings while I wait for every one else
        • Wouldn't that mean zsnes is fast enough to be run on an x86 emulator?
      • Their download page also seems to feature dead links and pop up ads. Nice job, SNES9X team!

    • Re:Best? (Score:2, Informative)

      by tormedhammaren ( 675713 )
      A Linux port exists. Heck, there is even an Amiga port.

    • Re:Best? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @03:54PM (#11186070) Journal
      No need for a flamewar, the two teams put aside the moronic infighting years ago and have largely collaborated.

      Back when, ZSNES was fast, because it was written in ASM. SNES9x was more compatable, because it was easier to tweak. And there was much boasting and bickering and it was basically an e-Penis contest between the two emus.

      Eventually they came together.

      Now, SNES9x got all its ASM code straight from ZSNES, ZSNES got its compatability and other features from SNES9x.

      Both projects would suck without getting together. SNES9x would still be slow and chunky, ZSNES would be missing a lot of compatability and features.

      Both are pretty good examples of what OSS projects can achieve when the authors put egos aside and focus on the end result.

      • Very true, if my memory serves the snes9x team donated a lot of their SuperFX code to the ZSNES team to get help it working. Between them they've created two excellent emulators.

        I still remember the good old days when SNES sound emulation was just a dream! :)
      • Back when, ZSNES was fast, because it was written in ASM. SNES9x was more compatable, because it was easier to tweak. And there was much boasting and bickering and it was basically an e-Penis contest between the two emus.

        Eh, that was mostly Jeremy Koot of Snes9x (example: Jeremy made the totally unfounded accusation that zsnes used source stolen from Snes9x). I know zsKnight (creator/former lead coder of zsnes) personally, and he's nice to a fault. He doesn't have it in him to get into a contest of egos.

    • Re:Best? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by NotAPirate ( 835652 )
      I've got a snes9x port working on my 'kube via GC-linux, runs fullspeed :)
    • I think ZSNES and SNES9x are on the same level in terms of functionality and compatibility - no suprise, because both teams worked together on important tasks. I use SNES9x, because it runs on my Mac. On Windows I prefered ZSNES, because I liked the GUI better, but that's just personal preference.

      Don't know if there's a Linux port.
      IIRC SNES9x had a Linux port when ZSNES was still DOS-only. :)
    • Yes; there is a Linux port. It even runs nicely on the Sharp Zaurus!

      http://www.killefiz.de/zaurus/showdetail.php?app=1 214 [killefiz.de]

  • Nice and all... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Leffe ( 686621 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @03:00PM (#11185850)
    ... but we already got CVS builds once in a while from here:

    http://www.ipherswipsite.com/ [ipherswipsite.com]

  • SNES9X (Score:5, Insightful)

    by acidblood ( 247709 ) <decio@d[ ]p.net ['ecp' in gap]> on Sunday December 26, 2004 @03:06PM (#11185873) Homepage
    I was always partial to SNES9X [snes9x.com] for some reason (perhaps it's the fact that they don't waste their time coding everything in assembly, as nobody should), and it's also open source [lysator.liu.se]. Whether it is GPL'd or not is just flamewar fodder -- most certainly the submitter's intention.
    • where do you get your ROMs from?
    • I haven't had too much as far as good experiences with snes9x - zsnes is a lot easier to configure and has a lot of neat features.

      But I agree that they really should have maintained C versions of all code for their emulator, especially in modern times when CPUs are more than fast enough to emulate an SNES without any assembly. As a result of the horrible dependence on assembly, ZSNES under Linux is missing a lot of features the Windows version has (such as HQ4X scaling, Linux only had HQ2X as of the last

      • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @03:39PM (#11186009)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re:SNES9X (Score:4, Insightful)

          by moosesocks ( 264553 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @05:03PM (#11186365) Homepage
          ZSNES ran at about 90% frame rate on my Pentium-100. I never even noticed the missing 10% until I actually checked the frame-counter -- it was still better than playing a 'real' SNES.

          It's a real testament to their coding skills.

        • Re:SNES9X (Score:3, Informative)

          by mushroom blue ( 8836 )
          untrue. Snes95/96 (which later became Snes9x) was able to run most games at full speed on a pentium 133. if you disabled transparency (or just didn't have a good DOS VESA driver), you could get it running full speed on a pentium 75Mhz.

          not only that, but other SNES emulators like NLKSNES or ESNES were both able to run most games at full-speed on this hardware as well.

        • Re:SNES9X (Score:5, Insightful)

          by acidblood ( 247709 ) <decio@d[ ]p.net ['ecp' in gap]> on Sunday December 26, 2004 @05:36PM (#11186529) Homepage
          Regardless, I can assure you that it'd be just as fast if about 20% not 100% of the code were written in C. I'm not familiar with emulators, so maybe those 20% are actually 30 or 40%, but never 100%. I assert this as a speed freak and optimized assembly coder (did a couple of cores for distributed.net). It's just a complete waste of time to write, say, GUI code and file handling in assembly.

          Actually, I'd go so far as to hypothesize that ZSNES would be faster if it were written in C/C++ with careful assembly optimization only where needed: the higher productivity associated with a high-level language would mean more time to optimize the parts of the code where speed really matters.
    • IIRC, ZSNES did release the source years ago - but all being x86 ASM (some portions in C) didn't do tons of people a ton of good.

    • Re:SNES9X (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DarkHelmet ( 120004 ) * <[ten.elcychtneves] [ta] [kram]> on Sunday December 26, 2004 @04:01PM (#11186100) Homepage
      One of the features in 1.40 is listed as:
      • - Cleaned up, overhauled, removed, and ported a lot of code (asm to C). [pagefault, MKendora, Nach]
      I think they're addressing that shortcoming.
    • It's been years ago when ZNES was 100% asm. IIRC in ZSNES was the emulator for Super Mario Kart's DSP chip (co-developed with the SNES9x team). that must have been in 1998 or something...

    • Whether it is GPL'd or not is just flamewar fodder -- most certainly the submitter's intention.

      Do you have any evidence to support the assertion that making mention of the license was "flamewar fodder" and that it was indeed the intention of the poster?

      The Snes9x license I found has a curious passage:

      "Snes9x is freeware for PERSONAL USE only. Commercial users should seek permission of the copyright holders first. Commercial use includes charging money for Snes9x or software derived from Snes9x."

  • Geez (Score:5, Funny)

    by AvantLegion ( 595806 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @03:08PM (#11185886) Journal
    I just finished installing the old version!

    • Me too, I guess using Gentoo wasn't such a good idea afterall (Yeah, it's meant to be a joke, if you don't like it, don't laugh en just ignore it. And no, I'm not a gentoo user)

  • Reccomendation (Score:5, Informative)

    by labratuk ( 204918 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @03:08PM (#11185887)
    For anyone wanting to play SNES games I highly reccomend looking in your kernel documentation about how to hook up your SNES controller to work with the gamecon driver. Only takes about 10 minutes.

    • Re:Reccomendation (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Or if you have the cash to burn, buy:

      1. A SNES to USB [lik-sang.com] adapter.

      2. A premodded USB SNES controller [sealiecomputing.com] (basically a SNES controller that's been gutted and replaced with new hardware to make it a USB controller).
      • why do either of those if you're spending cash, you may as well get the Gravis GamePro USB (around $15 USD) It's shaped like a PSX controller, which makes it somewhat similar to the SNES controller, but allows you to map a few extra buttons... I've noticed the D-pad is a bit more sensative than a standard console d-pad, but it's never been something I couldn't play around. (especially since most emulators will let you use both the keyboard and the joystick inputs) Looks like SNES emulation doesn't have muc

        • I've noticed the D-pad is a bit more sensative than a standard console d-pad, but it's never been something I couldn't play around.

          I have never been able to consistently press straight down on the Gravis GamePad Pro USB. It almost always goes down and to the right. Currently, I use an official Sony PlayStation controller through an EMS USB2 adapter, which also lets me play StepMania on my dance pad.

        • Ugh, I despise the Gravis Gamepads. I bought a pair of old Gravis Gamepad Pros off of eBay a while ago, thinking they would be perfect for playing emulated SNES games.

          For some games they were bearable, but for most of the games I was playing the pad was horrible because it is unreasonably difficult to press STRAIGHT in one direction without accidentally going diagonal. This made games like Street Fighter 2 unplayable.

          I'm much happier with a standard PS2 controller + PS2->USB adapter.
  • When can we expect a new version of Aerobiz?

    (and I mean after Supersonic, which is IMO, one of the best SuperNES games)

    • Re:A little OT, but... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Kyouryuu ( 685884 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @03:57PM (#11186084) Homepage
      The game's manufacturer, Koei, still makes regular releases of their Romance of Three Kingdoms and Dynasty Warriors series. They are still known for their tactical strategy games. Aerobiz was a very unique game since it dealt with corporate strategy in a way very different from more comtemporary games of that ilk (SimCity, etc) but I haven't heard about any plans to bring it back.

      For the uninitiated, Aerobiz and its sequel Aerobiz Supersonic were two games released on the SNES and Genesis. The aim of each was to become the most profitable airline in the industry. You could play the game at different points in time - the dawn of airplanes for business commutes all the way to Concorde-like supersonics. To win, you would have to oversee buying various real-life planes (Boeing, Lockheed, Airbus, etc), slots at worldly airports, and compete directly with three other companies who were also vying for the same assets. You would try to have a hub in each continent and grow the airline from there with large transoceanic flights. If a particular route was not profitable, you could alter its ticket prices, switch to a smaller plane, or other various options. The game actually had a board of directors you could meet with for advice (similar to SimCity's "Advisors"). Additionally, you could diversify your business by purchasing hotels or golf courses in respective cities. Various events, like the Summer Olympics and disasters, like fuel crises, war or worker strikes, would also influence your growing business. One of the features that made Aerobiz unique was that it was multiplayer. Although you had the option of making any number of them AI, the three other corporations could be other players. Granted, it's rather slow-paced and geeky, but it's arguably the closest thing there ever was to a competitive simulation game.
    • I agree.. my friend's and I would sit around and play Aerobiz and supersonic through the night years before we ever heard of a LAN party. We've tried to buy a few games that sounded similar, but nothing has ever been even close to as fun.
    • Aerobiz was the best. I remember playing that game with my buddies long into the night. The thing was it was hard to beat someone who had their headquarters in New York, LA, Tokyo or London. I always picked an underdog like Mexico City or Vancouver :)

      Thanks for reminding me of that awesome game!

  • Sheeshhh (Score:3, Funny)

    by MemoryDragon ( 544441 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @03:38PM (#11186005)
    Now after 1 1/2 years the compliation of the old version on my Amiga is done, now they have released a new one, time to start compiling again...

  • old Interface :( (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    bah, they still have that old "demo coder" interface. keyboard is qwerty even though i have configured otherwise in windows. no window borders, mouse speed is hardcoded. what a bullshit.

    while it's nice and all that they further developed an app from the days where speed was crucial, they should at least adapt to some basic guidelines regarding gui design.

    they may be talented in hacking year-old chips and code handoptimized assembly but they sure as hell have no clue about clean software design.

  • I see a lot of fixes in the list, but since it's getting late, I can't read well... =/

    Is there anything at all to warrant another glance at it? I used to think ZSNES was pretty damn cool, until I noted that SNES9X has actually working hardware screen scaling (through OpenGL - hardware scaling was pretty damn relevant on a P3-600 which I used until this month...) ...and another thing I had going for SNES9X was that there was an OS X port of it, too, so I could use the very same NVRAM files on all computers

    • ZSNES has had hardware scaling via OpenGL for quite a while. Although my favorite so far has been 4x software scaling with HQ4X (which is a scaling algorithm that is designed specifically for video games, which typically have lots of line art. HQnX attempt to perform pattern detection on the input graphics in order to guess what it's supposed to look like, and for most video games, the HQnX algorithms and their predecessor 2xSAI work quite well.) Of course, nowadays I follow HQ4X with further hardware sc
    • The most notable imo, is the S-DD1 emulation which is brand new, because previously I had been using zsnes 1.36 and it did not have it, so one can play games like Star Ocean without the graphics packs.
  • It's good to see a solid GPL'ed emulator, but where does one get ROMs without running into legal issues? What are the legal details about attaining ROMs?

    • Re:Where are the ROMs? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The legal details are not different from those of downloading movies or MP3s. Yes, it is illegal, but currently safer to download (from websites, or from a gnutella server - just do a search for: snes roms) as companies are currently not as adamant about protecting their old games.
    • I have a wildcard unit which can transfer roms from a cartrige. Even then there's a question of legality. Common sense says that there's nothing wrong with making copy of something I've purchased as long as there's no intent to distribute it, nintendo says there is.
  • ...until Debian users get to see this in the unstable branch? Still waiting for Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 to get introduced - might be a while.
    • I'm still waiting to see FireFox 1.0 in Ubuntu.
      • Yeah, Ubuntu was the first thing I was looking at when I was getting rid of SuSE, but of course I had to have the huge user base of Debian, so I went with that instead. Quite nice for finding third party package trees for things the official ones wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole (think libdvdcss).

  • Release notes (Score:4, Informative)

    by Spy der Mann ( 805235 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [todhsals.nnamredyps]> on Sunday December 26, 2004 @10:47PM (#11188580) Homepage Journal
    Taken from the official site:

    ZSNES News
    Dec 25th, 2004 - _Demo_
    We are releasing the new ZSNES version 1.40 today. We hope you will enjoy it!

    Merry Christmas

    The ZSNES Team

    ------------

    What's new:

    DOS Only:

    * - Fixed cublic spline interpolation. It should actually save the option now! [pagefault]
    * - Fixed other various DOS sound bugs. [Nach, pagefault]
    * - Fixed a frameskipping bug. [pagefault]

    Linux/SDL/POSIX Only:

    * - Updated icon. [cdbsi]
    * - Updated Linux video code to Windows Version. [pagefault]
    * - Fixed problems with nVidia cards. [Diablo-D3]
    * - Fixed audio problems with broken drivers. [Diablo-D3]
    * - Added 48khz sound support. [pagefault]
    * - Updated joystick input support. [theoddone33, Sander]
    * - Fixed Savestate incrementor, this caused some crashes. [pagefault]
    * - Cleaned up the Linux Autoconfigure [Diablo-D3]
    * - Added a couple of things for the start of BeOS compatibility. [theoddone33]
    * - Fixed 16->32bpp LUT Related bug. [kode54]
    * - Added hardcoded alt-enter fullscreen toggle. [theoddone33]
    * - Added dialog for why the video mode couldn't be set. [theoddone33]
    * - Added Circle buffer patch (savestate fix). [zinx]
    * - Fixed problem with man page when installing (when man1 directory doesn't exist). [hpsolo]
    * - Fixed cmd line sound quality. [pagefault]
    * - Fixed zlib and libpng issues. [theoddone33, pagefault]
    * - Updated libpng Version checking [theoddone33]
    * - Added -lm to acinclude.m4 so AC_TRY_RUN doesn't return negative on some systems looking for libpng. [theoddone33]
    * - Overhauled Makefile. [theoddone33]
    * - Fixed install target, -D should not be used. [theoddone33]
    * - Added the name of the start address to the error message, when mprotect fails. [theoddone33]
    * - Update config.sub. This allows configuration on 64bit targets, and requires autogen.sh to be rerun. [theoddone33]
    * - Added HQ2X filter! [MaxSt, pagefault, zinx]
    * - Snapshots now use the full ROM file name. [Nach]
    * - Prefixed Snapshots with leading zeroes. [Nach]
    * - Renamed Linux Version to SDL. [pagefault]

    Windows Only:

    * - Updated icon with Windows XP compliancy. [cdbsi]
    * - Added new disable screensaver code. [pagefault]
    * - Added a CPU utilization fix. [kode54, pagefault]
    * - Added 48khz sound support, updated sound code, and fixed sound bugs. [pagefault, Nach, ipher, StatMat]
    * - Fixed a couple of input bugs, such as one concerning the 5th joystick and another that made the mouse get stuck in an endless loop. [pagefault]
    * - Removed alternate timer. [pagefault]
    * - Fixed Netplay freezing bug. [pagefault]
    * - Many new video features, including (but not limited to): HQ2X, HQ3X and HQ4X graphic filters, support for hi-res and D modes in 32bpp windowed mode (now default), new aspect ratio code for scaling, and the KitchenSync (usable only via the commandline). [MaxSt, pagefault, Darkfalz]
    * - Fixes for video code errors, such as those that occured when alt-tabbing in fullscreen, MMX interpolation fixes, and blitter fixes. [pagefault, zsKnight]
    * - Snapshots are now numbered and use the full ROM file name. [Nach]
    * - Renamed Windows version to Win32. [pagefault]
    * - Win32 port can now also be compiled with MinGW (but we won't support it till the next release). [Nach]

    All Ports:

    * - Added multiple timing tweaks, fixed various emulation bugs, and many other technical updates, including (but not limited to): SPC core updates (with improved sound decoding), safer memory allocation in certain areas, HIRQ and VIRQ fixes, color add/sub and color bleeding fixes, HDMA improvements, sprite priority and flickering fixes. Many more games work :D. [pagefault, _Demo_, Nach, TRAC, Overload, theoddone33]
    * - Overhauled a lot of code, such as checksum calculation and mirroring code. Overhauled and added much better EHi/Hi/Lo ROM code, improved reset vector, changed much hard coding to variables. Fi

  • when will we see viable (read: fully functional) emulators for more modern systems like the Sega DreamCast? (I am not even talking about the current crop of consoles: XBox, PlayStation-2 and GameCube).

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