The SNES Emulation War of 1997 | MVG 

That bloody UI brings back memories.

God I remember playing Yoshi's Island in college in the computer lab and having the *entire* computer lab eyeing me playing it. I had headphones on and then suddenly find out everyone's cheering for me to finish each level, wonderful memories.

Zsnes was the first emulator I used on PC. Back then it was simply unbelievable to run the entire SNES catalogue of games on your computer. I would spend hours starting random games that sounded fun with a friend and discovering the unknown library of games. Simply unforgettable.

The gui for zsnes brings back the feels. It felt like magic to be able to load so many games as a little kid - my brother had set it all up and dang, it was so cool. That was my first time having save states. Good times.

It's always fascinating to me hearing about software development in the 90s and how C was considered a "slow, high-level language".

And now we are spoiled with emulation with all the great people behind these emulators. A big thank you from me for them all.

ZSNES was where it started for me. I'll never forget the sheer joy I had when I finally got Final Fantasy IV, V and VI working. Being in the UK meant there was no easy way to play these games, which in a nutshell sums up why emulation is a good thing

I remember waking up on Christmas in those early years and they released an update that allowed for transparency effects. This meant you could play a game with smoke, mist, or rain without having to turn off that layer. This was my favorite present that year.

ZSnes holds a lot of nostalgia for me - with each successive release, the accuracy of Chrono Trigger got better and better, and seeing that I'd never played on real hardware, each improvement was like a quality update for the game itself.

I remember using ZSNES back in the late 90s when I was in college. Gave me a chance to play games I couldn't get otherwise, like Chrono Trigger. Getting the bad ending while in a giant room, by yourself, in the middle of the night was creepy as hell.

Learning about emulation history never ceases to amaze me.

It's crazy that emulation has been around long enough to get nostalgic about it. I tried most of these, but I was into arcade emulation more than anything else. The early days of MAME were amazing because there would be a batch of new games every week. I learned about a lot of games I never saw before.

Ah yes, the Zsnes days. Loved every minute of it

Yeah I remember playing a lot of RPGs on early SNES emulators and having to toggle layers off and on at certain points due to the lack of transparency. Also remember finding it nice when toggling layers also revealed all the secret passages.

Zsnes almost utter lack of input latency was fantastic

Wait, ZSnes isn't being updated anymore? That's still my go-to emulator; it's still fantastic.

I was there, Gandalf. I was there 24 years ago.

This really made me feel old, I remember reading the emulation news sites on a daily basis through those years, great times and a great video summary

ZSNES was such a good Emulator - great video as always! Would love to see one about NO$GMB

I was half expecting him to end it with: "and then I wrote the best emulator of them all"

Homebrew does what Nintendon't.

I was a Genesis kid so when my family got internet for the first time in 1997 the first thing I did was download ZSNES. It took like 3 hours to download 😂

God this brings back so many memories. Especially that NESticle UI. So simple, yet so iconic. Zophar's Domain was freaking huge when it came to finding all those old emulators. The dark days of shareware emulators tho. *shudders*

I remember the first time I saw someone playing Final Fantasy III on the SNES in the computer lab in high school around ‘97 or ‘98 it blew my freakin’ mind. I never heard of emulation before and I have been hooked since.

I worked with Icer Addis at EA I remember meeting Him and thinking he was one of the smartest people I had ever met. Eccentric but very smart. Hard to believe that he was one of the pioneers of emulators and without his work (which was stolen) emulation may not be in the state it is now.

We need to talk about SNES emulation in 1997

Seeing SNES9X come into being from its former evolutions was interesting to see.

I think my first real efforts to mess with emulation was in 2006 or 2007 so most of these "historical" events happend before I was aware of anything. Therefore thank you for putting this together MVG and preserving not only the tools but also their history for all of us!

I'd love to see you do a similar video talking about the 2000s N64 emulation scene, and how the good-idea-in-theory plugin approach ended up creating more problems than solutions.

Always love seeing these "scene history" videos from MVG!

Love these classic emulator retrospectives. It’s fascinating reliving this stuff. I was obsessed with the emulation scene as a kid, especially the ps1 scene. Getting My personal copy of MGS running on VGS was one of my favorite computing memories lol. Keep em up! Would love more about the snes (rip near) and all the other systems.

Man, I remember building my first PC in my youth (after the 80's and early 90's being dedicated to commodore 64 and Amiga), it must have been in 1997 . A Pentium 166MHz MMX + the cheapest case and components I could find. Although the machine was great the year I built it, computer performance just sky rocketed at the time. It was really hard to keep up in the computer space at the time. Thankfully nesticle and zsnes really became the saving grace for many years to come. I was never able to afford the nes or snes back in my childhood. So really it offered me a way to play through a huge back catalogue of games. :) I remember this part in life fondly and I still remember the fantastic ergonomics of the Gravis Exterminator. :) The beige 166MHz Pentium lived on until 2006. At the time, my mother used it only for internet banking. It was slow, TERRIBLY slow, surfing the web was a pain, no matter how much I tried to optimize the experience, The RAM, OS and browser wasn't really up for it anymore. :D

Snes9x with ZSnes GUI mod. Maximum comfy nostalgia.

Zsnes was something back in the days...

Man I love the look of ZSNES’ menu. I’m reminded how cool it is every time TerminalMontage makes a video

Oh my gosh, this was the history video I didn't know I needed! I got into emulation in late 1996, so this is right when the scene starting making inroads for me. Thank you so much, MVG! I loved every minute of this!

Loved the video. Would be awesome if you did a whole series on all the emulated consoles. Especially the history of the Dolphin Emulator

3:47 man, the developer was angry at people xD

I found zsnes in '99 or '00, right after I was introduced to emulation via Pokemon Red GBC. I played more snes emulation for the next few years than any other console. The plethora of jrpgs was such a magical time.

Wow. I'm a bit stunned seeing a retrospective on this topic. I didn't realize there was much record of that era of emulation. I have incredibly fond memories of that era and community. I was a regular in #emu on EFNet at that time, and watched all of this go down. I remember how amazing it was when VSMC loaded the SimCity title screen for the first time. It didn't have the limited yellow palette at that time, that came a bit later. I remember he was targeting Final Fantasy II, and actually got it to run iirc. I believe it was around that time he took it commercial. Here's something I remember about SPW that wasn't mentioned. There was (of course) a patch made to remove the time-crippling feature from its demo version. In response, the author released a version that would eventually delete your C:\WINDOWS folder if it were cracked. For YEARS afterward, I renamed my Windows directory just to be safe. I had completely forgotten about using NLKSNES. I loved the early emulation scene. I made and released a number of backgrounds for VGB-DOS that were very popular at the time, and as a result MindRape asked if I'd like to release them under Damaged Cybernetics. I agreed, and as a result there are a few late .nfo files from DC releases that credit me as a member, under a different handle than I use today. But a few months later, MR stole and released the Nesticle source, and DC shutdown soon afterward. I also recall having a short conversation with him about how he went about that. Great video. I've got to check out more.

This was a great episode, almost felt like I was back in the 90s playing snes again

SNES9X on a softmodded Wii is my fave way to play SNES games. I also have a pocketgo S30 but you can't beat the big screen two-player experience the Wii offers.

ZSnes and SNES9X were all the rage back then. while most people preferred 9x, I stuck to zsnes 'cause of its GUI, good performance, and also because it was the first snes emu I was introduced to. then ZSnesW came with other joystick support, and I made the switch.

Damn, truly retro. Historical time piece of information on the emulation scene. I was just an end user but I remember back in my high school days (1999-2000) playing on zsnes and being passed off that chrono trigger didn't have transparencies until zsnes that had a build that could do such. Tales of phantasia and the subsequent English patch. It was a time of discovery for me. I never became a coder but I am still a lover of videogame games. Great idea to cover such a vintage thing. Who talks about old emulation code like this??? Oh, you do. The modern vintage gamer! Great piece my man

Good old Zsnes, the fist emulator I've ever used followed by Callus.

I love the ZSNES UI and wish more emulators were like it.

Great job, MVG. I'm a casual PC user who wouldn't come to own my first computer until 2006, where a neighbor gave me and old Pentium III, Packard Bell PC that he had for ages after upgrading himself. He taught me about the fundamentals of emulation, starting me off with Nestopia, Gens, VisualBoyAdvance, and of course, ZSNES. ZSNES was a revolution for me. Getting the chance to play unheard of, patched Japanese games like Majuu Ou, Magical Pop'n, and Magic Knight Rayearth. Legendary translated works like Dragon Quest V, Tales of Phantasia, and Megaman & Bass. Getting to Try out hard to find classics like Hagane, Super Bonk, and Castlevania Dracula X. ZSNES still holds a very special place in my heart and it hurts me to play on a different SNES emulator because I have some much vested nostalgia for what that program did for me in my budding 20s. I may have more attachment to ZSNES in my 20s than I do for the real SNES during my childhood. For whatever inaccuracies it had, save for the slow runspeed of my early computer, which was replaced a year or so later with a much faster Pentium IV machine with twice the RAM, were neigh on imperceptible to me.

ZSnes holds a special place in my heart, I got my first PC in 2005 as a gift for my good grades by my Mom (and it was pretty expensive for a single Mom at that time haha). I didn't get internet access until 2009 so all I had was a CD-Rom with a copy of ZSnes and a complete snes romset (US/EU/JP), as a kid I didn't get to play on consoles because it was way too expensive, so naturally I spent a lot of time playing almost every snes game, it also helped me learn English. Thanks ZSnes.

Loved snes9x and Zsnes. Took me back through memory lane.

Just finished watching the vid about PS2 development. This got uploaded 20 secs ago. Yay.

I absolutely love these history of emulation/history of modding scene videos

Great video. This needs to be a Series. Love hearing about the history of emulated systems and the individual projects.

I'd like an episode on Near's work on BSNES, Higan and Ares. Their work is extremely under-appreciated and they at least deserve to be remembered for their incredible efforts to preserve SNES games. RIP Near.

Wow I remember all of this going on. Man this is great stuff right here. Let me say all the plain boring text and backgrounds of websites brings back memories. Nobody knew emulation would ever go this far being ported on almost every platform 👍👍

The late 90s were a wonderful time for emulation. Thanks for the walk down memory lane. I was at university from 1996, and I remember running my own ROM site from the University servers, Data Potato. It was going great until, I managed to crash the network, with hosting one of the new NeoGeo ROM releases. It just couldn't handle all the traffic. Such an exciting time. Waiting for new releases, to see what features had been added, which bugs had been fixed, which games were now supported. Good times.

I remember talking to one of my neighbor's teenagers in 2007 about how I wanted to play EarthBound but had trouble finding a copy. He responded by showing me a 'free way' to play it on PC through an emulator and burned a CD for me containing SNES9x, EarthBound and a few other roms. My grandma later got me a copy of EarthBound for Christmas '07 but I'll never how happy I was to play it on PC.

You know its going to be a great episode when Axelay's OST kicks off.

Like a warm blanket of nostalgia.

Still get a kick out of those screen names - “The Brain” “The Teacher” those are old school 80’s BBS handles like “The Mentor” or “The Jolly Roger”

You're hitting that vocal compressor really really hard, turn your threshold up so that mostly your plosives are getting squashed. Love your videos, keep up the great work.

Where ever you are arch-nacho and tortilla godzilla, shine on you crazy diamonds!

these emulation history videos are my favorite, something so fascinating about the history of something i take for granted and use daily

I can’t tell you how happy this video makes me. I mentioned this to you once in one of your live-streams.

Terrific video on a subject I've long been curious about! Would LOVE more videos that delve into the early history of the scene like this.

Loved every minute of it MVG. Your retro emulator overviews are one of my favorite type of video. Well done.

This was super interesting. Im curious how this compared to early Genesis/Megadrive emulation.

Amazing video. It really took me back. Keep up the good work.

I'm pretty sure I just came into emulation as soon as it hit the golden age circa 97-98. It was such good timing. Snes games ran completely flawless, as far as my 11 year old mind could ascertain.

Oh man, ZSNES brings back so many memories. I used it on DOS for quite a while.

Excellent episode. I'd love to watch an episode documenting the decryption of cps2 hardware sometime in the future. I waited with baited breath for each new release, literally years before xmen vs Street fighter was released.

this is one of my fav videos so far! amazing work

I remember going to the library in 1998 to download ROMs and emulators so I could play SNES and NES games again. (didn't have internet access at home, the library had no content filter) Great video!

RIP Near

and i still use zsnes in 2021, especially with netplay

Your videos are amazing. I love how you tell the story behind the emulation/home brew scene. Could you please make a video about how to get started on writing emulators (where to get documentation, what system to start with, etc)? I guess many of your viewers would love this.

I learned a lot! Love Nintendo. I wish your lav mic hadn't gone sideways as we lost some high frequency in your voice. Thanks for the video!

I love that ZSnes was written entirely in asm. That is just awesome 😊

You are a god with this thank you for everything you do champ I love the show.

Excellent video!!!, brings many memories of those times, jumping from an emulator to another one, I loved the ZSNES emulator on DOS.

My favorite channel on RU-vid by far. Thanks for the content!

This is incredible how emulation evole

Such great memories playing on these emulators. I just assumed it was magic.

very accurate and down to details video as usual. thanks for sharing this information!

Nice content! Brings me some good old memories. This video is full of history!! Amazing.

Heads up, bsnes is more accurate than snes9x and doesn't take much power these days. If you're not familiar with its lineage, it started as an attempt to make most accurate emulator possible, speed be damned, then was turned into Higan, which keeps that goal, but then was spun off of Higan with the goal of being as accurate as possible without sacrificing speed. So now it's like 99.9% accurate and the best snes emulator for the average user. Could be a good topic for a video tbh

I still uses Zsnes, Thank you for making this video, really appreciate it!

From the drop, the video starts off with “Unkai” from Axelay. Goddamn fantastic track choice, MVG.

This was an awesome summary. I remember purchasing a licensed copy of VSMC in high school and receiving it on a floppy disk. The .exe would only execute from said floppy disk (must have had some hidden sector special sauce added...) - early copy protection at it's finest. When zsnes/snes96 came out, those blew my teenage mind - I still follow emulation today (mostly via MAME) and it's a fascinating topic that you are doing a great job of covering. You owe it to yourself to do a summary of the efforts of Byuu/Near to cover bsnes and the efforts to make it a 'perfect' emulation that could even emulate the shadows in that weird Desert Storm game..

those where the greatest times ever, thank you so much for this awesome trip to the past

Where did they come up with such catchy names for these emulators though?!

One of your best videos yet! I’d be interested to see one about how netplay in emulators came about, who was first to implement it, get it working etc.

I learned about a lot of this when I was involved with SNES-Station for PS2 and this episode was a fun trip down memory lane. Thanks.

Great video, thank you. Would be amazing if you made a part 2 someday about Nears emulator bsnes and their journey to become the best SNES emulator.

He's wearing glasses to show that time has passed.

This brought back so many memories. Love the videos guy.

Awesome episode, thanks! I only ever used Snes9x and ZSNES back in the late 90s and early 2000s, it's interesting to hear about all the others that I didn't know so far

Thank god for SNES 9x! A high accuracy, low system requirement emulator that runs on just about anything!

I was always amazed by the geniuses that could implement such great emulators without proper hardware specifications. To this day it feels like magic :)

These emulation history videos are absolutely fascinating. Thank you for them.

Excellent video! Please do more emulation history content!!