I was clearing out the loft and came across an old PC. I turned it on and found these on there. Zsnes and gens, I used to use these for snes and mega drive emulation 20 years ago.
ZSNES was how I first played Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, Super Metroid... But the game I played the most was Super Bomberman 2 with my brother, playing against each other, both using one side of the keyboard. The memories!
FFV for me, too! I would let the title sequence replay to enjoy the theme. I didn’t end up playing through it until later in life, but seeing it for the first time around 99-00 and hearing it via emulation was glorious.
Same here with FFV! I couldn't complete it due to issues with the layer order/z-indexing of the sprites in one of the dungeons. Shoot, it might have been issues with Snes9X.... and not ZSNES.... I don't remember. But yeah, didn't complete this game until years later (2023).
Yeah I never would have played some of the classics without it. Games were not cheap back then, and sometimes you didn’t know what you were missing out on.
It's how I finally played Final Fantasy V in English for the first time, and what me and my friends called "Secret of Mana 2" at the time, otherwise known as Seiken Densetsu 3 or Trials of Mana.
Finding out that regular people were actually translating games that never came to America was the most amazing thing.
Same here on the Chrono Trigger and FFVI front. I even had an SNES during my childhood when it was the biggest home console but never got either of those games and was convinced I'd never get to play them. Some guy in a Yahoo Chat room in 2001 told me about ZSNES and emulation, I was like 13 and just utterly blown away that I could play these games and play them for free.
Still never played Chrono Trigger on real hardware, but I've been able to at least play FFVI on a real SNES since then.
Clicking that and immediately getting hit with Zophar's Domain was the best hit of nostalgia dopamine I could've hoped for today, thank you so much for sharing this
I was a mega drive person myself, my friend has a snes so played both consoles loads when I was a child. Zsnes has all the games as does gens. I'll be keeping the PC out to play through some classics.
ZSKnight, the creator of ZSNES, just did an interview with Zophar of Zophar'sDomain. Which is a hell of a sentence if you were into SNES emulation in the late nineties.
I loved that era. I never actually owned a snes but I was lucky enough to own a pc from a young age. So I experienced FF6, A Link to the past, chrono trigger and more all on zsnes.
Ah ZSnes, so many good memories. When I first learnt about emulation I was so happy because I was pining after zelda a link to the past. I had sold my snes to pay for an n64 and missed it since. Took me a bit to learn how to run games/roms and what it could do but I smiled like crazy playing zelda3 again I damn near completed it all that day. ZSnes was my gateway to emulation.
The escape key to bring up the menu was ingenious and convenient rather than a function key. Unfortunately, some other emulators used the escape key to exit the program.
Apparently a couple months ago there was an interview on Zophar's Domain with the Creator of ZSNES, and they were inspired by the outpouring that they wanted to make an updated version. IIRC
I had a CD-ROM that came with several emulators and ROMs that you could play directly from the CD on your PC. It came with ZSNES, so it brings back a lot of nostalgia for me.
I used SNES9x on my dad’s Mac instead, I believe ZSNES was Windows-only at the time. Super happy for everyone, though. It’s the fact we got access to all the games that matters.
Just a few months ago I did the same with my G4 PowerMac - A friend gave me an old Sony monitor and I needed to test it before I started looking into HDMI-VGA adapters. 2005 was the last time the old Mac booted and it was like stepping back in time 20 years. I only had a mouse and keyboard connected so I “tested” it with Warcraft III but I did scroll through my little rom library for its NES, SNES, and Genesis emulators.
After getting 8BitDo’s NES style keyboard and mouse for my SteamDeck, I had the idea to use the old monitor for RetroDeck and while its image looks good, it’s doing a blip/zap thing every handful of minutes. Also, the docked Deck doesn’t support a compatible resolution so it isn’t as simple as running an adapter cable to the monitor and likely needs a pricey DAC …still all worth doing someday but now at the bottom of my projects list.
Ohhhhhhhhhh Zsnes!!! It was the only emulators that I used for the SNES years ago. I was quite attached to the SNES because it was my first official console so I used Zsnes a lot. I also remember searching for the IPS fan translation of the games ( playing tales of phantasia for the SNES English patched was nice, especially because there was during the demo?intro? A line of one of the character read in Japanese).
Ah, the 90's. I remember not having internet yet and bypassing the security on the library computers to download roms onto floppy disks, if they would fit 😆
zsnes recently came back, the old authors revived it some months ago. Gens I never did care for, I got more into using steve snakes kega fusion as it was a solid quality catch all for 8/16bit stuff.
That zsnes file directory giving me flashbacks lol. I swear it took me like 4 hours as a kid trying to figure out how to navigate to where I put the rom. Fun times.
Hatte ich auch damals zsnes längere Zeit dann auf bsnes bzw Higan von diesem byuu umgestiegen und viele snes Klassiker wie zelda 3 gespielt davor hatte ich auch us snes mit super Wildcard war auch cool
Thank you for all your comments. Its been wonderful reading how zsnes helped you experience games that you never would have been able to play. Its good to read about you reminiscing about the old days and the good times and memories you had with this wonderful piece of software.
The first way I ever experienced Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger, and the way I killed many an hour playing Zombies Ate My Neighbours with my brothers! ZSNES and ePSXe were fantastic and really opened my eyes early to the joys of emulation!
ZSNES. I played a German fan translation of Super Mario RPG on it 24 years ago as a kid. It stopped being German towards the end bit, but I had one of those mini translators that had a small keyboard on it that translated every English word for me back then.
I've never been dumb enough to run any pirate media on a network connected machine so shrugs let the virus fester. They're all lame ID theft tools anymore anyway not even interesting
128
u/East-Equipment-1319 3d ago
ZSNES was how I first played Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, Super Metroid... But the game I played the most was Super Bomberman 2 with my brother, playing against each other, both using one side of the keyboard. The memories!