[Music]
these days
emulation is considered essential for
the preservation of old games
and bringing them to a new audience but
going back to the mid 90s
emulation was considered a dark art that
was part of an underground scene with
ties to illegal activities and
questionable individuals
at least by reputation the reality is
however is that some very smart
programmers paved the way for emulation
as we know it today
painstakingly researching documenting
and coding their findings
in 1996 if you had a fast 486 pc
emulation wasn't that desirable they
were slow and primitive
often riddled with bugs and crashing due
to relying on guesswork
because documentation was not available
the emulation of home computers like the
commodore 64
apple ii or zx spectrum to name a few
was a challenge in itself
but these machines would have relatively
good documentation
emulating game consoles on the other
hand that were a much more closed
environment
would be a step up but the motivation to
emulate would only grow
getting a taste of an early nes emulator
opened up a whole new world of
possibilities
and by 1997 an emulator like nestical
was running full speed nes
games with sound on a fast 486 with good
but certainly not perfect levels of
accuracy and compatibility
it would also streamline features that
were used today such as save states
nesticle and ines became so well known
and mainstream
that everyone was using it trying to
find rom sites to download and try out
for themselves
and it didn't disappoint but emulating
the nes was one thing
what about the super nes the rumors of
the successor to nestical known as
snesticle
would never eventuate at least not until
years later as an easter egg found
in the gamecube game fight night round
three by 1997
nestical author isaratus had left the
scene and was very clear that this
nestical project had been discontinued
but this would not be for technical
reasons rather it was due to the source
code of nestical being stolen
by a member of a group known as damaged
cybernetics
addis grew disillusioned with the
emulation scene and left soon after
now damaged cybernetics was a gray hat
hacking group
and their main goal was the spread of
free information to the public they
believed that all information should be
free
whether that be intellectual property or
otherwise
and while they were focused on some
different areas such as
audio cd ripping and mp3 audio console
copiers and whatnot
their biggest focus was on emulation
by this point the race was on to emulate
the super nes
and surely it would be possible after
all
it ran a 16 bit cpu running at 3.5
megahertz
a 486 dx 66 or dx100
would have significantly more power at
least on paper
but the path to achieve a good level of
super nes emulation at good speeds
would be long and arduous the very first
publicly released
super nes emulator was virtual super
magikom or vsmc
which began its development in 1994 by
chris george who went by the handle
the brain the emulator was primitive but
showed promise
it could run simple homebrew demos at
the time and later on commercial games
like super mario world and final fantasy
2.
although in my personal experience i've
never been able to run anything
outside some simple homebrew the smc
received much popularity but it also
received much criticism
as it was offered as shareware which
crippled the emulation experience to
only allow a yellow color palette to be
displayed
this would in turn lead to much outcry
and protesting from the emulation
community
because they believed that emulation
should be free
the smc received updates all the way
until 1997
but when cracked versions of the
emulator appeared allowing access
to all the features the brain left the
scene soon after in frustration
the smc was popular mainly due to these
reasons
people had heard about it but when
running it would offer a poor experience
overall
with very slow frame rates
in 1996 another super nes emulator would
appear
super paso fami this was developed by
nobiaku andu and he also had built the
passo family emulator for the nes
previously spw
was a very impressive early emulator
but it was a shareware based product
that was time crippled
but things would really start to ramp up
in 1997 when developers lord eastness
and ishmael released the first ever
freeware
super nes emulator with sound known as
eastness
it was written mostly in c but the
complex tile drawing of the super nes
was written in assembly language it
would also emulate
the spc-700 audio hardware and sound was
a reality
if you had a sound blaster or better
card in your system
performance was decent certainly better
than vsmc
but not optimal at this point more
people were understanding the complexity
of emulating the original hardware
on a 486 pc would be quite challenging
according to lord eastness's webpage a
100 megahertz 486 class processor
could run at about 50 speed with sound
disabled
and a frame skip of four eastness was a
quite feature complete emulator that
handled all screen modes
tile scrolling priorities mode 7 most
rom formats or screen map modes
sprite and background priorities save
states and more
this would mean a good level of
compatibility but full speed emulation
would only be possible if you owned a
pentium machine
at 166 megahertz or more another early
challenge for super nes emulation was
transparency effects
this was difficult to emulate simply due
to poor documentation
the hardware can handle color addition
color averaging
color subtraction and color subtraction
than halving
but with the added complexity on how to
apply these operations to the snes's
background layers
meant that this functionality was left
out of early emulators
it was at this point where many
emulators would start favouring running
under windows instead of dos
eastness itself was discontinued and
joined forces with another emulator
nlk snes in lksness initially ran under
dos
and it was fast very fast with assembly
language handling the cpu and tile
drawing
but unfortunately it had no sound and
while many users
were enjoying nlk snares because it ran
pretty well on a 486 class
processor it did have its limitations
notably
compatibility with rom support not being
great
at the same time another emulator had
started rising in popularity
snes 96 originally developed for linux
by jeremy coote
who also had the online alias the
teacher was in the same
damaged cybernetics group as the brain
the author of vsmc
snes 96 was an impressive achievement
and featured sound and good
compatibility it was however
initially quite slow jeremy discontinued
snes 96
and started over with snes 97
a much more focused effort that ran
under windows
and used direct decks for its graphics
api it could achieve
mostly full speed performance with a 133
megahertz class pentium machine
but it did not include any sound by 1997
there was no less than six super nes
emulators that were being developed at
the same time
and this led to an all-out war between
the different authors taking shots at
each other
the ultimate goal here was to see who
had the best
the fastest the most accurate with sound
super nes emulator while jeremy had
moved on to snes 97
gary henderson another emulation
developer took over
snes 96 and did considerable work to add
features
fix bugs and generally speed things up
with the cpu core being rewritten in 100
assembly language while snes 96 was fast
that accolade belonged to nlk snes it
was the fastest around
and this is where the war of who had the
best super nes emulator
began snes 96 author gary henderson
would take shots at any caseness calling
out its low compatibility
often mentioning them in the snes readme
documentation
but the author of anil kaisness new
alaska responded with
we are not like gary henderson who can't
take an ounce of competition
the war between nlk snes and snes 96
raged on for months that is until
nalaska apologized to gary henderson
in one of the versions of nlk snes by
simply stating
stop the war in 1997 snes
96 version 0.73 was released
but it was quickly renamed to snes 9x
it turns out that jeremy coote and gary
henderson
had the idea to merge both snes 96
and snes 97 snes 9x
was a combination of excellent rom
compatibility
great speed and of course sound and it's
been one of the most popular emulators
ever since it's still very much active
in the community
all these years later in 2021
although nl caseness was discontinued it
did merge
with eastness to become an lke
this emulator would combine the
compatibility the transparencies
and the sound for the first time in
super nes emulation
and it was a highly regarded emulator at
the time
with each update snes9x quickly pulled
away from the competition
and became the best outright emulator
but on october the 17th
1997 a new emulator would appear that
changed everything
[Music]
the emulator was called zeesness
developed by demo nzs9
it was written in 100 assembly language
and claimed the top spot for the best
and fastest snes emulator around
a 486 dx100 could run most games at full
speed
initial versions of zeesness were
exclusively running on dos fire command
line
but quickly would incorporate the famous
gui that became so popular
zeesness had a very active community
with constant updates
this meant improvements to compatibility
and the inclusion of custom chips
such as the dsp1 super fx sa-1 and
others
zsness also would have a very good
netplay implementation
that was simple and easy to use but
overall the emulator had its issues
sacrificing outright speed meant hacks
needed to be introduced
some games simply didn't work such as
super mario rpg
and overall the sound emulation is quite
poor
thanks to the integer based audio timers
and most of the custom chip
implementations
have their own issues this means that
compatibility
while still quite high meant that it
would be only a matter of time
before you ran into an emulation
specific issue
but even still zeesness was the most
popular super nes emulator for years
and the team released the source code
under the gpl license
the problem however with zeesness was
that it was so tightly coupled with x86
that it was impossible to port and run
elsewhere
over the years z says continued to
receive updates
but ultimately was discontinued in 2007
and now is considered obsolete but its
legacy and
impact on the emulation community in
1997
cannot be understated it showed what was
possible
on 486 hardware but the only emulator
that would emerge out of the war of 1997
would be snes 9x it remains as the
emulator that's still being used today
it runs on many different platforms and
architectures
thanks to its portability and open
source nature
and this is a credit to the original
work done by gary henderson and jeremy
coote
in 2021 there is far more accurate
snes emulators that you can download and
use but these come
at the cost of requiring powerful
hardware it's amazing to imagine
how snes emulation was even possible on
a single threaded
100 megahertz pc back in 1997. it does
make me wonder about the early
development of super nintendo emulation
back in 97 if
that didn't happen whether the landscape
of snes emulation would have changed but
let me know what you thought about this
episode
in the comments below i definitely had a
lot of fun putting this one together for
you guys and as always we are going to
leave it here if you liked it
don't forget to leave me a thumbs up and
i'll catch you guys in the next video
bye for now
[Music]
you