ZSNES was generally well-regarded in its heyday, with British game magazine Retro Gamer in 2005 calling the emulator 'very impressive' and praising the 'incredible toaster mode'. Commercial gaming consoles did not typically use x86 processors (with the original Xbox being the most well-known exception) prior to the eighth generation, with the 2013 releases of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

īecause ZSNES is largely written in low-level assembly language for x86 processors, the idea of porting ZSNES to devices using RISC architectures such as ARM is highly unfeasible. Until version 1.50, ZSNES featured netplay via TCP/IP or UDP.

ZSNES is notable in that it was among the first to emulate most SNES enhancement chips at some level. Much of the development efforts concentrated on increasing the emulator's portability, by rewriting assembly code in C and C++, including a new GUI using Qt. Despite an announcement by adventure_of_link stating that 'ZSNES is NOT dead, it's still in development' made on the ZSNES board after the departure of its original developers zsKnight and _Demo_, development has slowed dramatically since its last version (1.51 released on 24 January 2007). The emulator became free software under the GPL-2.0-or-later license on 2 April 2001. Since then, official ports have been made for Windows and Linux. Development of ZSNES began on 3 July 1997 and the first version was released on 14 October 1997, for DOS.

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