The SNES Emulation War of 1997 | MVG

[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

Channel: Modern Vintage Gamer

Views: 300,211

Keywords: snes, super nintendo, nintendo, nes, super nes, emulation, early emulation, 1997, msdos, dos, zsnes, snes9x, snes96, snes97, nlksnes, nlke, esnes, vsmc, lord esnes, mvg, modern vintage gamer, emulators, roms, snes games, snes classic, war, snesticle, nesticle

Id: O3vk3cHYLSQ

Length: 13min 48sec (828 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 02 2021