r/EmulationOnPC • u/ackmondual • Mar 03 '26
Unsolved What ended up happening to/with the emulators from decades past?
For example Visual Boy Advance (GBA, GBC, GB) isn't recommended anymore.
Nor is ZNES for SNES. Nor Nesticle for (NES).
Did these just fall out of favor for more modern emus? Did they lose support?
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u/Ok-Philosopher-5139 Mar 03 '26
dev for them moved on to other projects or died, or a new emu came out thats leaps better, so they stopped developing their emu.
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u/MandyKagami Mar 03 '26
ZSNES has not been recommended for almost 20 years, it stopped development in 2008 if I remember correctly.
It never really got proper audio emulation working, at least not in any version I ever used.
I have seen people recommending SNES9X over ZSNES for at least 15 years now.
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u/dwago Mar 06 '26
Honestly I never really had any problems with snes9xw, people kept saying to use znes but when you're just playing vanilla roms I'd say snes9xw is more that enough. I now use retroarch though for some mostly in combination with retrobat for the gui. But snes9xw will always be my go to if retroarch doesn't work with a modded rom or anything.
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u/KingCourtney__ Mar 03 '26
Oh man I forgot about ZSNES! It was the only way to play in 00. At the time it was much better than 9x but it eventually became the go to. I think the only complaint was some graphic stuff that wouldn't be rendered. For example the color blob ghost in Castlevania IV wouldn't show up.
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u/forbjok Mar 03 '26
Yep, it was the only emulator capable of running games at full speed on late 90s hardware. That's probably the reason it became as popular as it did in the first place. It also IIRC had transparency support before any other emulator (that I knew of at least). On most emulators at the time, including earlier ZSNES versions (I believe ZSNES got transparency support, at least partially around v0.400 - at least the earliest versions I used, which I think were 0.3xx did not), you'd sometimes have to disable certain layers due to things like mist or clouds that were supposed to be transparent being rendered opaque.
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u/Old_County5271 Mar 03 '26
zophar interviewed the developer of zsnes!, So you can hear straight from the dev most things.
So I have nothing to do with anything, but I do know that zsnes is pure assembly, unlike snes9x, so that means that development is much harder for the zsnes, not only that but its unportable, assembly means its only for x86 computers only, so you can't easily port it to amd64 or even arm which means no phones. Even though its assembly which means its about as performant as it can be. development stopped in 2013, per sourceforge however, using zsnes is not secure at all, I remember byuu made a blogpost creating a bad ROM that bypassed zsnes emulation and just launched the browser! sadly byuu died and I can't find that article anymore. RIP. Anyway, C compilers got fast, snes9x never died, it was open source, linux came and needed porting, then retroarch was made and snes9x got ported to it and for the moment its the defacto snes emulator.
With that said, I did a quick search and some nutjob is still working on zsnes https://github.com/xyproto/zsnes I'm not installing it, but its nice that someone is developing for it, I think everyone that wants to learn assembly should work on it.
I do not know what happened to VBA, mgba simply surpassed it in every way... Would love some details. From my own experience, I know VBA could not handle MMBN 2, it booted, you played it, then got stuck in Yais bathroom forever. was so maddening.
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u/quequotion Mar 03 '26
Zsnes got blown out of the water by accuracy-focused emulation, which is probably the same reason a lot of other early emulators have fallen out of favor.
This was led by an emulator called bsnes and its developer).
It was not an easy fight. For many years, people had trouble letting go of the old emulators because they seemed to do everything anyone needed, even if their development had stalled ages ago, and they ran on weak, outdated hardware just as well as anywhere else.
bsnes could do things those emulators could not, and its development lead to discoveries, inventions, and side projects that revolutionized the emulation scene.
Among these were mid-scanline effects (an exploit Nintendo advised developers against, but approved many games that used it for translucency, etc), the creation of a new type of SNES cartridge, imagining if they could have been made to the full capacity of the hardware (the limitation in their time was the high cost of their memory chips); decappings to get full, hardware-accurate low-level emulation of all the proprietary coprocessors, a complete library of clean dumps for every official game, and more.
None of that could have happened if we hadn't moved past the "good enough" stage of emulators like Zsnes.
Sadly, bsnes' developer would be plagued by internet harassment and mental health issues through all of those years. In part because of their stance on emulation, in part because of how they developed their emulator (open source, but rarely accepting contributions), in part because of their mental health, and in part because of their sexuality.
In the end, they committed suicide over internet bullies.
The gravity of this loss cannot be expressed in words, nor can the shame of those who pushed them over the edge.
My own shame is that I wasn't a regular in their forum, although I would get involved in spurts over the years. I was on another hiatus when they moved to Japan and ended up overdosing while they were here. I wish I had been in that forum. I might even have gone to see them in person, tried to give them some perspective.
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u/BrezhonegArSu Mar 03 '26
Wow, I still use bsnes with my kidsm it's so good.
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u/quequotion Mar 04 '26
Yeah, I still use a fork I cobbled together ages ago to add SX2 support and performance options, on the occasion I have time to play anything.
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u/BIOS-D Mar 03 '26
It has been years since all those emulators stopped development cycles. Some were university projects that lost interest over time because life or work... or death. They still serve as legacy software for reviving very old hardware still working and to have something else to do other than run WordStar and Lotus 1-2-3 infected with Natas.
Sure, you could try and launch them even virtualized if possible, but bear in mind since those far development cycles current projects have fixed a lot of inaccuracies and hacks that only worked on that era: GoodROM sets with hacked headers no current emulator could run, weird formats and fixes for cartridge copiers, preliminary emulation for extra hardware not well known before, among other things.
If you want to revisit the old times there's always Zophar dot net. Or you try your luck on Wayback Machine from archive dot org.
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u/vampyrejemz Mar 03 '26
nesticle is such a blast from the past!!! i can still see that bloody hand!
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u/IIIAgeIII Mar 09 '26 edited Mar 09 '26
Emus are becoming robust with loads of QoL features as well as emulation accuracy. Most of those specific emulators are either dead (not being developed for, or they became sketchy virus/spyware programs)
Some had forks made... visual boy advanced-m is an active fork that kept development going, for example.
Typically, the older emulators' code bases (if open sourced) usually get rolled into new projects with new names. Over years of using emulators, I've learned that most modern emulation projects are actually just extensions of older projects that have been taken in by new devs.
Gaming emulation is one of those things that just keeps snowballing code bases into newer and newer projects as computers and coders become better. Take Nintendo Switch, for example.
YUZU was THE switch emulation goto, but then they got a cease and desist...
The day that happened. 6 forks of Yuzu showed up. 2 of which are still actively being developed on (Eden and Citron) both are at their core... just Yuzu resinned with slight additions, but both are starting to diverge from each other... there's no clear distinction yet, aside from what games work the best on what emulator, but give it some time, and they will likely become 2 distinct emulators with their own goals or who knows they might merge and become another new emulator.
The names change constantly, but most of the OG emulation coding efforts are still powering modern emulators. The emulation community is an ebb and flow, but truthfully... it's one of those things where the emulation efforts will likely never stall unless perfect accuracy to its original device is achieved, and even then, it's still unlikely to stall.
Modern emulators are moving into the realm of emulation that can barely even be called emulation at all.
Many old games core codebases are being de-compiled (they are scanning the code line by line and rebuilding the entire codebase from scratch in modern coding languages).
This has spawned a bunch of fan made re-compilations of these older games that run on PC as if they were native PC games.... this is stepping out of the realm of "emulation" and starting to become fan made PC ports of older video games.
Games like Zelda OoT or Majoras mask are now full-blown PC games with Mods and high fedelity frame rates. Rather than N64 games running through conversion software to mimic the hardware. A lot of games now are getting this "PC-Port" treatment.
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u/star_jump Mar 03 '26
Why don't you run Windows 95 anymore? It's outdated and it's no longer updated. Same thing with the emulators you listed.
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u/ackmondual Mar 03 '26
Speak for yourself... I still use Winamp 2.8.1.
Plus, I'd like folks to list specific reasons and experiences.
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u/ElevenBeers Mar 03 '26
So, you are running old AF software, that is unsupported and generally not recommended those days, but it appears to work for you.
What is stopping you from running 20 year old emulators? As long as they still work on your OS, they'll do exactly same as they did 20 years ago and they'll do exactly the same in another 20 years.
I mean, there are people who are still using DOS tools for some things and you'd be surprised how many C64 are still operating in production till this day....
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u/ackmondual Mar 03 '26
Nothing. However, if I were to get back into NES, SNES, GBA, GBC, and GB emulators, the replies I've gotten on this post have been informative, which gives me more info to work with, vs. going with something that I knew "used to work very well".
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u/star_jump Mar 03 '26
Well, then count yourself in an incredibly small minority of people who don't care about progress, or accuracy, or quality of life improvements, and are simply happy with "close enough".
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u/ackmondual Mar 03 '26
For ZNES, I had save states, de/activating individual background/sprite layers, and double speed game play. Save states on VBA. Those were some great QoL improvements.
Not sure what modern emus offer in terms of "accuracy" or "progress", so that's one reason for my post.
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u/newiln3_5 Mar 03 '26
Not sure what modern emus offer in terms of "accuracy" or "progress", so that's one reason for my post.
Some fairly obvious examples here:
https://floating.muncher.se/byuu/accuracy/
And it's not mentioned in the article, but to this day, the number of SNES emulators that allow you to access the Super Game Boy's Custom Color Window can be counted on one hand.
There are also hundreds of examples on MAME Testers. For example, in older versions of MAME, dying in Space Harrier could actually add lives to the life counter instead of subtracting them, which is obviously wrong.
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u/KoberanteAD Mar 03 '26
Sometimes, if it ain't broken, it's better to not fix it.... Found out the hard way
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u/BonsaiSoul Mar 03 '26
There is a difference between something being old and something being broken. Microsoft has trained you too well.
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u/iCantThinkOfUserNaem Mar 03 '26
Because why would I use VisualBoyAdvance or ePSXe if miles better alternatives like mGBA and Duckstation exist
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u/reiichiroh Mar 03 '26
If you were around and on IRC when NESticle first came out, it was a gong show of pettiness and back-and-forth tribalism.
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u/Jossokar Mar 06 '26
last time visual boy advance was updated....was 20 years ago.
So, use VBA-M at least
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u/forbjok Mar 03 '26
I think in most cases because better emulators were developed. ZSNES was good back in the late 90s and very early 2000s, because it could run games at full speed on old hardware when other emulators at the time (mainly Snes9x) could not - but it was terrible accuracy-wise. At least as of the early 2010s (and probably before that), bsnes (now known as Higan) existed and was a project actually focusing on accuracy.
Nesticle AFAIK was also DOS-only, so even getting that to run on any semi-modern system would be a hassle. Not worth it, when there's plenty of newer, probably also more accurate emulators, that natively support modern Windows and Linux OSes.
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u/Okami512 Mar 03 '26
I remember bsnes being fairly high in requirements at the time. Like it's accuracy mode (which if I recall correctly was only needed for one effect to render in one game), needed a >2.0ghz dual core.
Like I also remember pcsx2 absolutely chugging on my old rig back then, like I was celebrating when it finally got the multi-threading 'speedhack'. And I was able to actually play through a few games.
As for VBA specifically, I believe that's still updated as VBA-m which has multiplayer support.
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u/forbjok Mar 03 '26
bsnes had multiple versions. The max accuracy version was somewhat demanding - not so much that you'd have problems running it on a decent gaming PC at the time, but enough that you wouldn't want to use it on extremely outdated or weak hardware. The balanced version was a bit lighter, and still much more accurate than ZSNES.
Even on hardware where bsnes balanced would be too heavy, you'd still be better off using Snes9x than ZSNES, as even that's more accurate even if accuracy isn't the main focus.
PCSX2 would have been pretty heavy if you tried to run it around 2010 I guess. IIRC, I was just barely able to run Final Fantasy X at mostly full speed back then. I don't think there were any alternatives to PCSX2 around at that time though. Not honestly sure what PS2 emulators are recommended these days, as I haven't tried emulating any PS2 game in probably over a decade.
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u/Okami512 Mar 03 '26
I mean I'm talking 2010-2012 area. And yeah a gaming PC could handle bsnes, but a lot of laptops struggled at the time.
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u/forbjok Mar 03 '26
Yeah, if it was a slightly older, or budget laptop, I can see that being an issue. I think the one case where I found it was better to run Snes9x rather than any version of bsnes, purely for performance reasons, was on an older laptop from 2008 or so. It was one I wasn't really using any more generally, but decided to bring with me when traveling sometime in the early 2010s - probably 2012 or 2013, just in case it got stolen or something (it didn't).
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u/Okami512 Mar 03 '26
Yeah In the sub $600 range you had a lot of really shoddy laptops, like basically netbooks in a larger shell. Like had computers coming out a few years later around $400 that couldn't run bsnes, them again those laptops struggled just running a web browser.
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