Nintendo - SNES Emulators

<< Go to Windows systems list


Popular Emulators

Name Description
bsnes bsnes is a Super Nintendo emulator that was started on October 14th, 2004. It is now maintained as an open-source community project on GitHub.

bsnes was originally started to try and provide more faithful emulation of the SNES hardware than others emulators of that time. bsnes was the first SNES emulator to achieve 100% compatibility with no known bugs, and today continues to offer the most faithful SNES emulation available. Over time, bsnes grew to emulate more and more systems until the name became untenable, and the project was then renamed to higan on August 9th, 2012.

higan continued development as a multi-system emulator up until May 17th, 2018 when a bsnes revival project was announced, with the stated goal of creating a standalone SNES emulator that went back to bsnes' 2004 roots. At this time, bsnes was forked from higan, and the additional emulation cores were removed. A new user-interface was created, and many additional performance enhancements and features were added to the new emulator.

On February 22nd, 2019 the new bsnes software was completed and released to the public. It is still under active development to this day.
Snes9x Snes9x is a portable, freeware Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) emulator. It basically allows you to play most games designed for the SNES and Super Famicom Nintendo game systems on your PC or Workstation; which includes some real gems that were only ever released in Japan.

Snes9x is the result of well over three years worth of part-time hacking, coding, recoding, debugging, divorce, etc. (just kidding about the divorce bit). Snes9x is coded in C++, with three assembler CPU emulation cores on the i386 Linux and Windows ports.

Currently there are many ports of Snes9x available, please check http://www.snes9x.com/downloads.php to see if a port exists for your system.


Other Emulators

Name Description
CHAMPI An SNES emulator, entirely in Spanish. Its got average compatibility, FX chip support, transparency, and mosaic effects. It's outmatched by ZSNES/SNES9X but you might want it if you're fluent in the Spanish language.
ESNES Lord ESNES and Ishmair made a great SNES emulator. It is written in assembly and has sound support, thanks to Ishmair's efforts. It was one of the best. Now, it has merged with NLKSNES to become NLKE.
F-Zero VS F-Zero VS is an awesome emulator that gives multiplayer capability for the game, F-Zero. It's a custom build of SNES9X that constantly patches the game with player positions and other data. You can play locally or online with up to four players.
Geiger's Snes9x Debugger Geiger (AKA Evil Peer) has compiled a new version of Snes9x which includes some rather hefty additions. Mostly geared towards romhacking/reverse-engineering of SNES games, the additions include a robust Debugger, Hex Editor, Tracer, and code "usage mapping" features. Currently the most advanced SNES debugging emulator.

New version includes hotkey support and register editing.
GrimSNES An ancient SNES emulator. It only displays ROM properties, and isn't worth downloading.
Mesen-S Mesen-S is a high-accuracy SNES emulator for Windows and Linux. Game Boy and Game Boy Color games are also supported, along with Super Game Boy emulation.

It contains most of the features found in Mesen, including an extensive set of debugging tools.
NLKE ESNES and NLKSNES joined forces so the authors could work on one emulator together. NLKE was born. This emulator has all the features of ESNES along with the speed of NLKSNES. Transparencies are also available, although unoptimized rather slow. There's also a simple GUI as well. NLKE is better than many but ZSNES is faster and more compatibible.
NLKSNES This emulator was one of the fastest SNES emulators there was, and it even featured Mode7. There's no sound support, though. It merged with ESNES to because NLKE.
no$sns nocash SNES/SFC emulator/debugger for windows
Pasofami This emulator has been around for quite some time. Little is known about it however since it is natively in Japanese. This also appears to be crippleware.
RASnes9x Gives one to ability to earn achievements points for select SNES games.
RSRSNes An old SNES emulator, only capable of running the demo rom that comes packaged with it. Its really only here for archival purposes.
Sim-SNEX An old SNES emulator in preliminary stages, only capable of displaying ROM properties & information. It's here for archival purposes and not worth downloading.
SNEeSe This emulator can play many commercial games, and also has Mode7 scaling effects, along with HiROM support, decent sound, and more. It is written in a mix of C, C++ and assembly. Most emulation routines are done in assembly. It's quite slow, so brace yourself. It was discontinued by Savoury SnaX, but TRAC never stopped working on it, so private betas were still being released.
SNem This is a newer SNES emulator and is in active progress. It is open source and runs more games now in the WIP and the graphics engine is better. One to watch for progress.The WIP version includes the source code
SNEmul SNEmul hasn't been updated in a long time now and is assumed to be discontinued. It has sound, decent compatibility, doesn't require VESA2 and has one of the best GUIs ever. This is a good emulator but nowhere near the quality of newer emulators.
SNEqr This emulator has been discontinued. It has some useful features, such as automatic state saving and cheat searching and a good GUI. However, it has medium compatibility and lacks sound, 16-bit color mode and other advanced features found in more popular emulators. The source code is available for anyone to look at and play around with.
SNES Professional An archaic SNES emulator capable of running multiple demos. Its here for archival purposes only, and not worth downloading.
Snes9k This is an unofficial work in progress of Snes9x with Kaillera netplay support.
Snes9X Direct3D This is a derivative of Snes9x which switches the Snes9X display code from DirectDraw to Direct3D9.
The advantages are an optional bi-linear filter and no problems with Aero on Vista.
One disadvantage: the menu doesn't work in fullscreen without flickering, so it's disabled for now (ESC now exits fullscreen).
Last update: 2009-02-25
Snes9x-rr Snes9x is a pretty full featured emulator, and a good one, but have you ever wanted an easy way to record your gameplay? Enter Snes9x-rr. This branch of Snes9x adds a slew of video recording features.
Snes9xGL Kreed has made a version of Snes9X which uses OpenGL instead of Glide to do fullscreen bilinear filtering. It looks nice, but there's no GUI.
Snes9xPP SE This is a custom version of Snes9x which adds an HQ2X filter. A processor with a speed of at least 1.5GHz is highly reccomended.
SNESGT SNESGT is a fairly new emulator from GIGO and Hii (who also made G-NES and TGB Dual). It's the best emulator if you're looking for the most accurate BS Satellaview emulation (even better than SNES9X & ZSNES).
SNEShout Based on the Snes9x (1.37) core, this emulator features a few few minor tweaks and one major improvment; SNES games can be played using the Japanese version of ViaVoice. It comes with voice mappings for Street Fighter 2 and Puyo Puyo 2 but more can always be made. This version comes with the option of making the interface in Japanese, Chinese (BIG5), or English.
SNESLite A very old emulator released as a demo. It not worth downloading, here for archival purposes.
Super Sleuth Super Sleuth is an emulator in the works for about six years, only publicly released recently. It features a realtime debugging system and great compatibility.
TheSE TheSE, which stands for The SNES Emulator, is an emulator from the same team that created the now dead USNES. It hasn't been updated in a long time, the website is down and it's probably discontinued.
TrepSNES A primitive and old emulator, only able to run a few opcodes. Its here for archival purposes, and is not worth downloading.
USNES If there is a more useless SNES emulator than VSMC this has to be it. It only had two releases, both which were slow and buggy. The USNES team is now programming the emulator TheSE, but progress on it seems to be stalled. This one is simply here for nostalgic reasons, as it only runs a few SNES Games.
VSMC VSMC was pretty good for its time, but many emulators cam out after it that were far better and free too. Now ZSNES and SNES 9x are in a completely different generation than this. Don't bother with it.
xSnes The idea behind the xSnes fork of higan/bsnes is to preserve and separate the near perfect Super Nintendo portion from the multi-emulator known as higan. This means the emulator cores for the 8-bit Nintendo, and Game Boy Advance have been removed. The Game Boy and Game Boy Color emulators remain intact to accommodate the Super Game Boy. However, the Game Boy and Game Boy Color are not emulated as independent systems as compiled. Therefore, to play Game Boy & Game Boy Color games, you must use the Super Game Boy exclusively as a Super Nintendo Adapter. I agree clean code is very important.Therefore, I have tried to follow byuu's lead. The only code I would find to be outside of this philosophy would be the BS-X code, but I must stress that code is extremely narrow and only pertains specifically to the BS-X Satellaview.
Z-Net I Z-Net I is a program that helps users find other people to play SNES multi-player games with online, and easily launch those games with the emulator ZSNES. It was made as a replacement for zbattle.net, and both looks and functions exactly the same. For those that have never used that program, it was a program that did exactly as mentioned before, with a focus on simplicity to be user friendly.
ZSNES ZSNES is a Super Nintendo emulator. On April 2, 2001 the ZSNES project was GPL'ed and its source released to the public. It currently runs on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and DOS. Remember that this is a public beta so don't expect this to run on your machine.


Nintendo - SNES Emulators on Other Platforms

Linux (2)
BeOS (3)
Macintosh (4)
Amiga (3)
Consoles
-- Dreamcast (4)
-- Gamecube (3)
-- Playstation 2 (1)
-- Nintendo 64 (1)
-- Game Boy / Advance (2)
-- Nintendo DS (4)
-- Game Park 32 (3)
-- Playstation Portable (3)
-- Nintendo Wii (2)
-- GP2X (1)
-- Nintendo 3DS (1)
Java (1)
Pocket PC (2)
Windows Mobile (1)
iOS (iPhone/iPod Touch) (1)
Android (3)
JavaScript (1)