Friday, April 4, 2008

GSnes9x


Yay, GSnes9x is not a sudoku game! It's a broken SNES emulator frontend, instead! Snes9x is a cross-platform SNES emulator; GSnes9x is a graphical front-end for Gnome so you don't have to muck about with that whole command-line thing.

On the plus side, it includes Snes9x, so you don't have to download that as well. It just works right out of the box. Unfortunately, it doesn't work very well.

Joystick support is broken and sound didn't work for me either. No idea why, as far as the sound goes, though it appears that others had the same problem. The joystick thing is due to an error with the path it looks for the joystick at; it appears to be an Snes9x problem, rather than a GSnes9x problem, but the fix is to edit a configuration file of some sort somewhere, and I can't be bothered.

It also refused to go to full-screen despite the fact that I told it to in the configuration for the rom, and in the global preferences. The graphics look nice in their little window, but everything looks decent when it's really small. Downside? Everything's really hard to read when it's that small.

I decided to test the emulator with a rom from Shadowrun for the SNES; I loved the Genesis cart of the same name (completely different game; same franchise), and never had gotten around to playing the SNES version. It's essentially an adventure game, so the unreadable text was a bit of a hassle.

All in all, I'm sure you could get GSnes9x working with a bit of effort, but I have to wonder why you'd bother. The version of Snes9x it comes with has to be out of date, as GSnes9x has been listed as a dead project on SourceForge since 2004. You'd be much better off finding an SNES emulator that is still being updated, or at least works out of the box - I hear good things about ZSNES. I'll let you know if it works when I get to it.

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