It's your Fantasy........... (Snes9x)

Name: rob_writer

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Product:	Snes9x
Date:	07/11/01 (118 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free, Great, Um, yes

Disadvantages: Not many, Doesnt work with every game, but it does with most

(...............Final Fantasy 6, that is!)

If anyone read my opinion yesterday you may have noticed it said I was busy, so you may wonder why I write another opinion a single day later (well, no ones going to wonder anyway, but I'm going to tell you why!). After coming back from lectures I went to my girlfriends room to get my key for my room (don't ask why she had it!) and walked back up to my room with my bag, but on the way stopped at a friends to see what he was up to. Seeing his guitar propped up neatly in the corner I immediately dropped everything to pick it up and practice the beginning of Nirvana's 'Teen Spirit' which I am desperate to be able to play. Anyway, a cup of tea later I was back in my room, ready to do an afternoons work so I could go out this evening. Having had my customary 10 minute PC game break I reached for my bag....it wasn't there. Turns out I left it my friends room, who just happens to have gone for a 2 hour French test and won't be back until tea time. So I can't do my work. Which means I'm rather annoyed and bored and writing this opinion, which I hope may one day win an award for the most irrelevant introduction ever!

So SNESx then. It's a SNES emulator. Lets you play SNES games on your PC. Pretty neat then really!!

There's loads and loads of SNES emulators out there, some for DOS, some for Windows, and even some for UNIX (well I'm guessing so!). For people who don't know an emulator actually makes your PC run like a SNES ran, so it follows the same processes that the SNES would. Games come in files called roms, which are PC copies of the old cartridges games used to come on. Although all cartridges for the SNES are still officially under copyright, no one cares anymore so they are more or less frely available on the web, with some web sites claiming to have the entire SNES collection online available for download.

Naturally the most authentic wa
y to play on a SNES is to sit down at a TV with a SNES and some cartridges, but if you ask me in some ways playing games on the emulator is better than the real thing! First off it's free, the games are free, as are all the add-ons you would use on your SNES such as extra controllers and a cheat cartridge! You can even make games look better by smoothing the graphics using your 3D card, and play online with others over the internet (although on a 56K modem it was unplayable). Of course some points are worse too, such as the problem that no matter how good any emulator is it can't play every game 100% correctly.

As far as emulation goes, SNES9x is one of the better SNES emulators available, especially as far as precision of emulation goes. Everything is there, including some special chips included in single game cartridges (if you really want to know, the S-RTC is a chip used only in the game Dai Kaijyu Monogatari II). Especially neat are the selection of video and sound engines which can actually make games look and sound better than the original SNES!

SNES9x is very easy to use, requiring little technical knowledge (although you can fiddle if you like!). You just head over to www.snex9x.com, download the latest version and install it. Run it, choose your ROM (it even reads zipped roms!) and then it loads. Play away until 'thoroughly spent' (extra bonus prize for the link to a Dooyoo based thingy!).

If you have a nice joypad you can set SNES9x to use it, and you can run it in a range of resolutions, but apart from that you simply play your SNES game! One of the best features is the ability to save state, which means you save the position that you are up to in the game, even if the original game doesn't have any save features. This means that there's no need to sit and play Mario for hours, and once you've done the hard level you can save it so when you die 5 minutes later you don't have to play through fro
m the start again!

As emulators go SNES9x is pretty comprehensive, although it's main rival ZNES is equally as competent, personally I use SNES9x but I have both for the odd time that SNES9x won't play a game.

The minimum requirements are

Pentium 200Mhz
32Mb RAM
Sound Card

But in reality you're going to need a meatier processor to run some of the more intensive games. Performance is one location that SNES9x falls down in comparison to other emulators, but if you have a PII 400+ then you've nothing to worry about.

As important as the emulator is, more important are the SNES ROMS. Here isn't the place to go in to what's hot and what not, indeed there is a much underused SNES games section on Dooyoo which you should check out but before you move on to the next op, let me remind you of the wonders of the Mario games, be it Mario RPG, Mario Kart or the original Super Mario Bros. Then there's RPG's like Final Fantasy 6 (and 2,3,4 and 5 I think), Chrono Trigger and some Zelda games. Then there's StarFox, and Street Fighter 2....the list goes on, and they're all free. You'll even discover a few unheard of gems on your travels!

Go get it (while I go to see if my mates finished his French test yet!).

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