Insane Difficulty: A Request for all SNES Modders and Beta Testers - Insane Difficulty

Yeah I mean, I understand where you're coming from. It's just that there's a point where it's not realistic to make a game work on ZSNES. Like it's just not even remotely feasible. Especially the ones that use more sophisticated chips ala SMRPG or Starfox.

There's also stuff where some games "work" but don't behave the same. Like Super Metroid having lag frames emulated like it were on hardware where ZSNES would not emulate those same lag frames. Stuff like that is minor and acceptable to most people but it's not really the same game when that happens.

The one thing ZSNES has going for it is that these situations are fairly uncommon when it comes to mods.

I'll always question whether a bug reported in ZSNES is duplicated elsewhere though.

zSNES is shit, but more people use it, so people will continue to take it into consideration for their mods.

That does not change the fact that zSNES is shit.

/thread

I'd like to give an example: until recently, ROTDS had been exclusively tested on zsnes. Because of zsnes bypassing/tweaking some snes behavior and not accurately emulating the snes, it allows to bypass a limitation in FF6 song data. Songs were ok in zsnes but had audio glitches ion every other emulators. This does not mean zsnes is superior for playing the song in the way you coded it while other fails at it, it just mean zsnes is innacurate and shit for development.

I honestly can't bear to use SNES9x...I've tried more than once and I have never liked it in the slightest. zSNES is so much easier for playtesting purposes. I see all the arguments here but if for some reason exclusively using zSNES makes it so that I can't have my mod on a flash cart, so be it.

To clarify, I'm not against the premise being stated here, I'm sure it is better. I really want to make sure my mod will work if put on a flash cart.

The problem is that I don't like much of anything about SNES9x. The increased speed option sucks, there is sound cracking, the save state system is much more time consuming to use. The program is just clunky in general for my purposes. zSNES is far from problem free but its a lot easier to use to test things and has made my life a lot easier. I do a lot of reloading and testing so I need the fastest, most streamlined way to do testing possible, and SNES9x is a pain in the ass.

auraplatonic, on 28 March 2016 - 01:11 PM, said:

It's about so much more than just whether or not it plays on actual hardware though. ZSNES allows a developer to do things in a game that aren't otherwise possible. When a game becomes reliant on such things, it ceases to be a SNES game.

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If that's true, then you better make sure your more invasive changes (graphics, sound, etc) work in SNES9x and Higan, because if they don't, they won't work on a flash cart.

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What version of SNES9x are you using? I've never really had the save state issues with SNES9x. The sound is a little borked, but the frame skip stuff works well enough for testing from my experience.

Aura sounds like he's describing SNES9x from a decade ago when I tried both it and ZSNES and settled for the latter.

I think a good option for development is bsnes+. It doesn't has the ROM loading in library feature that can be annoying when you go back and forth making changes to the ROM and testing. It has all the necessary debug features though not as many as snes9x debugger. However snes9x debugger can be a nightmare on some modern OS (mainly Win 8, 8.1 and 10) and can crash more than regularly. bsnes+ will be the logical replacement for snes9x debugger given it continues being developed.

For strict testing, Higan, Bizhawk (has bsnes core) and snes9x are what I use. zsnes is good for playing but should never be a reference on how a ROM is played. I still like the lossless video recording feature from zsnes.