Emulation
See also: List of SNES emulatorsLike the NES before it, the SNES has retained interest among its fans even following its decline in the marketplace. It has continued to thrive on the second-hand market and through console emulation. The SNES has taken much the same revival path as the NES (see History of the Nintendo Entertainment System).
Emulation projects began with the initial release of VSMC in 1994, and Super Pasofami became the first working SNES emulator in 1996. During that time, two competing emulation projects—Snes96 and Snes97—merged to form a new initiative entitled Snes9x. In 1997, SNES enthusiasts began programming an emulator named ZSNES. These two have remained among the best-known SNES emulators, although development continues on others as well. In 2003, members of both the Snes9x and ZSNES teams and others began a push for exact emulation; this movement is now led by the development of bsnes by a developer named byuu.
Nintendo of America took the same stance against the distribution of SNES ROM image files and the use of emulators as it did with the NES, insisting that they represented flagrant software piracy. Proponents of SNES emulation cite discontinued production of the SNES, the right of the owner of the respective game to make a personal backup, space shifting for private use, the desire to develop homebrew games for the system, the frailty of SNES ROM cartridges and consoles, and the lack of certain foreign imports. Despite Nintendo's attempts to stop the proliferation of such projects, emulators and ROM files continue to be widely available on the Internet.
The SNES was one of the first systems to attract the attention of amateur fan translators: Final Fantasy V was the first major work of fan translation, and was completed in 1998.
Emulation of the SNES is now available on handheld units, such as Android devices, Apple's iPhone and iPad, Sony's PlayStation Portable (PSP), the Nintendo DS and Game Boy Advance, the Gizmondo, the Dingoo and the GP2X by GamePark Holdings, as well as PDAs. While individual games have been included with emulators on some GameCube discs, Nintendo's Virtual Console service for the Wii marks the introduction of officially sanctioned general SNES emulation, though SNES9x GX, a port of SNES9x, has been made for the Wii. Also launched Retrode a console that is able to emulate Super Nintendo and Mega Drive, it only works Licensed games and Betas games.
Read more about this topic: Super Nintendo Entertainment System
Famous quotes containing the word emulation:
“Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)