Super Nintendo Entertainment System

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (or SNES as it was affectionately known) was Nintendo's answer to the 16 bit Sega Megadrive in the early 90s. It was introduced after the megadrive, with more powerful hardware, and although the megadrive had already taken off, the SNES was soon recognised as the better of the two. Super Mario World continued the series of platform games starring Nintendo's iconic plumber, although it didn't really show off the true potential of the SNES. This was demonstrated later with a near perfect conversion of Capcom's arcade mega-hit: Street Fighter 2, which crushed the morale of many a megadrive owner. Other brilliant games were released, such as Megaman X, Zelda, Super Mario Kart and Rare's Donkey Kong Country series, marking a new level in home gaming, and the pinnacle of the 16 bit gaming era.

Later in it's life, the Super FX chip was built into several SNES cartridges, as a co-processor for some fantastic 2D and 3D effects, such as the mist in Donkey Kong Country 2. Super Mario Kart (SMK) also featured a RISC co-processor for floating point calculations, called the DSP1. Both of these have become notorious, since they served as good copy protection in the days of the SNES, and in more recent times have hindered emulation with knowledge of these chips being hard to come by. SuperFX emulation is recently starting to become more and more satisfactory, but DSP emulation still eludes even the best emulators, leaving the legendary SMK unplayable.

Snes9X

Ported to the Acorn originally by Gareth Long, with more recent versions by David McEwen, this emulation project was previously cancelled following various arguments and problems. At the time of cancellation, it was only available for the PC, and was by far the best SNES emulator available, with great compatibility and a wonderful GUI, a dark day for emulation indeed. Previously a merger of Snes96 and Snes97, Snes9X now lay dormant for several months while other emulators grew, and overtook it.

With no warning, it was announced by one of the original authors, Jeremy Koot, that 2 new coders had taken over the project and were continuing to develop it for a new release, with new SuperFX emulation added. What is more, they were looking for people to port the emulator to as many platforms as possible. Snes9X is now a very successful multi-platform emulator which has rocked the emulation world.

Written entirely in C, Snes9X is still surprisingly fast, running at full speed on a StrongARM, and providing a quality of game never before seen on the Acorn. The compatibility is superb, and even massive 4Mb ROMs have no problems running on the emulator (providing you have enough RAM). In several SNES cartridges, in order to supplement the relatively slow CPU, co-processors of one form or another were used, commonly Argonaut Software's RISC math co-processor, the SuperFX, and NEC's DSP1 floating-point unit. The previously token DSP1 and SuperFX emulations have now been improved and the infamous Super Mario Kart and StarFox can now run perfectly, after many years bringing frustration to retrogamers everywhere.

Snes9X
Speed Rating: ARM 2 ARM 250 ARM 3 ARM 6 ARM 7 StrongARM

David McEwen's Acorn Snes9X page
Gareth Long's outdated Acorn Snes9X page
Generic Snes9X page

SNEStool

The icebird group have released SNEStool, a SNES ROM image manipulator which allows detection of ROM image format, and conversion between SMC/SWC, FIG, MGH, GD and RAW formats on your Acorn. It also allows splitting and recombining of ROM images to allow them to fit on several disks. With this tool, game disk copiers can be used to dump and recombine ROMs, and you can be sure that any ROM image you download you'll be able to play.

SNEStool v0.09 2/5/98 (12Kb ZIP file)

Technical Information
CPU - 65c816 (16bit 6502 derivative) at 3.58MHz
Display- 512 x 448 with 256 colours out of 32K
Sound - SPC700 with 8 channels
RAM - 128K
VRAM - 64K
ROM - 2-32 Mbits (0.5-8 Mb)
reference - Yoshi's document & Michael Koenig

ROMs:
Top 5 SNES ROM sites
Emperor Gesthals's ROM page
ROM Nation
NailBomb's SNES ROMs
ScrewSNESica
Demon's Bane ROMs
The Emulator Zone
SNESmerism
Elite World
Orb
Annop's ROMs
Soul ROMs
Bowl 147
SNES Emulation Centre Homemade Games
SNES Emulation Centre Demos

Recommended ROMs:
Street Fighter 2, Super Mario World, Yoshi's Island (SMW2), Super Tennis, Megaman X, Donkey Kong Country 1,2 &3, Legend of Zelda, Urban Strike, Super Off Road, Civilisation, Super Mario Kart.