Taking a Dip in the Dark Side

According to its documentation, the ZSNES is a Super Nintendo Entertainment System (console picture on the left courtesy of Wikipedia) emulator written entirely in assembly and C, and it's supposed to be pretty fast.

I got my hands on this curious piece of software today, courtesy of a friend, along with some ROMs to play around with. Having said that, I don't really encourage gamers to download ROMs but in this case I'm using the ROMs for the sake of experimentation and the fact that I've never actually played on this "ancient" console before.

The emulator itself seems to be pretty comprehensive, with lots of options from setting up input options, saves, cheats and to inputting key combinations. A person familiar to the SNES and emulators might make sense of these options/settings but for a layman like me, I'd rather jump right into the games.

I loaded Street Fighter Zero 2 for a spin but not before I checked the input settings, otherwise I wouldn't know what keys to press.

Having nothing to gauge with, I suppose that gameplay on the emulator is pretty fast. But I would feel much better playing a handheld console game on an actual handheld console having missed a real d-pad.

One real benefit though from using an emulator would be it enables really nice screenshots to be taken :)