Play your old SuperNintendo video games on Linux with ZSNes

We continue with articles related to Games here DesdeLinux. Esta vez toca hablar de una aplicación que muchos conocen, pero vale la pena mencionar por aquellos que no la conocen, o por los que buscando en Google lleguen a este artículo.

zsnes is an emulator for SNES (Super Nintendo) games, according to Wikipedia:

ZSNES is an SNES emulator. It was released in 1997 on the Internet and developed for DOS, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD. ZSNES was written in Intel x86 assembly language. Therefore, it is not compatible with other architectures such as Macintosh, but since 2001 when it became free, an intense work is being done in porting the assembler routines to C.

Installation

We can find it in the repository of our distro, to install it:

On Debian, Ubuntu or derivatives:

sudo apt-get install zsnes

In ArchLinux or derivatives:

sudo pacman -S zsnes

Note: In ArchLinux zsnes is only available for 32bits, in case you want to install it in 64bits you must enable the multilib repository by putting the following in /etc/pacman.conf:
[multilib] Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

Then they must do:

sudo pacman -Sy

And voila, now they can install it.

When they install it, a question will appear in the terminal, regarding which libgl library to use, simply press Enter and voila, all the dependencies will be installed:

libgl

Once installed, we can find it through the Games category in the menu of our environment, for example in KDE:

kde-zsnes

Then they run it and voila.

In case you don't open them in the conventional way, in a terminal run it as root with sudo

zsnes

Load games

To load games we must download them from somewhere, here is a list of some:

Then through the LOAD option we look for the game, in which we double click and voila, it will open.

Options

We can access the options through the CONFIG menu, there we see that we have options for input devices, devices in general, video, sound, etc.

We can, for example, change the default size of the screen, change the buttons of the 'controller' and set the desired keyboard keys, etc. etc.

Remember that ZSnes is an application that cannot be classified precisely as novel, although once there was talk of giving support for skins to ZSnes and as far as I understand it was not done (which leaves it at a disadvantage in terms of GUI with respect to other emulators such as PSP which I think do support psp themes directly), more customization options ... well, not that we find them in abundance.

Despite this, for those of us who enjoy playing Super Mario World, Zelda, Killer Instinct or other games, ZSnes comes in handy 😀


24 comments, leave yours

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  1.   MegaMauritius said

    Thanks for the article. I even noticed that it detects joysticks.
    Now to play a vast and memorable collection of games 🙂

  2.   edu said

    I use linux mint, and it happens to me that after playing for a while with ZSnes it gets stuck. I have tried it with other distros and I have not had problems, but with Mint it sticks, why is that? Someone else happens?

    1.    cat said

      The same thing happened to me, try Snes9x, which for me gives a thousand kicks to the ZSNes: https://launchpad.net/~bearoso/+archive/ppa

      1.    william_oops said

        Okay, I like Snes9x better. I didn't know there was a version for gnu / linux. Will there be any .deb in cyber-space?
        Greetings.

        1.    Nico said

          this is a repository that among other things has the snes9x: https://launchpad.net/~hunter-kaller/+archive/ppa

        2.    cat said

          In the same PPA, click on where it says VIEW PACKAGE DETAILS and you will get all of them, for Ubuntu lower the one for your version (better to download the deb than add a PPA just for a package) and for Debian lower the one for Mavericks.

  3.   Ugo Yak said

    Wonderful, I think this will be the only way I can play decent Tetris on Linux X)

  4.   sasuke said

    Excellent post friend, a small question will not there be any Gameboy advance emulator (Gba) that runs well in linux if it is to be let me know please that I want to play a little with that emulator.

    1.    sieg84 said

      use any of Windows with Wine.

    2.    Killer_Queen said

      Your solution could be VBA-M (at least mine is). I have tried several GBA emulators on Linux and all a fiasco until I tried this one -> http://sourceforge.net/projects/vbam/

      To download the deb package -> http://sourceforge.net/projects/vbam/files/VBA-M%20GTK%2B%20svn%20r1001/

      I hope it helps you. Regards.

    3.    cat said

      VBA-M, packages available for Arch (repos) and Debian and derivatives (their SourceForge page has the debs): http://sourceforge.net/projects/vbam/files/VBA-M%20GTK%2B%20svn%20r1001/

  5.   diazepam said

    Built in assembler? What a feat.

  6.   juanuni said

    Sness Classic link appears down

  7.   frameworks said

    sad to know that old games are the only ones that linux can run (and not shiny new 3d games)

    my mind is small and it doesn't work well, and I can't figure out how to change this situation
    but it is necessary for the game market to touch down on free code.

    1.    cat said

      Really? There are plenty of games for Linux, it's just a matter of walking around Steam that has excellent titles (and Arch's repos are also full of good games), I even have more games on Linux than on Windows (I only played GTA and Resident there).

      1.    frameworks said

        what I was referring to was that «3d shiny games» are not generally «free software» these games like those of steam are proprietary software with digital restriction management (DRM), my question is what mechanism to do as consumers to that game designers opt in a massive way to make their games free software.

  8.   pablox said

    I remember that I was never able to install it by compiling the source code. Thanks to this emulator I was able to play many RPG Tales of Phantasia, Chrono Trigger and a long list: 3

  9.   Raistlin said

    : ') that nostalgia, I used it when I was just beginning to enter the world of silicon and bits, thank you very much, I will install it when I arrive at my house 😉

  10.   Zironide said

    They lacked http://coolrom.com/ 😉

  11.   ferchmetal said

    thank you very much, now to play !!!

  12.   anonymous said

    Bad emulator really, the sound is a disaster, it is not compatible with many games, especially those that have chips and if it runs, at different speeds from the original machine and with unexpected graphic errors and to make matters worse, being only compatible with roms of the type .smc that are almost all the ones that exist on the internet badly dumped, when the correct format for a good dump is .sfc, so then you have to be passing tools like snespurify if you want to use them in real emulators.
    SNES9x without being the panacea is 10 times better than this, especially in its latest version and that is not exactly one of those that I would recommend, but those who are at least a little knowledgeable on the subject of SuperNES emulation know perfectly that bsnes and higan are at another level, being these the only ones that offer almost 100% precision.

  13.   Wishful said

    If you want an emulator that runs all snes games without exception, give bsnes a try

    1.    Kalevite said

      And how is the bsnes installed?