My first experience of emulation was ZSNES in the late 1990s, letting me return to what then seemed like ancient history: the early 1990s. I could finally finish Secret of Mana! And I did. It was magical to learn that the new thing could pretend to be the old thing, even if it didn't run so well on my Pentium 133. Thirty years (!) have since passed, but now the original developers have rewritten it from scratch to use modern GPUs. It's been renamed Super ZSNES and offers some new features to put that power to use.
Far more accurate CPU and Audio cores than the original ZSNES
GPU-powered PPU core to allow for hi-res Mode 7 and special per-game enhancement features
Classic UI with falling snow, modernized with higher definition and improved UX
Fast forward, rewind, save states, auto save history, save bookmarks, cheat codes, quick load, and more
No Vibe Coding. Classic development style.
Super Enhancement Engine, where the ZSNES developers are enhancing the games one at a time
There's a new upscaler that allows games to use manually-drawn high-resolution graphics, normal maps, replacing audio samples (i.e. with higher-quality samples), heightmaps in Mode 7, and widescreen "whenever the game is internally coded" to make it possible.
We're clearly going beyond emulation here into somewhere new where old games are renovated rather than remade: "This is an early build, so there are still emulation bugs and special chips (DSP1, SuperFX, etc.) have yet to be implemented. A bunch of optimization work has yet to be done so performance may be a bit slow."
It's available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and, soon, iOS.
Update: Modern Vintage Gamer posted some video.
