So we've been pretty stuck with the same old emulators for a while now... the last ZSNES update was years ago... same with most every other emulator I've used other than handheld ones and I'm here today to tell you about a new emulator I've found that's been very promising.
It's called BizHawk or EmuHawk depending on the window you've got open and it emulates... well pretty much everything as far as I can tell. I mean, just look at all the file types it's associated with here...
So far I've used it to test a couple different NES and SNES games and it's done the job just fine.
It's written in C+ (if I remember correctly), plays in a window but can go full screen, had a massive amount of options for controllers and hot keys that needed very little setup on my part, fraps grabs it no problem, it has two different built in recording options (normal movie file like avi/mp4 and standard emulator video), it can resize the video you're recording (oh how I wish I could have done that with ZSNES) and it's just been really solid. I don't know what else to tell you other than you need to try it.
Let's break it down a bit more though...
Pros
If there's any interest in this at all I'll put a video together and show a little bit of what it can do and all that. As of yet I haven't tried any of the disc image emulation but I'm almost positive that's going to be PS1 kinda stuff.
It's called BizHawk or EmuHawk depending on the window you've got open and it emulates... well pretty much everything as far as I can tell. I mean, just look at all the file types it's associated with here...
So far I've used it to test a couple different NES and SNES games and it's done the job just fine.
It's written in C+ (if I remember correctly), plays in a window but can go full screen, had a massive amount of options for controllers and hot keys that needed very little setup on my part, fraps grabs it no problem, it has two different built in recording options (normal movie file like avi/mp4 and standard emulator video), it can resize the video you're recording (oh how I wish I could have done that with ZSNES) and it's just been really solid. I don't know what else to tell you other than you need to try it.
Let's break it down a bit more though...
Pros
- It just works. So far everything I've thrown at it works and works well. It even played ActRaiser 2 which no other SNES emulator I've tried has managed to really do.
- It's lightweight. For an emulator that does so much you'd expect it to take a lot of resources to do it. I mean we're using software to mimic hardware and that's no easy task, but the program doesn't have a huge processor footprint and played everything fine with no slowdown*.
- Sound a graphics emulate fine. Again going back to ActRaiser 2, it was kinda fancy at the time. Had a lot of layers and mode7 stuff and there was nothing the emulator failed to do.
- Easy to customize controller and hotkey options. I like playing console games with my SNES controllers, it was a snap to setup.
- More options than you can shake a stick at in the Config menu. Normal things like sound, display and paths... but also firmware, cores for GB, NES and N64 modes. A whole "Toolbox" option that gives your virtual pads and macros. Lots of stuff here.
- Maybe it's just me but I had a hard time getting the thing to run in full screen the way I wanted it to. I'll have to tweek the options a bit more but they seem to be pretty limited when it comes to what I can and can't do to fill the screen up. This requires more research.
- Having such a variety of consoles to emulate I think there should be different "loadouts" for controller options. As an example, I like to use the L & R buttons and save/load state buttons on NES games. To do that here I actually have to go back and redefine the buttons everytime I load an NES/SNES game. Not a big issue but kinda annoying.
- Resizing the video as you record it is great with a built in recorder but that is where the processing power gets eaten up. Games become hardly playable if you want to resize it from the basic 256 x 244 size to even a 640 X 480. Not something you'd want to do for action games to be sure. However the resize does look REALLY nice when you do work with it. Again, this could be just me not being familiar enough with the settings to make it work the way it should.
- Almost too many options. Many that I'd never even think to use.
- Cheap Support not for the casual cheater. Maybe ZSNES spoiled me with it's cheat search method but the same method here is a bit weird. Also using a PAR code requires you to know what the address is and what the value are and input them on different lines. Not really too hard as the value's always gonna be the last two digits... but it does go away from the industry standard.
If there's any interest in this at all I'll put a video together and show a little bit of what it can do and all that. As of yet I haven't tried any of the disc image emulation but I'm almost positive that's going to be PS1 kinda stuff.
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