ZSNES
ZSNES is a free software Super Nintendo Entertainment System emulator written mostly in x86 assembly with official ports for Linux, DOS, Windows, and unofficial ports for Xbox and macOS.

Background 
Development of ZSNES began on 3 July 1997 and the first version was released on 14 October 1997, for DOS. Since then, official ports have been made for Windows and Linux. The emulator became free software under the GPL-2.0-or-later license on 2 April 2001. Despite an announcement by adventure_of_link stating that "ZSNES is NOT dead, it's still in development" made on the ZSNES board after the departure of its original developers zsKnight and _Demo_, development has slowed dramatically since its last version (1.51 released on 24 January 2007). Much of the development efforts concentrated on increasing the emulator's portability, by rewriting assembly code in C and C++, including a new GUI using Qt.

ZSNES is notable in that it was among the first to emulate most SNES enhancement chips at some level.  Until version 1.50, ZSNES featured netplay via TCP/IP or UDP.

Because ZSNES is largely written in low-level assembly language for x86 processors, the idea of porting ZSNES to devices using RISC architectures such as ARM is highly unfeasible. Commercial gaming consoles did not typically use x86 processors (with the original Xbox being the most well-known exception) prior to the eighth generation, with the 2013 releases of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

Reception 
ZSNES was generally well-regarded in its heyday, with British game magazine Retro Gamer in 2005 calling the emulator "very impressive" and praising the "incredible toaster mode".

However, with the more recent development of more accurate SNES emulators such as Snes9x and higan as computers have gradually become more powerful, retrospective reviews have criticized ZSNES not only for its relatively low accuracy, but also because its former popularity has led several fan-made translations and modifications to be designed with specific workarounds for the emulator's inaccuracies, which often makes them unplayable both on real hardware and in the newer emulators that have superseded ZSNES. Some of these other emulators even include a mode which is explicitly designed to replicate the quirks of ZSNES, allowing the ZSNES-focused mods to become playable again.

In 2015 an exploit that allowed a specially crafted SNES ROM to gain control of the host system, and thus be able to execute malicious code, was discovered in version 1.51; a partially fixed preview build was released shortly afterwards.

See also 
 List of video game console emulators

References

External links 
 
 ZSNES Documentation
 Interview with zsKnight

Super Nintendo Entertainment System emulators
Linux emulation software
Windows emulation software
DOS emulation software
Free emulation software
Free software that uses SDL
Cross-platform software
Free software programmed in C
Free software programmed in C++
Assembly language software
Portable software