In middle school, I accidentally formatted my PC’s primary hard disk, erasing the operating system and everything else on it. This was before I learned how to ‘source’ Windows for myself, so for a stretch I was stuck playing the same 30-something Super Nintendo games on the MS-DOS-based ZSNES, which was on my secondary disk and thus had survived The Great Formatting.
I’ve written previously about how video games piracy in Indonesia during the nineties and aughties is the only reason gamers here can even participate in contemporary games discourse. Similarly, emulation and emulators like ZSNES were the backdoor into a country club where the door fee was beyond my family’s means. As video games technology zoomed into the future, my brothers and I ,with our outdated PCs , MS-DOS, and an old copy of ZSNES, were finally getting to enjoy an entire generation of Nintendo games we’d missed out on.
I have emulation to thank for granting me entrance to a whole section of gaming I’d only been glimpsed at through Game Informer issues and the occasional visit to a friend’s house, where his older brother had a Super Nintendo we weren’t allowed to touch. ZSNES was our emulator of choice because it ran on DOS, supported texture filtering, and ran like a dream compared to every other SNES emulator on the market. It even had peer-to-peer multiplayer (witchcraft!).
ZSNES suddenly stopped receiving updates back in 2007, and it’s been mostly crickets since. I’d barely even noticed at the time, mostly because I was a year into college, but also because I was in Indonesia, where the previously mentioned rampant piracy finally allowed me to play games that weren’t at least two generations past.
Anyways… ZSNES is back, baby! 🎆 🎆 🎆
Gaming has always been an expensive hobby, but it’s getting worse. Hardware prices are skyrocketing and the industry has settled into the ‘new norm’ of video games at $80 and beyond. If that’s all getting to be too much for you, guess what? Someone left the back door open, Grab a controller and let’s play some Captain Commando (sourced legally from a physical version of the game, of course).
