What Is The Best Snes Emulator?
What Is The Best Snes Emulator?
Best Snes Emulator: Despite the fact that gaming has advanced leaps and bounds over the last 3 odd decades, there’s nobody like the amazing fix of sentimentality that you get from playing classic SNES games from the 90’s. However, because of the fact that SNES-style consoles are way out of fashion these days and pulling your hands on a working model could prove to be a herculean task, enjoying games like Super Mario or Horse Kong could prove to be a hassle.
In order to play representative SNES games you’re now compelled to use emulators and even though there are quite a few options to choose from, not all of them are capable of handing over the same understanding that you’d get from playing the game on an old-timey console. So if you’ve been looking for ways to enjoy your favorite classic SNES game, here are the 10 best SNES emulators for PC, Mac and Android that you should try.

Best Snes Emulator For Windows 10
RetroArch’s biggest advantage is its sheer figure of settings. This can be overwhelming for some users, but it allows you to create as good an emulation experience as available, by enabling GPU Sync for lower input lag, or adding shaders for that classic CRT attention.
The bsnes core is the most accurate SNES emulator out there, which means there should be little to no bugs or malfunction in any game. If you have the resources to run it, it should be nearly perfect.
Also, while RetroArch can be convoluted, it’s a bit simpler to set up than Higan, the desktop version of the bsnes emulator.
As we mentioned above, RetroArch can be quite complicated. Installing cores and twisting settings is really perplexing if you aren’t familiar with RetroArch, and since there aren’t a lot of guides on it, you’ll do a lot of googling to figure it out, especially if you use it for extraer than one emulator. But it’s less work than trying to set up Higan (especially if you’re already commonplace with RetroArch from other emulators).
Secondly, the bsnes cores compel a fairly powerful computer facing run—the cost of accuracy, unfortunately—so if you’re on a particularly weak machine, it may not even be able to run bsnes-mercury-performance very well. In that case, you may need to settle for Snes9x.
Best Snes Emulator Reddit

Emulators are a profitable part of Android’s past. Emulators allowed gamers to play their favorite retro titles on mobile. It provided hours of satisfaction for not that much money. Thankfully, there are a decent number of really good SNES emulators available to replay those prototypes like Chrono Trigger, Super Mario World, and Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Super Nintendo emulators have plateaued a bit. These are not only good, but excessively stable. Here are the best SNES emulators for Android! Don’t forget to pair it with one of the best Bluetooth controllers as well! Or double up on the sentimentality with a Bluetooth controller that looks like the old SNES controllers.
- John NESS
- RetroArch
- The Retro Box
- Snes9x EX+
- SuperRetro16
Higan (formerly known as bsnes). It is literally, 100% bug free and altogether accurate. It’s the only emulator that can play Speedy Gonzales through to culmination. All other emulators crash about halfway through when you hit a switch. Ars Technica has a great article about this emulator, and what makes it so much better than Zsnes. Higan has some hefty system preconditions though. Perfect accuracy in an emulator isn’t cheap. You will want at least a 3.0GHz CPU to play games with Higan. If your calculator isn’t up for that, then I would recommend Snes9x. It’s still leaps and bounds ahead of Zsnes but can run on most housewares you will find out there.
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (also known as Super NES, SNES, or Super Nintendo) was a 16-bit video game console. Nintendo discharged it in Japan in 1990 as the Super Famicom (or SFC for short). They later they released it in North America, Europe, and other territories. The Super Nintendo was the best-selling 16-bit sport console of its era, despite a late start and competition from the Sega Genesis.
Emulators have always resided in murky legal territory. While games enjoyed through emulation are no longer sold, the rights are often held by the innovative company. Emulators are legal in most countries, but downloading a game to play on an emulator often isn’t, and distributing an emulator is considered infringement in most countries.
Nintendo is particularly protective of its games, and while it hasn’t gone after individuals downloading emulators, it has put pressure on people hosting games for download.
Best Snes Emulator Android
Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) or Super Comboy as it is known is one of the most popular 16-bit gaming consoles from the 90s and is regarded as the best 16-bit console ever. With speculations that Nintendo is releasing a new SNES classic version in 2017 and considering its limited availability it makes good sense to emulate SNES on PC. In this articl,e we write about the best SNES emulators for PC or laptop. These Super Nintendo emulators will let you play Windows 10/7/8.1 [64-bit & 32-bit]
Considering the SNES is a 16-bit console there are lots of emulators with smooth graphic and audio emulation. Hence, we had to sort them on basis of the features and ease of use they provided and BSNES emerged as the first .
BSNES lets you emulate SNES games and has a lot of features such as –
- Ability to emulate multiple gaming consoles – Famicom (NES), Super Famicom (SNES), and even Game Boy, Game Boy Advance too.
- Gamepad and external game controller joystick support
- Fast and Speedy emulation.
- Only con with BSNES is that it supports .sfc SNES roms only hence, we will recommend you to try out SNES GT
Best Snes Emulator For Android
Nintendo didn’t stuff a whole SNES in the SNES Classic Edition. Instead, to power their adorable micro-console they turned to the same platform that pretty much every micro-computer uses: Linux on an ARM processor, like that found in most smartphones. Nintendo also built a custom emulator called Canoe.
Canoe is far from the most compatible or even the more accurate emulator. It doesn’t even emulate all of the games included on the SNES Classic correctly. But it’s serviceable, has low overhead, and has the advantage of being the basis of a micro-console that is capable for the price.
Using Hakchi2 CE, a custom firmware for the SNES Classic, you can turn the adorable little thing into an emulation machine. Because of how well Canoe works on the hardware, though, it’s usually best to use it whenever possible.
You can’t download Canoe to use independently of the SNES Classic Edition and, given its flaws, we doubt you’d want to.
Many of the most popular SNES emulators began development during the late-1990s. Because of the lack of computational power, these emulators tended to focus on High-Level Emulation (HLE), which tries to simulate the response of a system efficiently, but doesn’t attempt perfect accuracy.
HLE very much concentrates on functionality over form, which often resulted in certain games not working, or working incorrectly. There was even a time when ROMs (copied games) had to be modified from their original format to work on these HLE emulators.
Bsnes (and later higan) was built to be cycle accurate. This Low-Level Emulation (LLE) seeks to render the original code of the games as accurately as possible. This allows you to play games and get as close to the experience you would have on the console as possible. The drawback is that it takes much more computational power to pull this off. Even higan isn’t 100% accurate yet, and it’ll likely be years before CPUs are powerful enough for that to be a possibility.
But if you’re looking for the best and most accurate experience possible, then you should use higan. Also, if you’re into some of the more obscure SNES accessories like the Satellaview, higan is by far the best choice
SNES9x traces its roots back to two of the oldest emulators for the SNES. The early days of emulation are hazy, and a lot has been lost to the ether, but two of the earliest (successful) attempts to run Super Nintendo games on PC were SNES96 and SNES97. The two developers of those emulators, Gary Henderson and Jerremy Koot, came together in July 1997 and merged their work. The result is SNES9x.
Why use SNES9x when higan and bsnes have better compatibility and are more accurate? Actually, there are several areas in which SNES9x is the emulator to beat. It’s light on system requirements, and there are forks available for Android, jailbroken iOS phones, Nintendo 3DS, PSP, and more.
From the look of the SNES9x website, you’d think work had stopped on it in around 1999. However, the forums are still active, and the emulator is being actively maintained by developer OV2.
The “official” builds are far from the only versions of SNES9x available. For mobile, you’ll want to take a look at SNES9x EX+ or SNES9x Next (also available as a Libretro Core). There’s even a version available for Pocket PCs, so you can break out some Mario on your PDA. Seriously!
Development started on ZSNES in 1997, and while it became popular, it’s among the least accurate emulators still in regular use. Compared to the emulators above it’s absolutely dreadful in its execution. Yet there are a few excellent reasons to keep a copy around.
If you want to check out some SNES ROM hacks, which are fan modifications of existing games, you’re going to run into issues with high-accuracy emulators like bsnes or SNES9x. Since ZSNES was so popular when SNES ROM hacks and ROM hacking tools became popular, many of them used the emulator to test out their games. That means many ROM hacks weren’t designed with accuracy in mind, but around the peculiarities of ZSNES, so they only work well (or at all) in this emulator.
There’s also the matter of netplay. If you’re serious about playing SNES games online with your friends, ZSNES (particularly versions 1.36 and 1.42) has some of the best working code out of all SNES emulators available. Unfortunately, netplay was removed in version 1.50, so you’ll have to stick with older ones to play multiplayer.
The last advantage ZSNES has over other emulators is that it can run on a turnip. It has stunningly low overhead, so if you’re stuck on grandma’s old Windows ME Hewitt Packard, ZSNES is the emulator of choice.
The No$ line of emulators have poor accuracy, but there are a few fringe case reasons to check them out. No$SNS, the SNES version, has some features that aren’t available on other emulators, and it’s the only way to use some extremely rare peripherals (aside from having the actual console, of course).
Weird stuff like the Exertainment Bike (yes an exercise bike for the SNES), Barcode Battler, Pachinko Dial, NTT Data Pad, X-Band Keyboard, and Twin-Taps (two push buttons made exclusively for a Japanese quiz game), are all compatible with No$SNS. Add-on hardware like the Satellaview, Super Disc CD-ROM, and Turbofile also can be emulated.
One of the most useful things about the No$SNS emulator is its debugging features. It comes with an assembler, disassembler, and even a feature that lets you test code on a real SNES. If you’re into homebrew or ROM hacks, then these tools will prove invaluable.
These days there are many great emulators for the Super Nintendo, and several have high emulation accuracy. Playing and completing games with these emulators should be no problem. If you want accurate emulation, higan is your best choice if your PC is fast enough. If your PC is too slow for it or you want a more friendly UI, try Snes9x. Despite its high ranking on this page, you should skip ZSNES.