Krade’s WebLog

Other than using this for hotlinking images, I’m still getting a few hits from people who are searching for the latest release of ZSNES (1.51) for Intel Macs, so I might as well make a post about it.

If you don’t care about the completely irrelevant story and you just want the link to the disk image, here it goes, you lazy bum:

• ZSNES 1.51 for Mac OS X (Intel)

(It does NOT work on PowerPC Macs. And it never will.)

The port of ZSNES for x86 Macs was started by a guy called hector. While one could think that, now that Macs are basically fancy PCs without BIOSes, porting it to OS X would be trivial, considering SDL is available for OS X as well and the Linux branch of ZSNES uses SDL for video, sound and etc, there’s one little fact that was overlooked: Apple doesn’t care about Assembly programmers.

But alas, luck was with us, because this guy is probably one of the five programmers in the whole world that understands both OS X and x86 assembly. He made a pretty good job on getting ZSNES to run on OS X (and he fixed Apple’s broken assembler tools). Thing is, after this release, he hasn’t been around, leaving ZSNES without an OS X developer. In the meanwhile, work on ZSNES progressed, but by the time we got to 1.51, the SDL port had some pretty nasty bugs under OS X.

Whoops.

The bugs were pretty weird and hard to pinpoint, thanks to the brokenness of Apple’s nasm that doesn’t support debug symbols for Mach-O binaries (thanks for nothing, Apple). Eventually, after having to put up with my bug reports for a couple of days, Deathlike2 fixed most of the showstopper bugs that prevented a working OS X release of ZSNES 1.51. After that, it was just a matter of backporting those fixes (which were only applied to SVN, the development tree of ZSNES) to 1.51 and package it the regular Mac way. If you want to do the compiling yourself (not recommended unless you know what you’re doing), here’s the diff patch that fixes the most serious problems in 1.51 under OS X. It patches against the 1.51 source release.

• Patch file for ZSNES 1.51

There are still quite a few bugs. Among the most serious ones (taken from the readme):
There are still a few known unsolved OS X only bugs.
1) Using the “Interpolation” filter with the option “Scanlines: none” causes ZSNES to crash under the video mode 512×448 DR (W and F).
2) Switching from non-OpenGL (no O) to OpenGL (O) modes may cause the GUI and/or the emulated game’s colors to become all glitchy and weird. If this happens, don’t worry, simply save your game (savestates are ok) and restart ZSNES.
3) 8-point Interpolation sound seems to be broken, pressing ESC while a game is running locks up ZSNES sometimes. Just use Gaussian Interpolation instead (the default).