ZSNES

The first public release of ZSNES was version 0.150, on 14 October 1997. It incorporated the entire 65816 instruction set from the SNES's modified WDC 65C816 microprocessor, as well as SRAM support and partial Mode 7 implementation. It also already offered save states to a .ZST file as an additional feature. This initial version missed certain DSP features.

Version 0.600 from 9 September 1998, was the first to feature developer Pharos (as a coding assistant), and was a milestone release due to the implementation a of new 16-bit graphics engine, as well as featuring an entirely new GUI with more functions available than before. Shortly afterwards, version 0.700 from 27 October 1998, was the first to compile with C code.

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emulator's inaccuracies, which often makes them unplayable both on real hardware and in the newer emulators that have superseded ZSNES.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.