Comment by unleaded
20 hours ago
This is from the original authors of ZSNES. I think they know what they're doing.
smartassery aside LLMs are pretty shit at esoteric stuff like this. Especially retro stuff in my experience they mainly tend to get super excited about how awesome and retro it is & reiterate misunderstood factoids about it that it knows that aren't that important/that you probably know already. Like showing it to a Reddit comment section.
> This is from the original authors of ZSNES. I think they know what they're doing.
ZSNES is popular because of legacy and nostalgia. It was very fast and came at just the right time, but the developers aren't quite coding gods. Their expertise on the SNES is no match for late/later developers like Near and Sour.
With Super ZSNES, being a Unity project, you can get a fairly clear decompile of the IR, and the code doesn't seem all that impressive. It's alpha-quality, but generally coded like the original ZSNES was. Optimization is completely missing and accuracy is still out of whack, but synchronization is improved and it's doing a little better job of counting cycles. "GPU-powered" is a big stretch. ~~They're only taking advantage of it for fixed-function perspective transform on mode 7~~ Scratch that. It borrows the line-based algorithm from bsnes-hd, including the trick to interpolate the transform variables between mins and maxes. So the only GPU feature it uses is blending for bump-mapping.