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ZSNES has several capabilities which its Super Famicom and Super Nintendo counterparts did not have; it can "smooth" the appearance of the screen through a variety of anti-aliasing schemes, and it has a better quality of sound output than the original console systems. In addition, it can create screenshots of games, it can "save" the game at any point by recording the game state, and it can capture sound files, saving them as SPC700 sound format files which can be read by an external player or a specialized Winamp plugin, such as Anti Resonance's "SNESAmp". SPC700 sound format actually sounds more realistic on ZSNES than on the actual Super Famicom or SNES console. Also included is a built-in Game Genie and Pro-Action Replay, which allows users to enter cheat codes for their games. ZSNES runs at lightning speed, due to its code base. It is almost entirely written in X86 assembly language, allowing it to run any SNES game at 50-60 FPS with only a 400MHz Pentium 2 CPU and 64MB RAM, with full sound and basic anti-aliasing.
Originally, ZSNES was closed source, however, in 2001, a new license was established and the project became open-source using SourceForge, a branch of the Open Source Development Network, as a basis of operations. Since then a large number of contributions have been made by outside coders and assemblers alike. ZSNES is still in active development although the frequency of releases has fallen dramatically since its original developer left the team.
ZSNES was also the first SNES emulator to fully emulate the Super FXThe Super FX is a supplementary graphics chip used in some Super Nintendo (SNES) video game cartridges. It worked by putting a specialized chip in the SNES cartridge's which increased the SNES's CPU speed from 3. 58MHZ to 10. Later on there was also a Sup, DSP-1, and C4 chips.