#zsnes

Short answer: ZSNES sucks as far as accuracy goes.

Sure, it runs full speed on an absolute potato, but at what cost?

You get a whole bunch of translation patches for popular games, and all these ways to play them on the actual hardware, and what do you get? Nothing, only half a thing, or complete garbage, because the translated game tries to upload new tile graphics mid-frame just to push more text onto the screen, and you can't actually do that on the actual system. Kinda defeats the point of a translation patch if the translation is unreadable, right? But these translations were tested against ZSNES and ZSNES does allow you to change VRAM content during active display so fuck it, it works, ship it. (Primary example would be Sailor Moon Another Story, but take your pick honestly.)

As the late Near said, those hacks don't run on the Super NES-- they are made specifically to run on ZSNES.

Then there's the dozens if not hundreds of Super Mario World hacks that have stolen custom music. A great many of them have been made using a version of the addmusic tool that was sorely mistaken about the nature of the echo buffer, causing an overflow on real hardware and corrupting the rest of the music. So I hope you didn't have your speakers turned up too loud.

And that's if you're lucky! If you're not, you can get out-right crashes.

Really, the only good reasons to use ZSNES are nostalgia, or your daily driver is in fact an absolute potato from the turn of the millennium.

Not specifically, no. But I do recall reading many years ago the effects of emulation on games like Super Castlevania 4, where minor differences in how chips were emulated in ZSNES could actually change enemy patterns versus real hardware. I believe the example was that crows could randomly change patterns during replay files and cause things to desync.

That was the first time I became aware of how important emulation accuracy was.