January 21, 2009by Chris

Written by the legendary OSX emulator guru Richard Bannister, this is, hands down, the best SNES emulator for the Mac. It has been in development for 5 years and is still in active development with the most recent release less than a month ago, on December 25th/2008.

It uses the 'Mac Emulator Shell' - an OSX emulator API also written by the developer.

BSNES is compatible with the Emulator Enhancer plug-in which allows for a variety of improvements including:

- Aspect ratio correction.
- Bilinear filtering.
- Custom icon generation.
- Full screen mode support
- Screen curvature emulation
- Support for USB game pads.
- Support for network play (certain emulators).
- VBL synchronized video
- resizable windows
- pause
- brushed metal skin

The enhancer plugin also provides good joystick and netplay support. Using the emulator over the Internet is possible but not recommended due to latency spikes which can cause a lot of frustration via choppy game synchronization. The plugin has been in development for over 5 years with the latest release in Sept. 2008.

Use of BSNES is joy. It will play zipped ROMs with a simple double-click to the file. Audio and video support is superb. ROMs can be found all over the net and a BIOS is not required. It does use a lot of CPU horsepower - got the fan going in my 2GHz dual core Macbook.

This emulator is top notch, it emulates the SNES to an extremely high precision and provides excellent value as a high quality application that is a pure delight to use. Cheers to Richard Bannister for this fine work of art.

CS 1.9