It's understandable that they went in this direction. Higan/bsnes has already captured the market for "accuracy" on the SNES emulator front, so this is more going off and doing its own thing rather than re-treading familiar ground.

I suppose my only concern is what it will do to the hardware requirements, since ZSNES' original claim to fame was how well it was able to run on limited hardware, even if it had to do a bunch of clever hacks to get there.

Or, thanks to bsnes/higan/ares[0], SFC accuracy is solved, thus it should be much easier for any new emulator to be accurate.

i.e. accuracy should be the baseline; I understand Super ZSNES is not there yet.

0. https://ares-emu.net/

Ares is a seriously underrated emulator. I don't use it much now that I have a MiSTer, but it is by far my favourite emulator on desktop.

Kind of?

Accuracy is valuable, but as illustrated by the early days of people using buggy emulators for SNES games on phones and the DS/3DS, people will tolerate buggy but running on their hardware over correct but unplayable.

I remember reading, back then, about the author byuu/Near going into future updates such as HD Mode7 and widescreen. Found it re-hosted on an odd site here: [1]

It does seem like Super ZSNES in ways picked up these ideas (and torch) and went with them! Rather neat actually! RIP Near.

[1] https://bsnes.org/articles/state-of-emulation-5

Impressive, but oh man, the transition from the original ZSNES User Interface from my childhood to the UI of Super ZSNES was jarring to say the least. Nostalgia is powerful:

https://imgur.com/a/R63BKTe

The original is timeless and way more beautiful in my opinion.

Not at least slapping a pixel font on there is an odd choice given the purposeful nostalgia goal.

If you slapped a pixel font in, you'd really want to rework the whole UI to not look jarring with the aliased font you'd most likely use to evoke the nostalgia, and that's a substantial rabbit hole, but also not one you necessarily need to rework the underlying functionality to do, e.g. it's easy to do later if you build it right initially.

Nesticle is a nostalgia bomb for me.

I felt like the coolest fucking kid on the block for having that icon on my desktop.

You may enjoy this[1] article about its history and where the dev wound up.

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20180329033107/https://motherboa...

The widescreen mode is surprisingly functional, wow