Whew, sorry I hadn't updated this page in a while... I was too busy with my own emulator!

By the way, GUI refers to a Graphical User Interface, which is basically means an interface with windows, sometimes a mouse cursor, etc.

zSNES (Mirror) Version 0.400; DOS; Freeware; Emulation=9 Speed=10 Sound=9 Extras=7
Plus! SuperFX emulation. Minimum system: 486 DX/80.
In a word, zSNES is incredible!  As well as having excellent emulation that, on average, matches or surpasses SNES9X 1.0, the emulator is fast.  I mean incredibly fast.  It is and always has been written in 100% assembly language, but even so, authors zsKnight and _Demo_ keep making it slightly faster!  Their current release features Super FX emulation, and although it's buggy, it's done well enough that Yoshi's Island is fully playable.  Star Fox, my all-time favorite SNES game, isn't playable but it works.

Other than basic emulation, it has several interesting features:

• It has sound support, and also most of the special sound effects (various volume and pitch parameters) are implemented.
• It has auto frame-regulation (keeping the speed at 100%)  In the new version it's not always automatic; you have to use the -a option.
• 16-bit color for color add/subtract... this could be considered a disadvange as well though, because 16bit mode is slow, and in my case, it is unsupported on my video card except for hi-res under SDD 6.0, which sux. :-(
• In 640x480x65536 mode, it has a nifty antialiasing feature that blurs between pixels which makes it look nice.  However, it fairly slow, as is the 640x480x256 mode.
• zSNES supports 512 horizontal scan mode, meaning you can read the text in the beginning of Secret of Mana.
• A primitive cheat manager.

SNES9X Version 1.0; DOS, Linux and Win95 ports; Freeware; Emulation=9 Speed=9 Sound=9 Extras=8
Plus! SuperFX emulation. Minimum system: Pentium 90Mhz With sound: 120Mhz.
(This review is based on the DOS version.)
The long-awaited new SNES9X is here, and it's great!  The emulation and sound quality is about the same as zSNES, supporting transparencies, SuperFX, Mode 7, offset-per-tile mode, and various cheat code formats.  I don't use this emulator because I find zSNES is just as good most of the time and slightly faster.  Oh yeah, and also, SNES9X crashes my computer if I quit (I have to go Ctrl-Alt-Del and then End Task to keep it from trashing my computer.) However, it's worth the download.  It has a nifty cheat search feature, which you can use to make your own cheat codes (byte searches only.)  The GUI is nice but lacks options; you will still have to do most things from the command-line.  Also, cheat codes are not remembered between sessions.

There are currently two versions of SNES9X DOS: a newer one with no GUI and a slightly older one with (0.96).  Personally I can't stand something without a good user interface (which you may have guessed if you've seen my emu), so I haven't tried 1.0.  SNES9X is the most portable emulator, with versions for Win9X, Linux, Macintosh, and other OS's.

SNEqr v0.340; DOS; Freeware; Emulation=8 Speed=8 Sound=*0* Extras=9
I know, it may be a little weird of me to review my own emulator, but whatever man.  Anyway, this emulator has no sound but I hope to start on sound ASAP.  It is also not quite as fast as zSNES, but really, how could *anything* be as fast as zSNES?  However, no other emulator approaches the amount of sheer convenience this emu is packed with.  To sum up the features:

• Instant save/load: come to think of it, every good emu now has this feature, but in the olden days it was a rare occurance.  NESticle users will be at home with the key setup (F5/F7).
• Auto-backtrack: when you become addicted to Instant Save, it totally takes the fun out of gameplay because you are always hitting F5/F7, F2/F4 or whatever.  This feature automatically makes "checkpoints" in your game, and whenever you screw up you can hit F10 to go back a little ways in your game--or farther if you want.  Optionally you can also disable Instant save/load to halt your addiction.
• Cheat searcher: like SNES9X's cheat search utility, you can use this to create your own cheat codes.  However, SNEqr also allows you to assign descriptions to codes, search for words (larger numbers), saves codes between sessions, remembers which codes go with which games, and allows you to toggle codes on and off.
• No command-line options required!  (Except, optionally, a filename.)  Almost all options can be changed in the GUI, and a few more are accessable in the configuration file.
• Each game gets its own set of options (frame skip, etc.), remembered between sessions.
• Different directories for SRAM, ROMs, and Instant saves; Six preset color schemes and four background types; well... etc.

NLKE v0.??; Doh I lost the page address and version # and stuff...
This is the emulator that occurred when the NLKSNES and eSNES people joined into one team.  It has sound, and is fast (of course, not as fast as zSNES.)  Unfortunately, it has no user interface (command-line only) and thus I only bothered using it once.  I think it also has transparency support.

Silhouette PD Version 1.0; Macintosh (PowerPC?); Freeware; Not Tested.
I don't usually cover Mac emulators, but I can't get enough of the Nintendo vs. emulators story, hehe.  This emulator, which came out new year's day,  is supposed to be the best one anywhere because it is written by (layed off) Nintendo employees and is derived from a professional development environment.  Too bad it's for the MAC!  If you're still wondering about the Snes9X story, the documentation hints something about that.... Anyway this emu has full sound support and transparency (color add/sub), among other things.  The user-interface is fairly bare-bones.

eSNES Version 0.14a; DOS; Freeware; F=6 E=7 S=8
Minimum system: Pentium 90Mhz With sound: 120Mhz. Games not currently playable: Secret of Mana (blank screen), Super Metroid (freezes), Megaman 7 (joypad malfunction) <Not finished>
A fairly good Emulator written by a cool spanish guy. After several months of dormancy, there has been a big update. While it is still a crappy command-line interface, it is much, much faster than the previous version. I would now say that it is a tad faster than SNES9X. However, the graphics engine is very bad, and most games are severly visually impared. There are at least two graphics engines, the faster tile-to-tile engine and the slower line-to-line engine. The line-to-line engine works better, but is noticibly slower. The graphics modes are still limited to Mode X and VESA, but I feel that if LordESNES would optimize his graphics engine for Linear mode 256x256x256 it could be as fast, or faster, than NlkSnes. It has Mode 7 support, but only using the quite slow C grfx engine. The sound doesn't work very good on most games, but sounds almost perfect in Super Mario World. The SPC emulation crashes in Super Metroid when you try to start a game, but if you disable the SPC it freezes after the Nintendo logo. DOH! I can't get it to work on my favorite Adventure-RPG, Secret of Mana, either. In Megaman 7 there is a really odd problem: 90% of the time you can only make tiny, pathetic jumps.
Conclusion: eSNES has become a good competitor to SNES9X.

NLKSNES Version 0.15d; DOS; Freeware; F=6 E=7 S=9
Minimum system: 486 DX4/80. Games not currently playable: Mario Allstars (the ROM claims it wasn't designed for my SNES), Breath of Fire 2 (the menu screen is gibberish), Wolfenstein 3D (gibberish), Sonic (crashes after title page), Secret of Evermore (Gibberish), Return of the Jedi (gamepad doesn't work)
A while ago one pompous author of SNES9X said on IRC that the only reason NLKSNES was so fast was because it didn't emulate very much of the SNES hardware. heh. I would estimate this version has about the compatibility level of eSNES, and the games that work run very beautifully. The only major missing feature is sound, and this edition comes with at least one feature that no other emulator currently has: 256-color color Sub-screen addition/subtraction (or as I like to call it, ghostness.) This means that all the fog and transparency effects you see in various games work: In Zelda 3, the rain at the beginning and the fog in the enchanted forest and mountain area works. In Mario World the ghost house fog and the transparent ghosts work. And in all those other games where you had to fiddle with the BGs because the fog made it impossible to see... problem solved! But, In a few games it's buggy or slow so you have to turn it off (press '0') but sometimes it gets fixed if you turn it off, then back on again. Nlksnes now has FAST mode 7 support. SNES9X said its support was fast, but apparently they haven't bothered to see how fast NLKSNES is in comparison! On my computer I can play f-zero at almost full speed with only one frame skip (in SNES9X, I would have to put it at about 8 frame skip.) Also, the "blur" effect (Mario World, when you start a level, for example) works perfectly.
Nlksnes's compatibility is way up. Unlike Snes9X, Nlksnes allows key remapping (and the default layout is so weird you will need to remap them.)

Super Pasofami Version 1.2d/1.3a; Windows+WinG; Shareware (but the reg. code is everywhere); F=7 E=3 S=7
(Old emu) This is a Japanese emulator but a translation is available. When you run it, you'd better have at 16 megs of RAM at least and not have any big programs like Netscape running, or you'll be sorry. It can thrash so bad that you might go for the red switch rather than wait for it to start or stop your game. The emulator is much faster than SNES97/9X for Win95 (and sucks up all CPU time), but the emulation of most games is very bad, and may require a lot of tweaking of options to get it to work. It has a single slot of instant save, and "remembers" the save before the last save. I can't remember but I heard on some computers it deletes Windows files... beware! But that may only be for the NES emulator, Pasofami. One nice thing about this emulator is that it supports many unusual file formats, and can play games in zip files.

VSMC Version 0.9702d; DOS (not a Windows DOS box); Shareware $25 (I think); F=0 E=2?! S=8
(Old Emu) This expensive emulator is supposedly has the best emulation around, and runs Crono Trigger, F-Zero, and Super Metroid. Well, I had to go through hell to get it working at all. First of all it doesn't like Windows and second of all it requires all the conventional memory you have and a lot of EMS too. Since I use DriveSpace (I need the space, okay!) I have to press F8 on startup to bypass it (which means I had to move some games and the program to an uncompressed drive), bypass all device drivers that were not absolutely neccesary, manually run the required mouse driver, and pray that it will run something. Well, the shareware version has eight colors, and either this emulator can't emulate anything it claims it can, or the shareware version is much more crippled than just the colors. I got it going and found that Super Mario World, Super Metroid, F-Zero and Chrono Trigger were messed up beyond playability. F-zero's title page was all gibberish, Mode 7 effects were practically non-existant, Super Metroid flickered and was really, really screwed up on the opening action scene (it was a nightmare trying to get out of that exploding space station since the room was randomly scrolling gibberish), the cinemas were messed up and the main game was usually a wash of ugly yellow and you couldn't see the ground. Chrono trigger began with a screwed up pendulum and a screwed up opening prompt. covered in seemingly random letters. Super Mario World wouldn't go past an opening screen of gibberish. However, on the up side it's very fast and could probably play okay on a lower-power Pentium or 486 DX4/100. You can actually select what keys you want to use. I couldn't find any save features.
  Unreliable counter - since August 16 '97