Notes: This interview is conducted by Eric Linenberg. Eric is obviously a huge SNES96/97 fan. Many thanks goes out to him for sending this to me.

Could you please tell me the status on SNES96/SNES97 as I would love to update the lovers of emulation with the progress on the project. This letter will be posted to EMU NEWS service, and EMU Express, so please help out.

Okay, why not ;-)

What is the current status with SNES97?

Well, in development as always..

What percentage of the Graphics routines are emulated? (addition/subtraction, mode 7, etc...)

At this point were are 75% of graphics emulation, we still need to implement Screen Addition and Substraction and horizontal mosaic... After that the Graphics routines will be finished, except for the bug here and there which would need to be removed...

Will SNES97 be ported to ASM or will it always stay in C?

Yes, well, kinda, read on and see what I mean...

Why SNES97 AND SNES96, why not combine them into one AWESOME SNES emu?

Were doing that right now, Snes96 can run more games and is faster so we will be using that as the 'base', we will then convert all the good features of Snes97 to Snes96... But seeing that most are already moved, this won't take long... After that were going to port stuff to ASM, the CPU engine is already in ASM but only the DOS, Linux and SunOS version can use it, not the Win95 version because it's in AT&T ASM and my compiler can't use that... But there are a few ways which I am going to try out very soon...

Will the new combined emulator will be called Snes97 or Snes98?

We're not sure about that yet...

What is the current progress in sound emulation?

As it is now official, we HAVE sound emulation, this means that the next version WILL have sound... At this point there are a lot of bugs here and there, ranging from emulation bugs to sound decompression bugs... There is NO way to resolve them all in the first release and this will mean that only a few games will produce correct sound, more will produce sound/noise here and there and the rest will crash the sound emulation... It's a different processor which is emulated, because of bugs and bad info, this CPU is not emulated 100% correct yet which will lead to the fact that the sound processor crashes... The normal SNES CPU will not crash and will run the game 'normaly' until it goes into a sound cpu check and then crashes.. So there will be a number of games which won't be able to be played with sound emulation on... Also because there are only a few processors which can emulate the SNES fast enough, the sound will slow down/speed up depeding on the number of backgrounds which need to be emulated etc...

What is [about] the current percentage of games that run in SNES97?

At this point 10 of the 200 games won't run, where only 1 or 2 show actual emulation bugs, the others crash because of the bad Sound CPU emulation/Skipping... At default the Sound CPU is not emulated and all checks are skipped, but since these skippers aren't able to skip all the checks, some games will crash... Enabling Sound CPU emulation will slow down the emulator 25%... So it'll be back to Snes96 v0.5 speed... With sound emulation enabled... The speed may increase when we write more stuff in assembler... It may also slow down when we add more features... The biggest slow down will be Addition/Substraction but this will be available in several ways and the 'old' way will also still be available..

Thank you, Eric Linenberg

Thank you to, Jerremy Koot

P.S. At the current moment the Sound CPU emulation was totaly created by Gary Henderson(Snes96: Linux, Snes96:SunOS, Snes96:DOS, Snes97:Linux, Snes97:SunOS) and he desirves ALL the credit for it.. This HAS to be mentioned!