In the meantime ports for other operating systems have also appeared. The former closed-source project is now being developed open-source. The emulator also supports the loading of compressed game modules (ROMs). Other developers were at times Matthew Kendora and Brad Jorsch.

Henderson and Koot later joined forces to develop Snes9x based on SNES96. Snes9x was originally developed by Gary Henderson and Jerremy Koot, who previously worked on their own emulators with SNES96 and SNES97, respectively. Macintosh models with PowerPC processors. In contrast to ZSNES, Snes9x is completely written in C (with a few optional parts in x86 assembler) and therefore also runs on other computer architectures such as B. Snes9x is also highly compatible, not least because the programmers of ZSNES and Snes9x often worked together. The emulator has its own user interface, which is identical for all ports. The loading of ZIP-compressed modules is also supported, so that a possible collection does not take up unnecessarily much storage space. ZSNES supports both formats of game images, which have existed since the introduction of the copy stations. However, the use of NASM also has disadvantages, so porting it to other systems is an expensive undertaking. Thanks to almost complete programming in assembly language, as well as processor-specific command extensions such as MMX, ZSNES is comparatively resource-efficient. The emulator is considered to be highly compatible with most commercial games and has been ported to various x86 platforms (including Windows and GNU / Linux ). ZSNES is a free project within the meaning of the Free Software Foundation. The possibilities offered by the SNES emulation ( debugging ) also enabled high-quality games such as Star Ocean or Seiken Densetsu 3, which are only available in Japanese, to be made available to a larger audience through fan localization. The prototype of the game, discovered in 2004, is 99% ready and can be played through completely. The most famous example is Nintendo's Star Fox 2, which should have been released in 1995 but was probably not released due to the Nintendo 64. It is also thanks to the emulation and fan base that games that were planned but never appeared were rediscovered. Nintendo took little action against such sites. This was not least possible due to the small file size of the copied games, which was only a few megabytes uncompressed and could be reduced again by compression (such as ZIP ).

As soon as usable emulators were available, there were a large number of websites that illegally offered the images for free download. In contrast to a real SNES, it is easy to reproduce games. The software to be emulated is available as an image file of the cartridge. In addition, there are now some ports of the emulators such as SNES9xTYL for the PlayStation Portable, DreamSNES for Sega Dreamcast or OpenSnes9x for the GP32. There are now SNES emulators for a wide variety of systems, for example for the Xbox (ZsnesBox), for the Game Boy Advance (SNES Advance) or Nintendo DS (SnemulDS, SnesDS). The SNES console could count on a large fan base even after production was discontinued. Many SNES games got a big boost from emulators. The Netplay promotion is being revised and should be included in a future version. A step backwards to an earlier version (e.g. However, all 3 options are no longer practicable from version 1.50 onwards, as the necessary Netplay function has been removed from ZSNES. Among other things, the programs serve and zConnector as well as the IRC - script Z-Net. For ZSNES there are now different ways to find other players. With both emulators it was possible in earlier versions to play SNES games that support 2-player modes together over the Internet without having to use external services (direct UDP or TCP / IP connection). A little later (1998) other SNES enthusiasts began programming a free emulator called ZSNES, which is now the most popular SNES emulator together with Snes9x.

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