by Jack Wallen
I have a confession to make. My favorite game of all time is Zombies Ate My Neighbors. It was a classic Super Nintendo game that had you playing either a young boy or girl who uses various toys (such as a squirt gun) to save their neighbors from getting destroyed by zombies! This game is pure fun and, as far as I know, it is where the old “muhaha” came from.
Lately I had been jonesin’ to play that game so I was about to plop down some cash for an old SNES and the Zombies Ate My Neighbors cartridge when I came across Zsnes . Zsnes is an emulator for the Super Nintendo game system that runs on Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, and DOS. If you long for the old SNES games, this emulator will do the trick.
Getting and installing
Installing Zsnes is simple because it will most likely be found in your distributions’ repositories. Because of that you can either search for “zsnes” (no quotes) in your Add/Remove Software utility, mark the results for installation, and click Apply to install. Or you can install the nearly-old-fashion way and issue a command like:
When you start up Zsnes you will see the main window (see Figure 1). From this window you can configure Zsnes, load a ROM file, add Cheat Codes, and set up key combinations and configure sound.
The GUI may look a bit old school but remember the games you are playing are 8 and 16 bit games, so what should you expect?
Loading a ROM
One of the first things you are going to want to know is where to get ROM files. There are plenty of sites that have ROM files for SNES games. I found Zombies Ate My Neighbors on ROMNation .
When you download a ROM file it will be in .zip format. You will need to unzip that file once it is downloaded. The contents of the zip package will vary, depending upon who created the file. But the import piece of the puzzle is the file with the smc extension. This is the ROM you need to load.I have also found that some of the ROMs can be loaded directly from the zip file. This, again, will depend upon how the creator packaged the file.
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