The hardcore members of the emulation scene will always recommend that you stick with standalone emulator releases, because they offer more options and greater flexibility. And, well, those people are right, but you still can’t beat a front-end like RetroArch for convenience. Luckily, one of the most exciting recent developments in SNES gaming is getting much easier to use in RetroArch.
bsnes HD is a fork of the popular Super Nintendo emulator built to allow HD, widescreen output for SNES games. By default, it can make Mode 7 backgrounds scale and rotate in HD at modern aspect ratios, and ROM hackers are working on patches to allow more robust widescreen versions of games like Super Mario World and Super Metroid. The new RetroArch core for bsnes HD aims to make it easy to apply those patches and get good results from those games.
“In anticipation of Vitor Vilela’s Super Mario World widescreen patch I have added support for dynamic patches and setting overrides to the Libretro core,” bsnes HD developer DerKoun says on Reddit. “This means that RetroArch users can now enjoy the same near zero configuration effort previously only available in the standalone version.”
That Super Mario World widescreen patch is aimed to launch next week, so barring any last-minute issues, you’ll have a good reason to put bsnes HD through its paces soon.
What if Super Mario World was optimized to run at widescreen 16:9? Here is the result ⬇️
Honestly, it looks awesome, it even feels a PC game! pic.twitter.com/Mn1HsbFcbg
— Vitor Vilela (@HackerVilela) March 7, 2021
Classic old games truly live forever, it seems.
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