ZSNES v1.51 Documentation

About Video Encoding

Video encoding requires MEncoder.

About Audio Encoding

Audio encoding requires LAME. Currently, Windows users must use this fixed LAME build due to a bug in the official versions.

You have a choice of dumping audio either in uncompressed PCM format with WAV header, or compressed as MP3. ZSNES uses LAME for MP3, so you can expect high-quality audio, given the bit rate.

When dumping audio to a separate file (not merged with video), audio compressed to MP3 will be about 6% of the size of the same uncompressed PCM audio.

Dumping a Movie

1. Place your MEncoder (mencoder.exe) and LAME (lame.exe) binaries in the same directory as ZSNES. Alternatively, configure your PATH environment variable to include the directories where MEncoder and LAME are installed.
2. Start ZSNES and load a game.
3. Open the Movie Options dialog. (Misc Menu->Movie Opt).
4. Make sure to select the correct movie slot, depending on which movie slot you used to record a ZMV.
5. Select the Dumping tab, and configure the Video Options and Audio Options to your liking.
6. Hit the Start button.
7. ZSNES will then exit the GUI and start playing back the previously recorded movie. If you chose to encode the video and/or audio output, you will see a console window appear, showing the progress of encoding. Don't worry if ZSNES slows down while playing back the movie; it needs to do this because the encoding process takes a lot of processor time.
8. ZSNES will indicate when the movie has finished playback (and encoding). You can now look in your ZSNES directory for the newly created file(s).

Note: ZSNES does not create an uncompressed temporary file and then encode it. Instead, the output stream is directly encoded. The only output files will be the finished, compressed files. Because ZSNES must encode the output stream as it is generated, ZSNES may delay the output of new frames of video/audio to give more time to MEncoder/LAME to compress the current frame. This means that you should not worry if you see the playback of your movie slow down while ZSNES is dumping it. The dumped file(s) will play back at full speed!

zsnes*.cfg

Almost every option available in ZSNES can be configured in this file. If there is something you don't understand in this file, please refrain from changing it, and instead set the option from within the ZSNES GUI.

The last letter of the filename is different for each port. Windows: zsnesw.cfg. SDL: zsnesl.cfg. DOS: zsnes.cfg.

zmovie.cfg

This file contains movie-dumping configuration information.

You can edit this file to make ZSNES use something other than MEncoder or LAME, or to tweak options. Read the MEncoder and LAME manuals to see what options you can tweak. If you choose other applications, they must support stream input via stdin and raw video (in the case of video encoding). Refer to the appropriate documentation for more information.

Unfortunately, you're on your own if wish to play with this.

zfont.txt

This file contains the font data for the ZSNES GUI. You can edit this file to customize the font.

• Comments are preceded by a ; and can be up to 99 characters in length.
  • In the default file, each comment precedes the character it's labeling.
• Each letter is represented by a block of five rows, each containing 8 bits. Only the first five columns of bits are used for font data; ZSNES uses a 5x5 font. The last three columns of bits should always be zeros.
  • There are characters for English, Hiragana, and Katakana scripts.
• In case it isn't obvious, a 1 means the pixel is on in that location. A 0 means it's off. If you view zfont.txt, you should be able to figure it out.
• The file terminates on the EOF+newline character or the last character (whichever comes first).

The absolute ordering of each and every line in this file is important. If you're missing a single line, things might start messing up. Just so you know, the last line of data should be on line 846, followed by the EOF character on line 847.

If you mess something up, just delete zfont.txt, and ZSNES will re-generate it as normal.

Debugger Keys:

Universal Switches

Windows-only Switches

From the Windows NT command-line, you can use the following command to view the accepted command-line input for a given ZSNES binary: zsnesw -? | more. Typing zsnesw -? does not work.

Users of any flavor of Windows can use the following command to output to a file the same information returned from the command above: zsnesw -? > commands.txt.

SDL-only Switches

DOS-only Switches

*The 640x480x16B (VESA1) video mode is compatible with many video cards, but can also be very slow. We recommend that you use a VESA2 mode if your video card supports it. Please see the system requirements for more information.