This little featurette consists of the method I used to change my PC into a snes. The technique I use will vary slightly between differing operating systems but the concepts behind the conversion should remain the same.

Why Would I want to turn a PC into a SNES?
Well there are many reasons but my personal reason was that I love the SNES gaming console but when you play it on a PC normally, the temptation to save too often and to change games without really giving one a chance (easily done when most of the games are under 1 meg zipped) is just too high. It also makes your games look much better. Most cheap monitors support a resolution of 1024x768 and (according to my site stats), that's what most of you are all using. When you play SNES games under this resolution, the graphics seems really blocky. even on the lower resolutions, it's the same (the lower resolutions are closer to the native snes resolution, hence it working better). But lets not forget something - the SNES was designed for the television. Television resolutions are generally quite low and they have this wonderful (unintentional) blurring effect which makes all of your games appear all silky smooth. Just trust me on this - it's well worth it and once you do it for a SNES, you can do it with any emulated console that your PC supports! So onward! Lets get this SNES up and running!

Step 1: Get yourself a decent machine.
Now I'm not talking a great spec here - just a pretty low standard PC. According to the Emulator README files, you can get away with about a 133MHz processor. This isn't really the case because some games rely very heavily on the CPU (particularily fx chip-based games). You could struggle along with a 266, I would say as a minimum, if you want full quality gaming. For my project, I used a Gateway G6-400.

It's also worth noting at this point that you would be best not using a Small Form PC because the Card you're going to buy later in this how-to will double in price if you go small form. RAM helps too but it's not a big benefit and the hard disk space required depends on the Operating System you intend to install and the amount of ROM files you want to copy onto your hard disk. I used 6.4 Gig but you could get away with much less (I use it to function as other platforms as well as play DVDs). USB slots are also a huge advantage as well as an agp slot.

Step 2: Loading the Operating system
MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A NEW OPERATING SYSTEM AND THE LICENSE KEY FOR IT BEFORE YOU START! Now you can blank the hard disk. Assuming you don't know how to do this, go grab a blank floppy disk and write this image to it, pop it into your machine and restart. THIS DISK WILL NOW WIPE YOUR HARD DISK WITHOUT PREJUDICE SO USE WITH CARE - I WILL NOT ACCEPT ANY RESPONSIBILITY TO MATTERS RELATING TO THE USE OF THIS DISK! Once the disk is erased (please note it will flash your Master Boot Record as well which means if you had a Bootloader installed, It will be deleted from the MBR). Now you're ready for the Operating System. I used Windows 2000 but both 2000 and Windows 98 (better make it second edition) have been tested as working. The reason I say second edition Windows 98 is because odds are that your project will require USB support. So now you have your brand spanking new operating system up and running - good on you!

Step 2: Update Everything
It is good practice to ensure that your system is entirely up to date. Easiest way to do this is to go to Windows Update (this isn't as essential if you don't plan to participate in Internet play) and just run their programs. It is also advisable to get the latest version of Direct X because some software demands that it is installed and it will (every so slightly aka probably not at all) speed up your computer's performance.

Step 3: Copying accross all of your files
Needless to say, this consists of copying accross all of your ROMS and the Emulator of your choice. I recommend setting up another partition for this so that if you ever have to defragment the partition, the program won't throw your system files all over the place like it usually does.

Step 4: Getting the additional equipment
Right - time for some bargain hunting. You need to get a few things here - namely:
1. A Graphics card with TV out
2. Game Controller
3. Cables for connecting your PC to your television

First things first - go get a decentish graphics card. Again nothing too fancy as all of the weight is going to be on the processor anyway (although I have noticed the graphics card does help for the likes of starfox). I managed to pick up a perfectly adequate Hercules Prophet 4000XT with composite AND s-video tv-out capabilities for £15 sterling delivered to my door so that's the kind of cash we're talking about. It's worth noting at this point that some graphics cards come with fans which can make your system much too loud. If you're like me and willing to chance it, just take the thing out - unless you overclock the thing, it's rarely needed, especially when the video card isn't likely to be under too much pressure with the emulation.

Next up is the Game controller. Now I'm no playstation lover but I am a big fan of the Playstation rip-off controllers. In particular the Gravis Gamepad Pro USB - they're going on e-bay for about £10 sterling (I got one for £8 with a free crappy game included). You are best sticking to the USB game controllers (hence why having usb on your computer is an advantage) because under Windows 2000, it's generally just plug and play and it's a lot easier to set up. The gameport doesn't really lend itself to multiplayer with a great degree of ease.

Finally you're gonna need something to hook your new PC up to the TV. I'm sure there are much cheaper cables out there than the ones I have chosen but here's what I have discovered on my travels:
1. The big scart connecting cable kits that retail around £10 generally work but are very expensive and much too bulky. Using the kit for my configuration, I found it worked extremely well but looked unprofessional when it was finished.
2. The laptop tv-out cables that work through a triple-tiered 3.5mm Jack plug work brilliantly and tidily for the audio channel if you have one to spare
3. Make sure you connect the cables to the scart connectors on the TV - without an adequate (and very rare) filter, if you plug it straight into the coax cable slot on your television, it will almost work but will never give you proper sound and colour.
4. If you find that your display is black and white and flickery, make sure you have the latest drivers installed for your card. After that, go into the display settings - you may find (as I did) that your video card is outputting ntsc instead of pal or vice versa.
5. You don't really have to feed in the audio cable - you can continue to use your speakers but I think using the TV's audio output adds a much cleaner touch. It is very difficult to find the right cable to do this though.

Step 5: Final Configuration
Configure your controllers etc (and remember to make sure all of the files you copied across are NOT read-only - right click on them and go to properties to amend this, otherwise your emulator configuration changes will not be saved). Now right click on your emulator exe file and click on send to desktop (create shortcut). Now rename the desktop shortcut to whatever you want. Now click and drag this shortcut right up into the start menu and into programs and finally into the subfolder "Startup." This will automatically start up your emulator now every time you run it. I prefer using zsnes because once it's loaded, there's an option to control the entire gui via your controller.

So there you have it - if you have followed the above instructions, you should now have a PC which will quite happily start up as a Super Nintendo every time you load it, then you can use your controller to control everything else (I have L1 on the gamepad pro mapped to the keystrokc "Esc" so I can truely go through every option via the gamepad.