BizHawk vs bsnes

BizHawk is a free multi-system emulator for Windows and Linux, built around the EmuHawk interface. It is aimed at Tool-Assisted Speedrunners and combines playback with recording and debugging. The project lists systems including 3DO, Apple II, arcade machines, Atari, Commodore, Nintendo, Sega, and PlayStation consoles. EmuHawk provides 10 hotkey-operated save slots as well as unlimited named savestates, along with speed adjustment, frame stepping, and rewind. Users can record input as TAS movies and save screenshots, audio, and video. Debugging tools let users inspect, search, and edit memory across emulated hardware, while Lua or C#.NET can control the core and frontend programmatically. Keyboard, mouse, and gamepad hotkeys can be rebound, and an input mapper covers emulated gamepads and peripherals. The Linux build targets x86_64 and omits Mupen64Plus for N64. Current releases are unavailable on Android and iOS; macOS use is limited to older releases or technical workarounds.

bsnes is a free, open-source emulator for Super Nintendo and Super Famicom games, with support for Super Game Boy and Satellaview. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Graphics options include HD Mode 7 with optional supersampling, a multi-threaded PPU renderer, and OpenGL multi-pass pixel shaders. The emulator also provides low-level emulation for SNES coprocessors such as DSP-n, ST-01n, and Cx4. It accepts standard ROM files, optional higan game folders, and 7-zip decompression, and can apply BPS and IPS soft patches. Its games database has thousands of entries, and its cheat database covers hundreds of popular games. Save states can include screenshot previews and names, with undo and redo. Other tools include rewind, frame advance, cheat code search, movie recording and playback, and screenshots. Speed settings are 50%, 75%, 100%, 150%, and 200%, with smooth audio output retained. The project lists nightly builds for Windows, macOS, Linux, and FreeBSD.