It's been several years since I ran Ubuntu. Some of my best college days were spent playing games on ZSNES in Ubuntu against my roommates. So you can imagine my dismay when I installed 13.10. ZSNES used to run reliably on 7.10 (!)... but the version in the Saucy repo inevitably crashes after about 15 minutes of gameplay. See: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2159402
The first thing I tried was installing a different emulator. Snes9x was always a good option... but apparently it's not in the 13.10 repo yet. Someone made a package, but it crashes for me whenever I open any menus, so I can't even load a game. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2182196
So then there's bsnes. That isn't even an option for a lot of people because the hardware requirements are so high. Fortunately, I have a new machine that can run it smoothly... most of the time. Of course, bsnes is what's in the repo, but it's horribly outdated. bsnes isn't even bsnes anymore. It's higan. At least someone made a higan package that is easy to install. http://www.playdeb.net/software/higan Unfortunately, even when bsnes is running at a tolerable speed, the user interface and feature set are maddeningly poor. There's no rewind feature, which I miss dearly. Fast-forward works... a little--but only if you're syncing to audio using certain combinations of video and audio drivers... and none of those combinations happen to run at an acceptable speed on my system. Perhaps the most difficult thing to deal with is that pressing ESC doesn't open the menu, and there doesn't seem to be a way to set it to do that.
When everything in the repos failed, I tried compiling my own. The most recent resources I can find on compiling ZSNES in Ubuntu are from 2007. No matter how many variations of libraries I've installed, I still can't get it to build. So next I tried compiling Snes9x. That worked--but the version I compiled crashes at the same places as the one from the package I downloaded.
Sorry to whine! I'm just frustrated. I'm holding onto a fragile thread of hope... that someone will tell me about some option I haven't considered. I *really* don't want to install Windows on this machine. That's no fun! Please help if you can. Thank you!
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