Indian Joe / Android Salad
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System, or SNES, is one of the most popular gaming consoles in history. Many people want to keep playing games for a variety of reasons. Nostalgia, fast-paced sprinting, and playing old classics were too young to enjoy the top causes. Fortunately, there is a large selection of SNES emulators for both PC and Mac. Here are the best we could find. You can find some great SNES emulators for Android phones as well.
quick answer
In general, we recommend Snes9x for PC and OpenEmu for macOS. Those looking for higher resolutions can try Higan on PC, but only if your computer has a high-end CPU. RetroArch has several SNES cores for you to try out, which makes it great on both Mac and PC.
Best SNES Emulators for PC and Mac
BSNES
Indian Joe / Android Salad
A solid and reasonably simple SNES emulator that focuses more on accuracy than pure performance.
- Pricing: free
- Platforms: PC, macOS, Linux (downloads)
What we like:
- It worked well with all of our test games.
- It’s reasonably accurate and fast, with good performance overall.
- BSNES comes with a bunch of add-ons, such as shaders, filters, and more to improve the look of your games.
- It is free and open source.
What we don’t like:
- While Apple M1 support is available, we don’t think it’s the best option for Mac users.
- Snes9x is a bit more accessible, while Higan is a bit more refined, which puts BSNES somewhat in the middle of the pack.
Once upon a time, there were two BSNES emulators. The first went on to become Hegan, also on this list, and the other is this one. BSNES is a reasonably good emulator that falls in a good middle ground between good fidelity and good performance. It has some optional elements, like shaders and filters, but you’re getting something like this for an accurate emulation on flashy features. Anyway, all of our test games loaded and played without drama, so it’s an easy recommendation for us.
Hegan
Indian Joe / Android Salad
A multi-console emulator with SNES support that places great emphasis on precision.
- Pricing: free
- Platforms: PC, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD (downloads)
What we like:
- The most accurate SNES emulator on the list.
- It can emulate multiple consoles, including Famicom, Super Famicom, several Game Boy consoles, several Sega consoles, and more.
- Higan played our test games without issue, though the Crono Trigger took a minute to figure it out.
What we don’t like:
- The learning curve is pretty steep with this one.
Higan is a multi-unit emulator that supports SNES. Its claim to fame is its accuracy. The emulator is designed with precision in mind and places great emphasis on hardware emulation as well as the game. Our test games played fine, though we had to download a different Crono Trigger ROM in order to play. This is not the game we recommend for casual play. Beginners and those who stick to accuracy should definitely try this out. For most people who just want to play retro games for fun, they can find simpler options on this list.
OpenEmu
Indian Joe / Android Salad
This multi-console emulator built for macOS has great SNES support.
What we like:
- You can emulate multiple consoles with this, including the SNES.
- It lets you choose between Snes9x or BSNES to emulate.
- OpenEmu played our demo games without any drama.
- Configuring for things like controllers is surprisingly easy.
OpenEmu is our recommendation for SNES emulators on Mac. It can emulate a few dozen systems, and the SNES is one of them. It uses cores to emulate different systems, and you can choose between Snes9x core or BSNES core, depending on which works best for you. In practice, this is a plug-and-play emulator. It loaded our test games with no issues, and played them without any drama. The benefit of this device is that it comes with good support for consoles as well as other consoles so you can download games for other classic systems and play them there as well.
RetroArch
Indian Joe / Android Salad
A really excellent multi-console emulator with many SNES cores to choose from
- Pricing: free
- Platforms: PC, Mac, Linux (downloads)
What we like:
- There are more SNES cores than there are flopping through it, ensuring that any game you play is playable.
- RetroArch has a lot of configurations on all platforms where it is available.
- I played our demo games without drama on both Mac and PC.
- It is available on many platforms, including Android, Raspberry Pi, and others.
What we don’t like:
- This one has a learning curve for beginners to the emulator.
- There are so many SNES cores out there that it can be hard to know what to choose unless you already know which ones are good.
RetroArch is a multi-console emulator that includes SNES support. It uses “cores” as a kind of plug-in for each console. Thus, you can download the cores for the console you like, and the emulator will run games from that console. RetroArch is special on this list because it has a bunch of cores for the SNES. It includes several Snes9x and BSNES cores, depending on what you’re looking for. You can also use Higan if you value precision.
Thus, you can get the same experience that you can get with any emulator on this list, depending on your needs. We tested it with BSNES (Balanced) and the latest Snes9x and Higan kernels. All three played our test games without problems. In fact, those who appreciate Higan’s precision can probably make games run easier in RetroArch than they can in Higan itself. Anyway, if you don’t mind the learning curve, this is a great emulator.
Snex9x
Indian Joe / Android Salad
The most intuitive SNES emulator for PC works very well.
- Pricing: free
- Platforms: PC, Linux, Mac (downloads)
What we like:
- The most popular and accessible SNES emulator is easy to use.
- It’s accurate enough for casual games, which is what most people are looking for.
- However, all of our test games played great, with no noticeable drama or problems.
- It is free and open source.
What we don’t like:
- For Mac, at least, we think OpenEmu has a better user interface for beginners.
- It’s not the most accurate simulator for things like sprinting, but it’s not so imprecise that it matters.
Snes9x is the most popular SNES emulator available for PC and Mac at the moment. Lots of people use it. It works fine. It doesn’t have the extreme precision of something like the Higan, but you shouldn’t have any problems playing any SNES game you throw at it. The configuration is very good, with reasonably simple menus. We’ve played this game quite a bit and had no issues with it. RetroArch and OpenEmu both use this as one of their SNES cores, so you can get that experience in an all-in-one if you’d like, too. It’s just good, and there isn’t much to say about it.
If we missed any great SNES Emulators for PC or Mac, tell us about them in the comments.