Until version 1.50, ZSNES featured netplay via TCP/IP or UDP. ZSNES is notable in that it was among the first to emulate most SNES enhancement chips at some level. Much of the development efforts concentrated on increasing the emulator's portability, by rewriting assembly code in C and C++, including a new GUI using Qt. Despite an announcement by adventure_of_link stating that 'ZSNES is NOT dead, it's still in development' made on the ZSNES board after the departure of its original developers zsKnight and _Demo_, development has slowed dramatically since its last version (1.51 released on 24 January 2007). The emulator became free software under the GPL-2.0-or-later license on 2 April 2001. Since then, official ports have been made for Windows and Linux.
Development of ZSNES began on 3 July 1997 and the first version was released on 14 October 1997, for DOS.
