I wrote on my last post about this that I'd had good results with Snes9x and Kega Fusion on Mint in the past. Well, something changed there. Back in November, I had a malware scare on Mint which I dealt with by simply reinstalling the operating system from my boot disk. Apart from destroying my Hurricane Milton datahoard, it also erased all the software I had ever installed onto my laptop, which I knew it was going to do, but it didn't seem like such a bad deal. Sacrifice a few files and a couple system executables to kill a malware infection like a boss. It took me until June to reinstall Snes9x and Kega Fusion onto my laptop, at which point I discovered they don't work anymore. I distinctly remember playing Super Mario RPG on Snes9x and ToeJam & Earl on Fusion on Linux Mint in the month leading up to the OS wipe, but much to my dismay I discovered last week that they wouldn't play with my Logitech F310 anymore. Well, to be more accurate, they wouldn't play with any gamepad anymore. I tried my F710 and my bootleg USB-wired N64 and SNES controllers, and they wouldn't work with any of them. Something had happened to these emulators in the intervening time that made them allergic to gamepads, making them useless for my use-case.
After complaining to R about how there was no end to the problems I faced in the game input department and wasting more time searching down blind alleys for "controller not working snes9x linux mint" than I would care to admit, I decided it was time to give it up. I uninstalled those emulators. If they weren't going to play with my controllers, I wasn't going to play with them. And, while M64Py still works splendidly on Mint, it was a little disappointing that I couldn't bring Super NES and Mega Drive out to the sitting room like I had wanted to. Well, not on Linux anyway. I still have my Windows 10 datahoarding computer that runs the Windows versions of those emulators, but I would very much like not to need to switch computers everytime I want to change consoles, especially considering how long it takes Windows 10 to start up.
Long story short, I switched to Mednafen. At first, I was a little turned off by how complex it all seemed and how I'm still a beginner when it comes to interacting with the Linux terminal, but then I read about a frontend called Mednaffe. Frontends are our friends. I swear by D-Fend Reloaded, as I wouldn't be able to use DOSbox otherwise. Fortunately, the version of Mednafen available from the Software Manager comes with Mednaffe built right into it, so all it took was a few trivial modifications to get it working, and now? Super NES games run more smoothly than they ran on the original hardware! I've only played SMAS+W and DKC1 with it so far, but I'm betting this is going to work for me.
I'm not sure why, but all the way up to this week, I didn't like the idea of emulators that could run more than one make and model. A vestigial holdover from Console War II, I guess. The reason Mednafen didn't enter onto my radar on Windows was because it's a multi-system emulator. With some exceptions, it can play all the most popular 8- and 16-bit games, even some 32- and 64-bit ones, like the Saturn and PlayStation. So, this also means that I won't have to find a Game Boy Advance emulator, I can just use Mednafen for that.