BSNES on Older Distros, such as Lucid and Squeeze

In addition to being on the forefront of SNES emulation, BSNES also utilizes cutting-edge programming techniques to maintain the cleanest, most easily readable code possible. Unfortunately, that means that older distros--even ones that are still well within their supported lifespan--may get left out in the cold.

However, BSNES forums user Themaister has done us all a favor and backported byuu's cutting-edge C++0x code to use the more widely supported C++98 standard, which allows it to be compiled on any version of GCC from 3.x on up. The only catch is that his work only applies to libsnes, the modular emulation core of BSNES in library form, so byuu's official Phoenix GUI is still off limits, as is his libsnes-driven Qt GUI.

Thankfully, Themaister has us covered here, too, by offering SSNES, his super-slim CLI-only interface to libsnes. Just like his C++98 port of libsnes, SSNES can be readily compiled with even extremely old versions of GCC, so any semi-modern distro should be able to use it just fine.

My PPA now contains Lucid packages for both libsnes (all three official cores, plus an snes9x-based core for legacy machines) and SSNES, which should also (hopefully) work on Debian Squeeze.

A few things I'd like to point out about SSNES:

1. It will accept a variety of audio drivers, including jack, which allows ultra-low latency :D

2. My package was built using dynamic libsnes linking, so it requires a libsnes package from my PPA to function

3. In addition to accepting BSNES-style XML shaders written in GLSL, SSNES will also accept shaders written in Nvidia's Cg language if you install the nvidia-cg-toolkit package

4. The default configuration file for SSNES is located at /etc/ssnes.cfg, but you can override this by placing another config file in ~/.config/ssnes

As always, let me know if you run into any problems with these packages.