Snes9x is a Super Nintendo (SNES) and Super Famicom emulator that has been in development since the late 1990s. The current stable release is version 1.63, published on 9 July 2024 on the project’s official GitHub releases page. This guide walks through a clean Windows setup: where to download Snes9x safely, how to run it (there is no installer), how to load a game, set up a controller, and where your saves live. For the download itself, see our Snes9x download page; for the full tutorial library, see the setup hub.
What you need
Very little. The official Windows readme that ships with Snes9x 1.63 lists the requirements as “Windows XP and up. DirectX 9” and recommends a semi-modern machine (800 MHz CPU for good results, 1 GHz for a near-perfect experience). If your PC runs Windows 11 or Windows 10, it exceeds those requirements many times over. Snes9x is freeware for personal, non-commercial use — it is not open source, despite what many download sites claim, and its source code is publicly available under that non-commercial licence.
You also need game ROMs. Snes9x ships with none, and this site does not provide any: the legal route is to dump cartridges you own. No BIOS file is required for normal SNES games — Snes9x emulates the enhancement chips in code, so there is no firmware step in this setup.
Step 1 — Download Snes9x 1.63 from the official source
The only current official download channel for Snes9x is the GitHub releases page of the snes9xgit/snes9x project. The project’s historic homepage, snes9x.com, has not been updated in years and hosts no current builds at all. For a 64-bit Windows PC, the file you want is snes9x-1.63-win32-x64.zip (5,328,695 bytes). Our download page links straight to that official file and publishes the SHA-256 checksum we verified against it, so you can confirm your copy is untouched.
Step 2 — Extract it somewhere writable
There is nothing to install. Right-click the ZIP and extract it, then run snes9x-x64.exe from the extracted folder. One detail matters: Snes9x writes its settings, battery saves (.srm) and save states into a Saves folder next to the executable, so put the folder somewhere your user account can write to — for example C:\Games\Snes9x or a folder on your desktop. Avoid C:\Program Files: Windows write protection there is the most common reason saves “disappear”. We cover that failure mode in detail in our guide to Snes9x saves not working.
Step 3 — Load a game
Use File → Load Game and pick your ROM. Snes9x opens .smc, .sfc, .swc, .fig and other copier formats, and it can read a ROM directly from a .zip, .gz or .jma archive as long as the archive contains a single ROM. If a game refuses to load, work through our ROM won’t load checklist before assuming the file is broken.
Step 4 — Configure your controller
Open Input → Input Configuration and click each SNES button field, then press the pad or keyboard key you want for it. Xbox controllers and other XInput pads, PlayStation pads and 8BitDo-style retro pads all work; Snes9x also accepts DirectInput devices. One Windows quirk worth knowing: unlike the Linux (GTK) build, the Windows port does not hot-plug controllers mid-game — plug the pad in before you launch, or use the Input menu to reconfigure joysticks after connecting one. Our dedicated Snes9x controller setup guide covers Bluetooth pairing and per-player mapping.
Step 5 — Know your save options
Snes9x gives you two systems. Battery saves (.srm) are the game’s own save feature, written when you save in-game and loaded automatically next time. Save states snapshot the whole machine at any moment: press Shift+F1–F10 to save and F1–F10 to load, across 10 banks — up to 100 states per game, stored as files .000 to .099 in the same Saves folder. Both systems are explained in our save states and .srm guide, and the full key list is in the Snes9x hotkeys reference.
Next steps
From here, the setup hub collects everything else: the best Snes9x settings for picture quality and performance, cheat codes, shaders and filters, netplay, and syncing your saves between PC and Android.