A fork of the bsnes emulator offers an extremely impressive feature: real HD widescreen support for Super NES games.
Rather than simply stretching and "flattening" the game window in 16: 9, the bsnes HD beta actually recreates additional images beyond the edges of the usual 4: 3 window.
There are serious limits right now, but with some creative ROM hacks, and future emulator enhancements, this could mark an era of fan-made 2D classic remastering.
The bsnes HD beta has been in development by DerKoun for a year on its GitHub, but was recently presented by LibRetro, the platform behind the famous RetroArch emulator.
This can give us hope for future console ports, because for the moment only a PC version exists.
The bsnes HD beta works best with games that use SNES mode 7 backgrounds, since the emulator is able to transparently display more of these scaled images in the 16: 9 window.
For fake 3D effects in games like F-Zero and Super Mario Kart, the results are incredible, although you will sometimes see the sprites of enemy racers disappearing on the edges of a now invisible 4: 3 screen.
It is not very annoying for this type of games, but already more problematic for platform games.
The games decide when the sprites should appear, and these games were obviously designed for 4: 3 screens.
This cannot be resolved at the emulator level, but DerKoun says on Reddit that ROM hacks could solve this problem, and that some developers are already working on these projects.
You can retrieve the bsnes HD beta from its GitHub.
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