Set Up Emulator

How to play Donkey Kong Country on your PC. About fifteen minutes, start to finish.

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A Super Nintendo console and controller beside boxed copies of Donkey Kong Country 1, 2 and 3, with a DK barrel mug.

What you need

Two things, and that's it:

  • An emulator — software that makes your PC behave like a SNES.
  • A ROM file — the game itself, as data.

Got the real thing? You can skip all of this — plug in a SNES and play. This page is for everyone who doesn't.

Install Snes9x

Snes9x is a free, open-source SNES emulator for Windows, macOS and Linux. It's accurate, lightweight and the one most people start on.

Download Snes9x

  • Grab the build that matches your system — on most Windows machines that's the Win64 download.
  • There's no installer. Unzip the folder anywhere you like and run snes9x.exe straight out of it.
  • Keep the whole folder together — it stores your config and saves alongside the program.

Set up your controls

Plug in a controller before you open Snes9x, then go to Options → Input Configuration. Click each SNES button in turn and press the button you want mapped to it.

  • A keyboard works fine to start, but a real controller makes a big difference on the tighter movement tricks.
  • Load a game with File → Open ROM, or just drag the file onto the window.
  • Display and fullscreen options live under Options → Display Configuration.

Save states let you snapshot the game anywhere and jump back to it — great for practising a tricky barrel jump over and over.

Only if you later want to submit a run: leaderboards set their own rules. They often require a specific emulator version, some don't accept emulator runs at all, and save states are disallowed in essentially every category. None of that matters if you're just here to play.

What a ROM file is

A ROM is a copy of the data on a game cartridge, saved as a single file on your computer. "ROM" is just read-only memory — the chip inside the cart that holds the game.

The emulator reads that file the same way a SNES reads a cartridge. For SNES games the file usually ends in .sfc, sometimes .smc. They're typically a couple of megabytes — DKC is about 4 MB.

Emulators don't ship with games. You supply the ROM yourself.

Getting the right DKC ROM

The version matters. Donkey Kong Country shipped in several revisions and they don't all behave the same — later ones patched out a number of the glitches the game is known for. The one to look for is:

Target version Donkey Kong Country (USA) Revision 1.0 — the original, unpatched release

ROMs circulate widely online. Search that exact release name and add the file extension (.sfc) to filter out storefronts and video results. The sites hosting them come and go, so what turns up shifts over time — but the release name is stable, and it's what you're looking for.

Verify what you downloaded. Don't trust the filename — files get mislabelled constantly, and a v1.1 ROM named "1.0" will quietly break the glitches you were after. Every clean copy has a known checksum (a CRC32 or SHA-1 fingerprint). Look up the correct checksum for DKC 1.0 on the resources below, generate the checksum of your file, and confirm they match exactly. Snes9x will also show the ROM's details under File → ROM Information.

Where to go next

That's it — go play it. If you catch the bug and want to go faster, the DKC speedrunning wiki is the reference: route notes, trick tutorials, category rules and the exact ROM details all live there.

DKC Speedrunning Wiki My speedrun.com

If you do start timing yourself, LiveSplit is the free standard. Pick one category, learn it level by level, and ignore your times for a while.

Stuck on any of this? Come ask in a stream — it's a friendly community and nobody minds beginner questions.