I have tried both bsnes and snes9x and am leaning toward the latter due to the better performance of the NTSC filter, giving a more authentic feel.

Could someone explain to me in what practical ways bsnes would be more "accurate" than snes9x, and what I could do in either emulator to give the feeling of playing Chrono Trigger on a 13" CRT TV with an authentic SNES like the good ol' days?

Btw, I have a Lenovo T420 w/ Intel HD 3000 and 4 GB of RAM (it does run bsnes though)

I'd talk to byuu himself, in this case.

Though I can say one thing: Snes9x's focus is to not have 99.9% accurate emulation, but for users to emulate the entire library of games on a lower-end-machine (hopefully) without too many issues.

bsnes' focus, AFAIK, is to be as accurate as possible, with no sacrifices.

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Having read a couple articles by Byuu, I can probably answer your question fairly well.

If you just want to play Chrono Trigger, use SNES9x and the NTSC filter. You, personally, will not notice the difference (aside from SNES9x running faster). As Camo_Yoshi says, the target is different between SNES9x and BSNES.

BSNES is a very, very in-depth exercise in learning how a piece of hardware works, and recreating it in as much detail as possible as a piece of software. The side effect, of course, is that you can play SNES games on it, and the reason he's doing it is almost certainly heavily influenced by his love of the SNES, but his stated intention is to create an emulator that is so accurate you will never need hacks to make a given game work - there will be no distinguishable difference between the actual hardware and the program. BSNES is a labor of love - a museum, enshrining the SNES for all time, as a series of bytes.

SNES9x exists so you can play SNES games at a decent speed on a lot of different kinds of hardware. Full stop. :]

@Those who would say that snes9x's focus is to not have 99.9% accurate emulation.

I currently use zsnes 1.51 & snes9x 1.53 (usually the latter). I, not being the creator of snes9x, can't prove what I'm about to say, but everything that I've read about snes9x indicates that snes9x's focus IS to have 99.9% (or better) emulation. What I've read comes straight from the text files that are included with every official download of snes9x. I don't have the relevant qoutes on-hand (I'm online on somebody else's PC), but statements about how snes9x tries to emulate the real snes's hardware would seem to support the idea that snes9x's current developers are taking a partly LLE (low level emulation) approach, although I admit that bsnes has probably one upped snes9x at that, even though snes9x seems to be the better emulator overall. Zsnes 1.51 is a better (probably the best) example of a snes emulator that takes a partly HLE (high level emulation) approach.

My argument would be that SNES9x has the objective of being as accurate as possible while still keeping the speed fast enough to permit portability to a wide variety of platforms.

BSNES won't run well on lower-end hardware. At all. byuu has stated that he can probably do more optimization, and he will probably continue to do so, but his first step was to get the emulation as accurate as possible.

It's entirely possible that BSNES and SNES9x will converge to a point where there is next to no difference between the two emulation-wise, but they're approaching that point from two different directions. BSNES started with accuracy first and foremost; SNES9x started with playability and 'apparent' accuracy. BSNES doesn't need any sort of timing hacks. That's not the case with SNES9x - yet. They've managed to trim out a lot of them as their accuracy increased (in part thanks to byuu's kind assistance).

The other point to make in regards to BSNES is that it doesn't have a lot of usability features - extensive support for different formats, movie recording, et cetera. byuu used to do that, then he got to the point where he was doing more work on the front end than the back end. Now he leaves that bit to other people. (Like the SNES9x team! )