Going to be releasing an updated version of SNES9x Next today that has the bugs ironed out that the_randomizer and others pointed out. It will also play Tales of Phantasia. There are also some slight performance improvements that you may or may not notice in some of the edge case games. Overall, it's a good enough improvement to release.
Also - I think I have a solution for those people that have been complaining about ZIPs - it will be in the next release (not the SNES9x Next update but the next RetroArch version) - there will be an option so that it will 'directly load' the first ZIP file - it does this by doing behind the scenes 'extract file to current directory first, load it into RAM, then delete it immediately again since we no longer need it'. Now, of course, this won't work for ISO files put into ZIPs, but really, I've never seen any emulator in my life support that, so I don't think people will expect this to work in either case.
I think this might take away most of the complaints to do with ZIPs - I mean, the only thing that still might worry you is if you have not enough space available on your harddrive/SD card to temporarily extract that file to the current working directory, but other than that, it should be transparent and it should work about the same to you as 'directly loading' the contained file in the ZIP archive into a buffer.
Also - to the guy complaining about Star Fox 2 not running really well - I think I should point out that most ROMs run better if you run that ROM first after you start up the libretro core. This especially applies to games like Star Fox 2 and Star Fox that really tax the CPU. I have found only minuscule and very irregular slight sound pops here and then - but overall, it is really playable considering that prior to the speedhacks, this would run at 45fps on a PS3/360 (Star Fox 2 and Vortex are the most demanding games on SNES9x 1.52 - even Vortex prior to the speedhacks would run at say 45-50fps on 360). So considering that, the performance is a vast improvement considering it also has no frameskipping to 'rely on'/'cheat with'.