Posted January 25, 2012
Very nice video there.
I knew about writing to registries and such. I didn't know just how involved and time consuming writing during the scan of the TV was. I knew about updating line for line but not the limitation of what you could put in those lines.
The complexities should still be possible to emulate though maybe getting a bit heavy. WinUAE and MAME being rather good examples of how many resources it takes to emulate a simple system but at the same time keep things synchronized with each other.
I believe my 1.7ghz cpu still had trouble emulating the 14 mhz stock Amiga 1200 CPU because of all the synchronization and hardware tricks built in there.
And yeah there were a lot of "less authorized" tricks people used to squeeze cycles out of a system. Never had an old console so never really got into that, but an example from the computer world would be the C64 and the 1541 disk drive. Some games would actually manage to get the disk drive to do calculations for them, again making emulation heavier when needing to suddenly emulate the controller and such in an external disk drive, and synchronize that with the rest of the system running a different clockrate.
But I'd still say emulators for many systems have now come so far they could potentially be licensed for distributing old games with, and they are at times too. 1:1 might save work in the end, but the result can be quite good without everything accounted for. Sega for instance have re-released their sonic games for quite a while. in 2003 I bought a collection, one of the titles was the sega smash pack containing sonic 2 and other megadrive games. The emulator itself was an (apparently) licensed version of KGen with modifications to encrypt the rom images. Emulators have come a long way since then.
I knew about writing to registries and such. I didn't know just how involved and time consuming writing during the scan of the TV was. I knew about updating line for line but not the limitation of what you could put in those lines.
The complexities should still be possible to emulate though maybe getting a bit heavy. WinUAE and MAME being rather good examples of how many resources it takes to emulate a simple system but at the same time keep things synchronized with each other.
I believe my 1.7ghz cpu still had trouble emulating the 14 mhz stock Amiga 1200 CPU because of all the synchronization and hardware tricks built in there.
And yeah there were a lot of "less authorized" tricks people used to squeeze cycles out of a system. Never had an old console so never really got into that, but an example from the computer world would be the C64 and the 1541 disk drive. Some games would actually manage to get the disk drive to do calculations for them, again making emulation heavier when needing to suddenly emulate the controller and such in an external disk drive, and synchronize that with the rest of the system running a different clockrate.
But I'd still say emulators for many systems have now come so far they could potentially be licensed for distributing old games with, and they are at times too. 1:1 might save work in the end, but the result can be quite good without everything accounted for. Sega for instance have re-released their sonic games for quite a while. in 2003 I bought a collection, one of the titles was the sega smash pack containing sonic 2 and other megadrive games. The emulator itself was an (apparently) licensed version of KGen with modifications to encrypt the rom images. Emulators have come a long way since then.
