orange808 wrote:
That depends on your definition of a hack.
A hack is a modification of how your own code works in order to make something run, which otherwise wouldn't.
This means you've basically messed it up somewhere along the road and you're doing a (highly likely) very bad patch to make the problematic game run.
So instead of doing it properly, by doing research on where's the flaw in your logic/code is, you just lazily make a change just for that game in order to have it working.
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How close does it have to be for you to call it legitimate? And, obviously, your definition of "close enough" changes with every passing day. Who has time to constantly churn a hobby project?
That's the 1 billion dollar question and it's not just me, but all the people looking at the emu scene since it all started.
To some, legitimate = I personally can't tell a difference between emu and real hardware, to others it has to be graphically identical and then there are those who go beyond and want the game code to run exactly like on original hardware, even if there are changes that they can't see or feel.
Your call.
For me, I don't necessarily need to go down to circuit level, like emulating the picoseconds of delay cause by a trace length. That's way too much and absolutely useless.
But this is something which I always wanted to see being made: a FPGA where you can put in whatever components you have on hand and let the FPGA handle the rest of the logic.
For example, Mega Drive FPGA, you have your own 68000 CPU, Z80 and YM2612. You put those on, the FPGA recognizes them and turns its own emulation of those ICs off and use them. If you don't have them, then the FPGA will emulate them.
That's my little utopia, emulation wise, but I feel we're nearing a stage were it won't be needed because...
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Yes. So, we agree the research isn't done.
...enough research has been already done.
It's not complete, like every single IC on the every console or arcade board, but parts like the motorola 68000 CPU, Z80 and others are at this point well known and perfectly emulated, down to cycle accuracy. And those have been used in god-only-knows how many consoles and arcade boards.
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You said transistor level emulation and that's not feasible today. Something tells me the goal posts of "acceptable" will move as time goes on. (They always do.)
It will in time. Having the foundation ready it's a good thing. MAME should have taught you this.
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That's my issue with this. Intentional or not: you suggested we can make a magic hardware recreation by just plugging the schematics into an off the shelf FPGA. The barrier? "Lazy" devs?
I'm not suggesting anything, I'm not an FPGA developer, that's more of a question for the likes of Jotego or paulb.
The barrier is knowledge and motivation. Today we have the means to create motivation through donations, Patreons and so on.
MiSTer itself is a fantastic starting point and it's going to get better and better as time passes, so we basically just have to wait.
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We got flamed in Mame for worrying about accuracy and letting the hardware catch up.
You know I wasn't on that part of the fence, I always cared more about accuracy (except, maybe, when I was a kid and just wanted to play Metal Slug, but good ol' NeoRageX got me covered on that)
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On the other side, hitting frame rates on real machines today is penalized with a dismissive "you're just lazy" tomorrow.
It is not, it's never been about speed, it's been about making stuff work through hacks.
The whole "speed" topic was brought up by you and I didn't buy into it.
There have been hacks to make games run at full (or acceptable) speed, but I wasn't addressing those and you'd known if you've read my posts.
I never talked about speed, I always talked about accuracy.
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Very few people have time to pour into infinite iteration. At some point, there just isn't any spare time and energy to keep going.
And that's true, I agree and it's why open source software has been the real revolution in emulation, so that when someone doesn't have any more time, someone else can pick it up and continue.
And it's why I have really high hopes for MiSTer.
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UltraHLE was important, but the dev never wanted to make a long term commitment to an emulator--or take on Nintendo. It was a tech demo. I can't speak for the other N64 emulation options.
For a very long time, it was the only real option and opened the doors for High Level Emulation (that's what HLE stands for) to other platforms. Dynamic recompilers then came out and made the Playstation emus make huge leap forward and so on.
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With Mame, it was possible to work on games that couldn't hit frame rate on the hardware, but if you tried that with a console emulator, all you would get was flame.
I know too well but trust me, MAME got a huge amount of flak for this even back in the days.
And let me add just a little remark: for once, it feels really good to actually have a goddamn civil discussion without resorting to personal attacks and non sequiturs.
If you feel like discussing it further, I'd be absolutely okay with that, although this might not be the best thread.