6 ms·

I played around with this in my own NES emulator, which works roughly the way you describe. I found that, at least for major-brand titles (Mario/Zelda/Metroid/

I played around with this in my own NES emulator, which works roughly the way you describe. I found that, at least for major-brand titles (Mario/Zelda/Metroid/Kirby), cycle accuracy actually doesn't matter. Everything's based off PPU/APU/mapper interrupts. In fact, doubling (or more) the CPU clock enhanced some of the games I tried. Animations in Kirby's Adventure became more smooth (e.g. the Spark ability). Screens full of enemies in Metroid ran with no slowdown. The glitchy first scanline of status overlays in various games cleared up. I haven't yet observed negative effects in major-party titles. I had designed my emulator as an experiment: treat the NES as an abstract specification, rather than a concrete implementation. Turns out that a lot of games seem to have actually been designed following the same principle. It was a wonderful feeling to see these games as I imagine they were intended to be experienced, as if I opened a letter from the game designers left unopened for thirty years.

makomk 10y ago
Bear in mind that sometimes, people want to do tricks that depend on the slowdowns and glitches that happen on real hardware.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  And in fact some games won't work without them. http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-one-mans-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator/ http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-o...
- colanderman 10y ago
  I'm sure. That wasn't the point of my experiment.
emodendroket 10y ago
Yeah, every emulator is pretty much going to be fine with Mario, Zelda, and Kirby, but that isn't really the point.
- colanderman 10y ago
  In my case it was.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    I guess what I mean to say is that someone endeavoring to write a cycle-accurate emulator wants every game to work exactly like it did originally regardless of what bizarre hardware-specific hacks it relies on. For someone who just wants to play any of the top 20 most popular games on a system and isn't too concerned with minor deviations pretty much any emulator is going to suit their needs (in fact it's a common model to have hacks in the emulator just to make a particular popular game work right).
Narishma 10y ago
> It was a wonderful feeling to see these games as I imagine they were intended to be experienced Did you mean the way they were not intended to be experienced? Otherwise it doesn't make sense. The way they were intended to be experienced is on a real console connected to a CRT TV.
- 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
  It really depends on the game and what the designers and programmers considered ideal or non-ideal at that time. There might not even be unanimous opinion among the creators of what the ideal behavior would be; that's often seen in film, where an actor, director, and screenwriter all have somewhat different interpretations of a character. On one hand you have stuff like Cave shooters where they've tried to reproduce the slowdown in ports because it's expected in the genre and affects difficulty. On the other hand you have stuff like Shadow of the Colossus, which was almost certainly not intended to have extreme framerate drops. We can objectively talk about various metrics of accuracy compared to the original hardware. Authorial intent is, pretty much by definition, a matter of opinion (and authors themselves, over the years, often change their ideas of what their intent was).
  - colanderman 10y ago
    Well-said. For my experiment I took "authorial intent" to include: * no framerate drops * audio synthesized with band-limited step functions (including the "triangle" channel) * video composed of band-limited scanlines * video interrupt running at NTSC rate * audio interrupt running at 240 Hz * free-running audio synthesis Like you said, it is entirely a matter of opinion what authorial intent is. For my purposes this definition provided an interesting experiment, and the result was aesthetically pleasing.
    - WorldMaker 10y ago
      There's also the part of "authorial intent" where particularly at that time many of the games were designed and developed sometimes on much bigger hardware (corporate mainframes, for instance) targeting the consoles and then later QAed on development consoles (that might not even be the same hardware as production consoles). There certainly are questions for some games if the authors intended something much better that they could get their development hardware to perform. It's not that many console hardware generations back where even development consoles still varied in hardware from production consoles (at least as recently as the early history of the PS3/Xbox 360). All told, it's all a part of game's version of the "the artwork is never quite finished/realized, it's just eventually published".
kLeeIsDead 10y ago
You still have the source?

makomk 10y ago

Bear in mind that sometimes, people want to do tricks that depend on the slowdowns and glitches that happen on real hardware.

emodendroket 10y ago
And in fact some games won't work without them. http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-one-mans-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator/ http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-o...
colanderman 10y ago
I'm sure. That wasn't the point of my experiment.

emodendroket 10y ago

Yeah, every emulator is pretty much going to be fine with Mario, Zelda, and Kirby, but that isn't really the point.

colanderman 10y ago
In my case it was.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  I guess what I mean to say is that someone endeavoring to write a cycle-accurate emulator wants every game to work exactly like it did originally regardless of what bizarre hardware-specific hacks it relies on. For someone who just wants to play any of the top 20 most popular games on a system and isn't too concerned with minor deviations pretty much any emulator is going to suit their needs (in fact it's a common model to have hacks in the emulator just to make a particular popular game work right).

Narishma 10y ago

> It was a wonderful feeling to see these games as I imagine they were intended to be experienced Did you mean the way they were not intended to be experienced? Otherwise it doesn't make sense. The way they were intended to be experienced is on a real console connected to a CRT TV.

0xcde4c3db 10y ago
It really depends on the game and what the designers and programmers considered ideal or non-ideal at that time. There might not even be unanimous opinion among the creators of what the ideal behavior would be; that's often seen in film, where an actor, director, and screenwriter all have somewhat different interpretations of a character. On one hand you have stuff like Cave shooters where they've tried to reproduce the slowdown in ports because it's expected in the genre and affects difficulty. On the other hand you have stuff like Shadow of the Colossus, which was almost certainly not intended to have extreme framerate drops. We can objectively talk about various metrics of accuracy compared to the original hardware. Authorial intent is, pretty much by definition, a matter of opinion (and authors themselves, over the years, often change their ideas of what their intent was).
- colanderman 10y ago
  Well-said. For my experiment I took "authorial intent" to include: * no framerate drops * audio synthesized with band-limited step functions (including the "triangle" channel) * video composed of band-limited scanlines * video interrupt running at NTSC rate * audio interrupt running at 240 Hz * free-running audio synthesis Like you said, it is entirely a matter of opinion what authorial intent is. For my purposes this definition provided an interesting experiment, and the result was aesthetically pleasing.
  - WorldMaker 10y ago
    There's also the part of "authorial intent" where particularly at that time many of the games were designed and developed sometimes on much bigger hardware (corporate mainframes, for instance) targeting the consoles and then later QAed on development consoles (that might not even be the same hardware as production consoles). There certainly are questions for some games if the authors intended something much better that they could get their development hardware to perform. It's not that many console hardware generations back where even development consoles still varied in hardware from production consoles (at least as recently as the early history of the PS3/Xbox 360). All told, it's all a part of game's version of the "the artwork is never quite finished/realized, it's just eventually published".

kLeeIsDead 10y ago

You still have the source?