3 ms·
Yeah some of this do not seem like bugs, but more like devs making full use of their sole and direct access to the hardware while the game is running. After al
by digi_owl 9y ago
Yeah some of this do not seem like bugs, but more like devs making full use of their sole and direct access to the hardware while the game is running.
After all, the Nintendo hand held line may well be closer to the NES and C64 than a modern PC or smartphone.
A lovely example of a bug in a game that may as well be intention is a use after free memory bug in the DOS version of SimCity. This went uncaught during development because DOS didn't have the checks in place as modern OSs do. But trying to run it on Windows and you get an error.
So what Microsoft did in the name of backwards compatibility and user friendliness was to program and exception for the SimCity binary.
Similarly the stability of Win9x was kinda compromised by how the cmd window had virtually all the capabilities of DOS. This to the point of being able to poke various BIOS memory areas.
- Narishma 9y agoThe article is about bugs in emulators, not the games they emulate.
- digi_owl 9y agoIt is more about emulation accuracy than out and out bugs. It is about how certain games behaves in ways that may or may not be bugs in a strict sense, but still go outside the expected environment set down by the hardware documentation while still functioning on the actual hardware. So be it cmd in Windows, or Dosbox, if one want to run the unmodified SimCity binary from back then it will have to allow it to access ram after it was freed. Because when it worked back then, but do not work now, where is the incorrect behavior (or bug if you will) actually located?
- Narishma 9y agoThe goal of an emulator is to reproduce the behaviour of the original machine, whether that behaviour was expected by it's designers is irrelevant. If it can't do so, for whatever reason, then it's a bug as far as I'm concerned.