6 ms·

On Emulation

49 points by deltaryz 7y ago

CJefferson 7y ago
This article is mostly good, but saying machines are deterministic breaks down at the limits - - some emulators start hitting cases where physical chips enter inconsistent states, which non-deterministically then fall into another state. Emulating such things requires treating machines as analogue.
- deltaryz 7y ago
  I probably should have clarified that my "point" here isn't really about genuinely replicating the behavior 1:1, but rather preserving the experience at a level where our culture & media can still be accessed in a form that maintains its core experience and intentions. Sure, an emulator might have certain bugs or idiosyncracies when compared to the real hardware, but you're still able to utilize a game or piece of software for its intended function. It still delivers on the promise of what it was created for. Looking into the future, this means that children of the year 4862 might still be able to play Super Mario Bros. It might get some pixels wrong, it might crash or freeze under some weird edge case scenarios, but the experience is preserved.
masswerk 7y ago
I guess, I'm a bit divided on this. While software is abstract (and deterministic), the experience of running the software is not. Meaning, as you become part of a feedback loop, the sensorical side of things matters. And this is really hard to recreate. E.g., not only do emulators introduce lag, also modern systems tend to be laggier than vintage ones. Graphics taylored to the specific attributes of a display technology won't convey the original feeling on modern hardware. Or, interacting with a game using modern controllers, by D-pad or thumb stick, which are operated by fine motor control, feels much different from using joysticks that involve the entire body, by this establishing a rhythm. (This is also true the other way round, e.g., Pong, meant to be controlled by fine motor controls using a paddle, is half the fun using the brute means of a digital joystick, either jammed up or down.) This may sum up to the effect of the user entirely missing the point of a game. (There are some VCS games, I always deemed to be noteworthy, which are generally rated low in modern reviews. I had a hard time understanding why reviewers would miss the rather obvious qualities of those games – until I tried them using a D-pad controller.) P.S.: This doesn't mean that emulators aren't worth it (to the contrary, it's great to have them), but it may be worth keeping in mind that you are not necessarily having the original experience.
- byuu 7y ago
  > E.g., not only do emulators introduce lag, also modern systems tend to be laggier than vintage ones. Some emulators have run-ahead now, which removes internal processing frames from games. Combined with an adaptive sync monitor, 1000hz USB polling, and other tricks, emulators can actually respond to inputs faster than the original gaming consoles did on CRTs. It's pretty much the closest thing we have to magic. Here's a video demonstration I made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AvOa8yt6Vc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AvOa8yt6Vc An an article of mine explaining the concept: https://byuu.net/input/run-ahead https://byuu.net/input/run-ahead
  - tombert 7y ago
    While I agree with you on this for the most part, aren't we going to start hitting a ceiling with what's possible to do run-ahead with? For example, I know in that article you mention bsnes, but wouldn't it be exponentially more difficult to have that feature in something like a GameCube or N64 emulator (let alone something like a PS3 with its funky Cell architecture)?
    - DCKing 7y ago
      The system setup of old devices was quite different from what we're used to now. CRT TV's, no OS in the way. Just inputs and near instant display of what was going on. The more modern your game system gets, the harder it is to perform runahead. But it's also required less and less. Newer consoles got more 'laggy' by default, with OSes, USB/Bluetooth input processing, triple buffering and so on. So runahead requirements have become less and less to recreate experiences. As to you examples, the PS3 was meant to be played on LCD TVs much like our current setups. I don't know how RPCS3 compares to a real console, but I expect the difference isn't huge. Dolphin (GameCube) and Mupen (N64) can emulate their consoles so efficiently that you should be able to achieve 1 frame of runahead on somewhat powerful systems for many games.
    - byuu 7y ago
      Yes it definitely would be. Every frame of run-ahead requires emulating another instance of the system. So a run-ahead of four frames means needing 5x the processing power. Generally speaking you'd only want 1-2 frames of run-ahead, however. And in practice you can usually skip video rendering during the run-ahead frames to reduce overhead a bit.
saagarjha 7y ago
> Imagine if we had a perfect replica of every conversation ever shared in a given location. Perfectly preserved lists of exactly who lived there, what their jobs and names were, and enough information about them to build a fairly detailed image of both the individual people and the culture they belong in. Hopefully long after the people involved are dead…
- deltaryz 7y ago
  Everything you've ever posted on the internet is probably already archived in 12 different places
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Right, and I hope that doesn't extend to things I haven't posted on the internet.
    - deltaryz 7y ago
      better check your phone's permissions and make sure none of your apps have background microphone access
apetresc 7y ago
I'm deeply worried that this generation's experiences are not preservable in the ways the last one's were. Regardless of how you may feel about hardware quirks, etc., you can re-experience Prince of Persia today in a way that you will never be able to experience, say, Hearthstone the day after Blizzard decides to shut down the servers. Hell, even right now you can't do it fully. Modern-day games have irrevocable change as a fundamental game mechanic. You can't even experience Hearthstone as it was _last year_ (with its ban list, standard rotation, etc). Not on ladder, not with your friends, not even in some offline form. This generation's gaming experiences are ephemeral by design. Nobody seems to care now but what a strange feeling it will be in 30 years that media from 60 years ago will be completely accessible, but from 30 years ago it won't be. (I'm using Hearthstone as an example but similar principles apply to almost every successful mainstream game of this generation)
- ses1984 7y ago
  Why do we have such an attachment to preserving these these things? It's really only of interest for nostalgia's sake or for academics. I think you can't actually re-experience Prince of Persia today because part of the experience is being in that historical context. Hearthstone is only a game. Even if you could re-create the game, you can't re-create the feeling of queuing up with tens of thousands of other people queuing up for a new experience for the first time. On the one hand, the Hearthstone game client and server may not be able to be preserved outside of Activision's vaults, but on the other hand people are producing more content than ever before, photos, videos, text, it's a deluge and you're free to capture and scrape as much as your budget can afford. Maybe you're using hyperbole but I feel like there are better things to choose to be deeply worried about.
  - spc476 7y ago
    Even if it's for academics, the academics 30 years from now won't be able to study the game. Five years ago, I examined BASIC for the Atari 2600. I'm far from an academic, but even so, I was still blown away with that was done with 4K ROM and 128 bytes of RAM. Yes, the emulation was annoying (I think it would have been slightly easier on real hardware) but I still found it to be a positive experience. To be sure, I could have had first hand experience with this, as I do remember seeing this cartridge advertised when it was initially released, but I never got the chance back then. And in retrospect, I think it's for the best, as I now have the background and experience now to know just how impressive a feat it really is. So just because you don't feel a need to revisit games (or programs) of today 30 years from now (or use programs from 30 years ago) doesn't mean apply to everyone. [1] http://boston.conman.org/2015/06/16.1 http://boston.conman.org/2015/06/16.1
GuiA 7y ago
Emulation is a fascinating topic on many dimensions. One that I find particularly interesting is that it seems like more primitive systems are exponentially more "sharable" than small ones - I can fit a NES emulator with the entire NES library in a hundred megabytes or so. The entire library of the PS3 would be many many terabytes, and not only do we not even have good PS3 emulation, it's unclear if we'll never get it. While any programmer can code a functional NES emulator in a weekend, it is not the case for these more sophisticated platforms. I wouldn't be surprised that, if humanity is still around and computing a few hundred years from now, people will still be playing SNES ROMs. PS5 games though might be entirely forgotten (especially given online components, endless patches, etc.). The corollary of that is that if you want your software to be preserved by history, your best bet is probably to package it as a NES/SNES/GBA ROM or something like that.
- tenebrisalietum 7y ago
  Every Atari game ever made is right around a gig. When CDs became game media, content size exploded, since it was cheap. > While any programmer can code a functional NES emulator in a weekend, it is not the case for these more sophisticated platforms. Any programmer can code an NROM-compatible NES emulator in a weekend that will play Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, and a few other 8K or 16K games. The plethora of mappers that exists for NES turn the NES into a complex platform even if you don't account for perfect graphic and sound accuracy. PS3 is harder to emulate because it had that Cell BE, but PS4 and XBone have gone the way of arcade hardware - it's all basically a PC now, and will probably remain so simply because it's cheaper to have one real platform. Emulation in the future may disappear because it won't matter--it's all a PC anyway so you might as well just play the PC version of the game, and if none exists, you're going to port it, not emulate.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
pol4ko 7y ago
> But regardless of these details, software has two main qualities that give it this advantage in terms of preservation: It's interactive It's deterministic No sure if we are talking of the same thing here but a Software is deterministic, but the randomness in a Game makes it non-deterministic, even if the emulation is deterministic. See, for exampe, a loot in a dungeon crawler. It will be different everytime.
- CompuHacker 7y ago
  The randomness in games currently available boils down to picking from a set of very large numbers and executing a limited number of code paths. That is to say, there are no non-deterministic video games, because all outcomes must be programmed. A problem that can crop up with emulators is a lack of random seed values between runs, leading to, for example, a dungeon crawler with the same loot every time.

49 points by deltaryz 7y ago

This article is mostly good, but saying machines are deterministic breaks down at the limits - - some emulators start hitting cases where physical chips enter inconsistent states, which non-deterministically then fall into another state. Emulating such things requires treating machines as analogue.

deltaryz 7y ago
I probably should have clarified that my "point" here isn't really about genuinely replicating the behavior 1:1, but rather preserving the experience at a level where our culture & media can still be accessed in a form that maintains its core experience and intentions. Sure, an emulator might have certain bugs or idiosyncracies when compared to the real hardware, but you're still able to utilize a game or piece of software for its intended function. It still delivers on the promise of what it was created for. Looking into the future, this means that children of the year 4862 might still be able to play Super Mario Bros. It might get some pixels wrong, it might crash or freeze under some weird edge case scenarios, but the experience is preserved.

masswerk 7y ago

I guess, I'm a bit divided on this. While software is abstract (and deterministic), the experience of running the software is not. Meaning, as you become part of a feedback loop, the sensorical side of things matters. And this is really hard to recreate. E.g., not only do emulators introduce lag, also modern systems tend to be laggier than vintage ones. Graphics taylored to the specific attributes of a display technology won't convey the original feeling on modern hardware. Or, interacting with a game using modern controllers, by D-pad or thumb stick, which are operated by fine motor control, feels much different from using joysticks that involve the entire body, by this establishing a rhythm. (This is also true the other way round, e.g., Pong, meant to be controlled by fine motor controls using a paddle, is half the fun using the brute means of a digital joystick, either jammed up or down.) This may sum up to the effect of the user entirely missing the point of a game. (There are some VCS games, I always deemed to be noteworthy, which are generally rated low in modern reviews. I had a hard time understanding why reviewers would miss the rather obvious qualities of those games – until I tried them using a D-pad controller.) P.S.: This doesn't mean that emulators aren't worth it (to the contrary, it's great to have them), but it may be worth keeping in mind that you are not necessarily having the original experience.

byuu 7y ago
> E.g., not only do emulators introduce lag, also modern systems tend to be laggier than vintage ones. Some emulators have run-ahead now, which removes internal processing frames from games. Combined with an adaptive sync monitor, 1000hz USB polling, and other tricks, emulators can actually respond to inputs faster than the original gaming consoles did on CRTs. It's pretty much the closest thing we have to magic. Here's a video demonstration I made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AvOa8yt6Vc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AvOa8yt6Vc An an article of mine explaining the concept: https://byuu.net/input/run-ahead https://byuu.net/input/run-ahead
- tombert 7y ago
  While I agree with you on this for the most part, aren't we going to start hitting a ceiling with what's possible to do run-ahead with? For example, I know in that article you mention bsnes, but wouldn't it be exponentially more difficult to have that feature in something like a GameCube or N64 emulator (let alone something like a PS3 with its funky Cell architecture)?
  - DCKing 7y ago
    The system setup of old devices was quite different from what we're used to now. CRT TV's, no OS in the way. Just inputs and near instant display of what was going on. The more modern your game system gets, the harder it is to perform runahead. But it's also required less and less. Newer consoles got more 'laggy' by default, with OSes, USB/Bluetooth input processing, triple buffering and so on. So runahead requirements have become less and less to recreate experiences. As to you examples, the PS3 was meant to be played on LCD TVs much like our current setups. I don't know how RPCS3 compares to a real console, but I expect the difference isn't huge. Dolphin (GameCube) and Mupen (N64) can emulate their consoles so efficiently that you should be able to achieve 1 frame of runahead on somewhat powerful systems for many games.
  - byuu 7y ago
    Yes it definitely would be. Every frame of run-ahead requires emulating another instance of the system. So a run-ahead of four frames means needing 5x the processing power. Generally speaking you'd only want 1-2 frames of run-ahead, however. And in practice you can usually skip video rendering during the run-ahead frames to reduce overhead a bit.

saagarjha 7y ago

> Imagine if we had a perfect replica of every conversation ever shared in a given location. Perfectly preserved lists of exactly who lived there, what their jobs and names were, and enough information about them to build a fairly detailed image of both the individual people and the culture they belong in. Hopefully long after the people involved are dead…

deltaryz 7y ago
Everything you've ever posted on the internet is probably already archived in 12 different places
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Right, and I hope that doesn't extend to things I haven't posted on the internet.
  - deltaryz 7y ago
    better check your phone's permissions and make sure none of your apps have background microphone access

apetresc 7y ago

I'm deeply worried that this generation's experiences are not preservable in the ways the last one's were. Regardless of how you may feel about hardware quirks, etc., you can re-experience Prince of Persia today in a way that you will never be able to experience, say, Hearthstone the day after Blizzard decides to shut down the servers. Hell, even right now you can't do it fully. Modern-day games have irrevocable change as a fundamental game mechanic. You can't even experience Hearthstone as it was _last year_ (with its ban list, standard rotation, etc). Not on ladder, not with your friends, not even in some offline form. This generation's gaming experiences are ephemeral by design. Nobody seems to care now but what a strange feeling it will be in 30 years that media from 60 years ago will be completely accessible, but from 30 years ago it won't be. (I'm using Hearthstone as an example but similar principles apply to almost every successful mainstream game of this generation)

ses1984 7y ago
Why do we have such an attachment to preserving these these things? It's really only of interest for nostalgia's sake or for academics. I think you can't actually re-experience Prince of Persia today because part of the experience is being in that historical context. Hearthstone is only a game. Even if you could re-create the game, you can't re-create the feeling of queuing up with tens of thousands of other people queuing up for a new experience for the first time. On the one hand, the Hearthstone game client and server may not be able to be preserved outside of Activision's vaults, but on the other hand people are producing more content than ever before, photos, videos, text, it's a deluge and you're free to capture and scrape as much as your budget can afford. Maybe you're using hyperbole but I feel like there are better things to choose to be deeply worried about.
- spc476 7y ago
  Even if it's for academics, the academics 30 years from now won't be able to study the game. Five years ago, I examined BASIC for the Atari 2600. I'm far from an academic, but even so, I was still blown away with that was done with 4K ROM and 128 bytes of RAM. Yes, the emulation was annoying (I think it would have been slightly easier on real hardware) but I still found it to be a positive experience. To be sure, I could have had first hand experience with this, as I do remember seeing this cartridge advertised when it was initially released, but I never got the chance back then. And in retrospect, I think it's for the best, as I now have the background and experience now to know just how impressive a feat it really is. So just because you don't feel a need to revisit games (or programs) of today 30 years from now (or use programs from 30 years ago) doesn't mean apply to everyone. [1] http://boston.conman.org/2015/06/16.1 http://boston.conman.org/2015/06/16.1

GuiA 7y ago

Emulation is a fascinating topic on many dimensions. One that I find particularly interesting is that it seems like more primitive systems are exponentially more "sharable" than small ones - I can fit a NES emulator with the entire NES library in a hundred megabytes or so. The entire library of the PS3 would be many many terabytes, and not only do we not even have good PS3 emulation, it's unclear if we'll never get it. While any programmer can code a functional NES emulator in a weekend, it is not the case for these more sophisticated platforms. I wouldn't be surprised that, if humanity is still around and computing a few hundred years from now, people will still be playing SNES ROMs. PS5 games though might be entirely forgotten (especially given online components, endless patches, etc.). The corollary of that is that if you want your software to be preserved by history, your best bet is probably to package it as a NES/SNES/GBA ROM or something like that.

tenebrisalietum 7y ago
Every Atari game ever made is right around a gig. When CDs became game media, content size exploded, since it was cheap. > While any programmer can code a functional NES emulator in a weekend, it is not the case for these more sophisticated platforms. Any programmer can code an NROM-compatible NES emulator in a weekend that will play Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, and a few other 8K or 16K games. The plethora of mappers that exists for NES turn the NES into a complex platform even if you don't account for perfect graphic and sound accuracy. PS3 is harder to emulate because it had that Cell BE, but PS4 and XBone have gone the way of arcade hardware - it's all basically a PC now, and will probably remain so simply because it's cheaper to have one real platform. Emulation in the future may disappear because it won't matter--it's all a PC anyway so you might as well just play the PC version of the game, and if none exists, you're going to port it, not emulate.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

pol4ko 7y ago

> But regardless of these details, software has two main qualities that give it this advantage in terms of preservation: It's interactive It's deterministic No sure if we are talking of the same thing here but a Software is deterministic, but the randomness in a Game makes it non-deterministic, even if the emulation is deterministic. See, for exampe, a loot in a dungeon crawler. It will be different everytime.

CompuHacker 7y ago
The randomness in games currently available boils down to picking from a set of very large numbers and executing a limited number of code paths. That is to say, there are no non-deterministic video games, because all outcomes must be programmed. A problem that can crop up with emulators is a lack of random seed values between runs, leading to, for example, a dungeon crawler with the same loot every time.