4 ms·

Nintendo's emulators are usually equivalent to what the state of the art was 15-20 years ago. They have plenty of bugs, usually fixed with duct tape and game sp

Nintendo's emulators are usually equivalent to what the state of the art was 15-20 years ago. They have plenty of bugs, usually fixed with duct tape and game specific hacks. They are designed to run the set of games they sell and nothing else -- once you get out of what the QA team has explicitly tested, it's not uncommon to find unemulated or badly emulated hardware features.

kingbirdy 7y ago
While all of Nintendo's official emulators are afaik made internally, it's interesting to note that Sony used an existing open source emulator (PCSX ReARMed) for their Playstation Classic. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/11/sony-using-open-source-emulator-for-playstation-classic-plug-and-play/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/11/sony-using-open-sourc...
- jldugger 7y ago
  > While all of Nintendo's official emulators are afaik made internally I believe the consensus is that the NES classics on GBA were done using an open source emulator. The emulator itself was liberally licensed and I think someone asked the author's thoughts and they were 'ya, that's half the purpose of the license. i don't care'
derefr 7y ago
Also, when you think about it, if a game behaves differently when run in an emulator, as part of an emulator-and-ROM bundled software product released by Nintendo... then that behavior is just how that particular release of the game has been canonically chosen to behave. Any bugs in the emulation of a Virtual Console title, or a SNES Classic title, or a SNES Online title, are just "how that version of the game is." Much like any typos in a particular printing of a book are "just how that release of the book is." They're now part of the authorial intent of that release; part of the text. If you later ported that game, you'd seek to be bug-for-bug compatible with the bugs introduced by that emulator, because those bugs are what Nintendo released, and so those bugs are now, in part, what it means to play that game. Or, to put that another way: there's no real difference between a bug introduced by wrapping a game in an imperfect emulator, and a bug introduced during recompilation/porting/remastering of the game. Either way, you now have a new "variant" of the game with its own bugs, but one which is also a canonical, supported release of the game. Interestingly, sometimes—because of one of these slight variances—the fastest [and so preferred] version of a game to speedrun, is a Nintendo-sanctioned emulated (e.g. Virtual Console) release of the game. It says something important, I think, that these releases of the game aren't automatically shunned by the speedrunning community, the way that runs of the game under an arbitrary emulator on someone's PC would be; but rather are just treated as their own separate category-set, in the same way the speedrunning community differentiates different region releases, or version releases, or port/remaster releases.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  > Interestingly, sometimes—because of one of these slight variances—the fastest [and so preferred] version of a game to speedrun, is a Nintendo-sanctioned emulated (e.g. Virtual Console) release of the game. Not that that necessarily has anything to do with bugs. Some VC games simply have reduced lag when a lot is loaded, because they throw somewhat more power at the game than the original console could.
  - derefr 7y ago
    Sure, definitely. One more interesting difference, that you'll see with N64 games specifically (e.g. VC Paper Mario on the Wii) is that the original console will hard-lock in places where the VC version will just keep on truckin' (presumably because it has access to more memory, or the emulator just discards crazy out-of-bounds writes, or because the emulator treats open-bus address reads differently. Something like that.) Anyway, that means that there are glitches that can be used save time on the VC version, which in some sense don't exist at all on the original version of the game, because they're gated behind a fault that the original hardware can't get past.
- sjwright 7y ago
  I don’t agree. Canonical status is bestowed by the artist/author, not the publisher, and certainly not a republisher. If Lord of the Rings is republished with page 527 arbitrarily missing, that omission doesn’t become canon.
  - willis936 7y ago
    Yes but if there was a second edition released by Tolkien, that would be canon. There could have been changes in page 527, such as Sam and Frodo run away to start a domestic life together, and it would be official. It would also cause quite a stirring and fracture the community. You see smaller scale scandals of the same variety everytime nintendo rereleases a poorly emulated title. Copyright needs to be fixed.
    - 7y ago

kingbirdy 7y ago

While all of Nintendo's official emulators are afaik made internally, it's interesting to note that Sony used an existing open source emulator (PCSX ReARMed) for their Playstation Classic. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/11/sony-using-open-source-emulator-for-playstation-classic-plug-and-play/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/11/sony-using-open-sourc...

jldugger 7y ago
> While all of Nintendo's official emulators are afaik made internally I believe the consensus is that the NES classics on GBA were done using an open source emulator. The emulator itself was liberally licensed and I think someone asked the author's thoughts and they were 'ya, that's half the purpose of the license. i don't care'

derefr 7y ago

Also, when you think about it, if a game behaves differently when run in an emulator, as part of an emulator-and-ROM bundled software product released by Nintendo... then that behavior is just how that particular release of the game has been canonically chosen to behave. Any bugs in the emulation of a Virtual Console title, or a SNES Classic title, or a SNES Online title, are just "how that version of the game is." Much like any typos in a particular printing of a book are "just how that release of the book is." They're now part of the authorial intent of that release; part of the text. If you later ported that game, you'd seek to be bug-for-bug compatible with the bugs introduced by that emulator, because those bugs are what Nintendo released, and so those bugs are now, in part, what it means to play that game. Or, to put that another way: there's no real difference between a bug introduced by wrapping a game in an imperfect emulator, and a bug introduced during recompilation/porting/remastering of the game. Either way, you now have a new "variant" of the game with its own bugs, but one which is also a canonical, supported release of the game. Interestingly, sometimes—because of one of these slight variances—the fastest [and so preferred] version of a game to speedrun, is a Nintendo-sanctioned emulated (e.g. Virtual Console) release of the game. It says something important, I think, that these releases of the game aren't automatically shunned by the speedrunning community, the way that runs of the game under an arbitrary emulator on someone's PC would be; but rather are just treated as their own separate category-set, in the same way the speedrunning community differentiates different region releases, or version releases, or port/remaster releases.

Dylan16807 7y ago
> Interestingly, sometimes—because of one of these slight variances—the fastest [and so preferred] version of a game to speedrun, is a Nintendo-sanctioned emulated (e.g. Virtual Console) release of the game. Not that that necessarily has anything to do with bugs. Some VC games simply have reduced lag when a lot is loaded, because they throw somewhat more power at the game than the original console could.
- derefr 7y ago
  Sure, definitely. One more interesting difference, that you'll see with N64 games specifically (e.g. VC Paper Mario on the Wii) is that the original console will hard-lock in places where the VC version will just keep on truckin' (presumably because it has access to more memory, or the emulator just discards crazy out-of-bounds writes, or because the emulator treats open-bus address reads differently. Something like that.) Anyway, that means that there are glitches that can be used save time on the VC version, which in some sense don't exist at all on the original version of the game, because they're gated behind a fault that the original hardware can't get past.
sjwright 7y ago
I don’t agree. Canonical status is bestowed by the artist/author, not the publisher, and certainly not a republisher. If Lord of the Rings is republished with page 527 arbitrarily missing, that omission doesn’t become canon.
- willis936 7y ago
  Yes but if there was a second edition released by Tolkien, that would be canon. There could have been changes in page 527, such as Sam and Frodo run away to start a domestic life together, and it would be official. It would also cause quite a stirring and fracture the community. You see smaller scale scandals of the same variety everytime nintendo rereleases a poorly emulated title. Copyright needs to be fixed.
  - 7y ago