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But over time, emulation becomes unwieldy: because the host systems for which emulators are designed will themselves become obsolete, emulators must eventually

by sehugg 15y ago

But over time, emulation becomes unwieldy: because the host systems for which emulators are designed will themselves become obsolete, emulators must eventually be moved to new computer platforms — emulators to run emulators, ad infinitum. Has there ever been a shortage of developers willing to write new emulators? A better argument would be that the usability degrades since the emulated environment is from a different era and might not map to current tech (e.g. iPad version of a keyboard-driven app).

zandorg 15y ago
In 1998, I wrote MIDI support into Frodo (the C64 emulator). Later, my suggestion got the developers of UAE (the Amiga emulator) to implement MIDI support in UAE. So it is possible to recreate the environment by passing the MIDI data back and forth between Windows and the program running on UAE. The same goes for mouse support, graphics tablets, etc etc.
gwern 15y ago
> Has there ever been a shortage of developers willing to write new emulators? A good usable emulator, with all the bugs and corner-cases ironed out? I've read the occasional MAME blog post or documentation about the gory details, and all I remember is a mounting sense of horror and gratitude that the MAME devs were doing the work rather than me. There's basically only one MAME project, BTW.