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I mean, aside from the question of whether fpgas can truly accurately simulate everything at the transistor level, the truth is that most fpga emulation cores f

I mean, aside from the question of whether fpgas can truly accurately simulate everything at the transistor level, the truth is that most fpga emulation cores for this sort of thing don't. They are, afaik, still mostly 'just' cycle-level accurate emulations built off the same reverse engineering that accurate software emulators are. They can do it more efficiently for sure, but that doesn't mean it's worth it for them to go much farther. Like, for an extreme example there's no world in which the in-development PSX mister core, running on a de10 nano, is particularly more accurate than a software emulator. The chips involved have too many transistors to completely simulate. But this will be true to some degree for everything above some complexity threshold. Maybe the Atari 2600 core is perfectly accurate. I wouldn't be surprised if the most accurate software emulators are more accurate than the most accurate fpga cores, especially for anything newer than the NES, just because that's where most of the original work involved happens. This idea that FPGAs are inherently more accurate seems to be rooted in marketing FUD from a company called Analogue.

philistine 5y ago
I’ll 100% give you the marketing spin, but FPGAs provide an element of accuracy with frame delay. If you plug in a controller and use a CRT, there no more lost frames than the original hardware. That’s the accuracy that’s above what an emulator on our Babel’s tower of a stack on Windows.
- stormbrew 5y ago
  That's not because of the fpga though. You can also plug a CRT into a PC. You can even chase the beam if you're willing to go to a low enough level. People generally don't but this is a limitation born advantage. There's no OS (sort of) to get in your way and why would you put one there if it's not helping you. (I say sort of because there usually is a system that could be described as an OS running somewhere on the fpga board, to load the fpga bitstreams, if nothing else, but also sometimes to supplement the fpga's abilities)
  - philistine 5y ago
    You will find projects that have zero-input lag with FPGA based emulators right now. You will not find PC-based emulators with zero-input lag at all. That this is the reality has no effect on whether a PC could do it or not.

philistine 5y ago

I’ll 100% give you the marketing spin, but FPGAs provide an element of accuracy with frame delay. If you plug in a controller and use a CRT, there no more lost frames than the original hardware. That’s the accuracy that’s above what an emulator on our Babel’s tower of a stack on Windows.

stormbrew 5y ago
That's not because of the fpga though. You can also plug a CRT into a PC. You can even chase the beam if you're willing to go to a low enough level. People generally don't but this is a limitation born advantage. There's no OS (sort of) to get in your way and why would you put one there if it's not helping you. (I say sort of because there usually is a system that could be described as an OS running somewhere on the fpga board, to load the fpga bitstreams, if nothing else, but also sometimes to supplement the fpga's abilities)
- philistine 5y ago
  You will find projects that have zero-input lag with FPGA based emulators right now. You will not find PC-based emulators with zero-input lag at all. That this is the reality has no effect on whether a PC could do it or not.