3 ms·

Fun fact: Dolphin emulates some N64 games better than current PC N64 emulators do. For example, Mario Tennis (N64) is considered very difficult to emulate, but

by delroth 13y ago

Fun fact: Dolphin emulates some N64 games better than current PC N64 emulators do. For example, Mario Tennis (N64) is considered very difficult to emulate, but the official Nintendo emulator running in Dolphin has almost no problem with it!

heydenberk 13y ago
I'd have to imagine this is because the game executed by the virtual console has been simplified and improved by Nintendo since they have direct access to the source.
- derefr 13y ago
  Or, possibly, that each Virtual Console ROM ships with a set of shims or plugins to the emulator, to add extra logic and workarounds specific to each game. Which is pretty much exactly how NES and SNES cartridges worked, come to think of it—except that the console they were patching was hardware, so they had to add new physical chips to do it. (Speaking of, I've always wondered why no console just ships with some FPGAs inside that are free for each game to program on startup.)
  - Jasper_ 13y ago
    Because it makes mass production a lot harder and a lot more expensive.
  - simcop2387 13y ago
    It'd be doable to have an FPGA there, it'd have to be an SRAM backed FPGA which will make it more expensive from what I've seen. Otherwise they're usually flash based which will wear out after a while. It'd also likely suffer a similar fate to the random processors in the playstation systems where they barely got any use in games to a serious extent since they were only on one system.
  - Everlag 13y ago
    An fpga that would be useful is a relatively expensive piece of hardware, even at scale. Additionally, finding skilled professionals that would be able to work with them is much, much tougher than hiring a comparable graphics programmer. There's also the issue of developing for an fpga being more difficult, and thus time consuming, than writing tight c.

3 ms·

Fun fact: Dolphin emulates some N64 games better than current PC N64 emulators do. For example, Mario Tennis (N64) is considered very difficult to emulate, but

by delroth 13y ago

heydenberk 13y ago
I'd have to imagine this is because the game executed by the virtual console has been simplified and improved by Nintendo since they have direct access to the source.
- derefr 13y ago
  Or, possibly, that each Virtual Console ROM ships with a set of shims or plugins to the emulator, to add extra logic and workarounds specific to each game. Which is pretty much exactly how NES and SNES cartridges worked, come to think of it—except that the console they were patching was hardware, so they had to add new physical chips to do it. (Speaking of, I've always wondered why no console just ships with some FPGAs inside that are free for each game to program on startup.)
  - Jasper_ 13y ago
    Because it makes mass production a lot harder and a lot more expensive.
  - simcop2387 13y ago
    It'd be doable to have an FPGA there, it'd have to be an SRAM backed FPGA which will make it more expensive from what I've seen. Otherwise they're usually flash based which will wear out after a while. It'd also likely suffer a similar fate to the random processors in the playstation systems where they barely got any use in games to a serious extent since they were only on one system.
  - Everlag 13y ago
    An fpga that would be useful is a relatively expensive piece of hardware, even at scale. Additionally, finding skilled professionals that would be able to work with them is much, much tougher than hiring a comparable graphics programmer. There's also the issue of developing for an fpga being more difficult, and thus time consuming, than writing tight c.