this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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Why not just get a Steam Deck and emulate everything?
Phones have been able to do gameboy emulation well for 10-15 years, this is for real enthusiasts who want a cool toy
to be fair, the emulation on these devices is significantly more accurate, right?
Yes, but I suspect that GB emulation has been perfect for a decade or 2 lol
Yes, fond memories of using No$Gb on my 486 laptop back in the day to play pirated copies of Pokémon Red and Blue...
To shine a spotlight on just how long ago, the DOS version of No$Gb had a Y2K easter egg built into it, which I got to witness in real time. And it was hilarious.
Not necessarily. Accuracy comes down to specific implemention of the emulator, hardware or software.
Where FPGA shines is it can do operations in parallel, just like actual hardware would. This means there will be a lot less latency in the emulation, giving it a feel that's close to the original hardware.
An FPGA implementation of the GBA can be as inaccurate as software emulation, and just because a game seems to play the same way doesn't mean the emulator is calculating everything in the exact same way as the original hardware. Cycle accuracy isn't technically necessary to have it still seem exactly the same so long as the timing is the same. That's what the PS1 core on the MiSTer is (timing accurate, though not perfectly cycle accurate).
Not necessarily. FPGA cores are black box reverse engineered from the original hardware, which involved a lot of guess work and trial and error. Chances are there are some flaws that crop up in the process. The only way to get a 100% accurate FPGA core would be if someone used leaked HDL from Nintendo, which would be very illegal and would land that developer in court.
For example, I believe the Verilog for the N64, Gamecube, and Wii were all leaked in the gigaleak, but the person who developed the N64 core for the MiSTer never downloaded or read that code, and instead completely reverse engineered the original black box hardware to write his core. That core is not 100% accurate, and some games even require patches to function properly. Granted, that is more due to space limitations in the MiSTer FPGA, but even if there were no such limitations, it would be very unlikely that the HDL written would be functionally identical to the leaked HDL.
I think analogies pocket is attempting to replicate original hardware. You can plug in old games.
I like emulation cause I don't need to keep physical games on me all the time or swap them out, and I get upscaling, save states, and fast forward. Emulation is way better to me.