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Comment by jron | Hacker News Reader

Byuu's work in emulation and ROM preservation should be commended but his FPGA dismissal seems rooted in envy. After spending 14 years developing Higan, I can sympathize. The fact is, the SNES chips are well understood (partly through the work of Byuu). The SuperNT FPGA code from Kevtris mimics almost every perceptible quirk of these chips in gameplay and I'm sure MiSTer will get to the same point if enough talent is drawn to the project. The list of known timing/graphical issues for the SuperNT is less than 20 from some of the most fanatical users: https://github.com/SmokeMonsterPacks/Super-NT-Jailbreak/issu...

Edit: only 10 of the known issues are confirmed and graphical/timing related.

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To me, Byuu didn't come across as dismissive of the SuperNT so much as the idea that FPGA's are inherently more accurate than software emulators. Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages.

20 known issues is significantly more than Higan's zero known issues (for the SNES emulator specifically; other Higan emulators are of varying degrees of quality and maturity). Unless you count issues like, there's a certain game that appears to randomly crash slightly less often in Higan than on real hardware, which was still being investigated as of when I last checked.

I'm not dismissing the incredible work of Byuu. I'm simply suggesting it is far easier to get cycle accuracy and correctness in an FPGA than through software emulation. Kevtris probably spent less than a year in his spare time to pull off nearly identical results with his FPGA. He also hasn't gone back to work through the known issues because of his work on the MegaSG.

> I'm simply suggesting it is far easier to get cycle accuracy and correctness in an FPGA than through software emulation.

This is the line I would disagree with. What about an FPGA makes cycle accuracy and correctness easier than with an emulator written in software?

Make no mistake, Kevtris is immensely talented. But he also had the advantage of additional research going in (such as byuu's), and, well, I truly don't think the accuracy is comparable as of right now. The difference in effort required to get between 99% and 100% compatibility is immense, and the Super NT is clearly at 99% right now.

Verilog/HDL has obvious advantages to C/C++ in the emulation world that seems to escape too many people in this never ending debate. Are both using some blackbox magic? Yes, but if we could compare the HDL size to byuu's code base the mystical advantages would start to become more transparent. Byuu, by his own estimation, spent "40% of his life" developing Higan...

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