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Comment by lidHanteyk | Hacker News Reader

It is interesting to me how some systems are easier to emulate than others, and the ease of emulation seems to correlate somewhat with ease of programming model. The infamous example which comes to mind even far beyond the SNES is of course the Sega Saturn, while on the other end of the spectrum, Dolphin has support for multiple consoles at once.

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Counting the GameCube and the Wii as two consoles is kind of cheating, the Wii is barely more than an overclocked GameCube with an irrelevant OS running on the side exposing some I/O through a fairly well defined I/O interface. The hardest part of emulating a Wii is emulating a GameCube.

Dolphin is also nowhere close to the accuracy of emulators like bsnes. There are many games that plain don't boot, mysterious bugs that have resisted debugging for years and years (some game breaking, e.g. if you have too many characters unlocked you cannot finish Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn on Dolphin), etc.

Dolphin has support for two consoles: Gamecube and Wii. It supports both of them because the architectures are extremely similar. I don't get what you mean by "ease of programming model". Saturn/Playstation/N64 were the first to have games programmed primarily in C with libraries provided by the system developers. This generation is harder to emulate simply because the system architectures contain more chips connected with wider buses running at much higher clock speeds. All of those factors make low level analysis, like with a logic analyzer, impractical. Another factor is the popularity of the system and level of interest in emulation of the system. The original XBox is a good example of this. Gamecube and PS2 have much more polished emulators because they have more titles that interest people, while little effort is spent on emulating the original Xbox (despite being essentially a PC) arguably due to the lack of exclusive titles to make it worth it.

Nintendo consoles seem to always have the best emulators, likely due to being almost all exclusive games. Every nintendo console recently has had a working emulator before the end of the consoles life. I remember nintendo ds emulators adding support for games that had only just come out.

The other reason Nintendo consoles have the best emulators is because Nintendo generally avoids cutting-edge technology, or at least they prioritise "simple" and "cheap" over CPU and GPU performance.

Apart from the latest consoles (the Wii U and the Switch), the worst-emulated Nintendo console is the Nintendo 64, which also had the strangest hardware (RAMBUS RAM, a general-purpose GPU, etc.)

On that note about the N64, there is a project (created by a friend of mine in college) that is looking to go down the cycle accurate route that the Byuu has gone down with higan.

It's called CEN 64 and can be found at https://github.com/n64dev/cen64

Lots of work that still needs to be done but it's quite impressive!

I played SNES games emulated on a 66MHz 486/DX2 using an emulator named "esnes". No sound[1] and translucency was more miss than hit, but good enough to play through the entirety of ChronoTrigger. It was pretty cool to play a current (if aging) system emulated on a PC.

1: Sound was eventually implemented, I don't remember if it was before or after I upgraded to a Pentium though.

Did the same, with ZSNES running on Win95. Sound was disabled and I'd toggle layers on and off since transparency killed the framerate. Sometimes, when my parents weren't home, I'd copy my saves onto a floppy and boot the game up on the family Pentium 166 for sound and full FX. But I beat most of the game on my 486!

The savegame support of ZSNES and the easy way to hex edit memory are still fond memories of mine.

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