Yuzu (Nintendo Switch Emulator) Progress Report January 2021
yuzu-emu.org
yuzu-emu.org
> Mali on Android: Not tested. We can safely say it wouldn't end well, though.
This brings memories; my canvas webpage had a number of problems with android mali devices.
I am super impressed by the content of this post, but I bet there is also a lot that is going over my head that I am not even aware of.
In my opinion, the best way to learn how an emulator works is to start writing one. /r/emudev and the emudev Discord (see subreddit sidebar) are a great place to start. The Discord in particular is great: it’s split into channels for each system, and there are a ton of pointers to resources for all systems in the main channel.
As far as consoles go, the typical recommendation is to start with CHIP-8. It’s a straightforward system with a very simple design, which makes it relatively easy to emulate.
[1] For the curious: https://github.com/aksiksi/gbc
I do wonder how one takes on modern machines though. It seems like it'd be a completely different ball of wax.
And it was a blast.
For emulating a real system, the Gigatron would be relatively simple. The hard part would be the display because it is bit-banged into NTSC.
This does sound like fun. I feel like I’ve had a similar experience in porting and refactoring legacy code, and each successive step forward unlocks more and more cool stuff
Basic overview of a GameBoy emulator. Far cry from the complexities of a Switch, but still a great writeup by cturt.
Modern games, in whatever form, most of the time are just watching yet another x-men remake.
None of that is true though. It's just the rose tinted glasses one wears when looking back at the games one grew up with and loved.
> where game genres were yet to be invented
Actually by the 16-bit era quite a number of genres were already really well defined. This was even true for the 8-bit era for some genres (like platformers, maze games, etc).
> publishers were keen to take anything that came their way
That very much depended on the publisher -- just the same as it does now (some publishers will buy any old indie crap and others are more selective). And it wasn't just publishers who were known to reject games, Sega Japan were famously strict about the titles they'd allow to be licensed on the Mega Drive. It was Sega America who allowed any old release to be licensed.
> and we were creating stuff that were told the hardware wasn't capable of.
That's selection bias. There was a lot of mediocre titles around too. Many of which didn't push the hardware or was less creative about the use of hardware resources. But people tend to remember the more impressive titles, in part because they have aged better, but also literally because they had that "wow" factor.
> Modern games, in whatever form, most of the time are just watching yet another x-men remake.
The 8-bit and 16-bit era had their fair share of copy cat games. When Mario Bros was a hit everyone seemed to jump on the bandwagon to make a Mario clone. There were hundreds of Pac-Man inspired games (and Pac-Man itself wasn't the first game of that style). Not to mention all the side scrolling shooters, JRPGs that are almost identical from one another, etc. Even popular games like Galaxian was themselves a knock off (eg Space Invaders). And don't get me started on the number of Space Harrier and Outrun clones on the Famicom.
Even copy cat games aside, most successful games saw sequals (and even many unsuccessful ones). Alex Kid had 4 games. Wonderboy had 3. There are around a dozen 8/16-bit Sonic games that are 2D platformers (ie not counting Sonic 3D Blast and Sonic Pinball) and Mario has even more titles to it's name.
Don't get me wrong, I do love that era of gaming. In fact I'm a massive collector of the original hardware and have ~20 consoles (including some obscure ones) still hooked up in a spare room...all of which still get regularly played. You could say this is a big passion of mine. But with that it does mean I also see my fair share of shelf fillers -- and they do outnumber the classic titles despite what your fond memories of the era tell you.
As for what the golden age was, well that's subjective and likely whoever you ask will say it's the era they grew up in. Each new generation of gamers have seen a new paradigm in gaming and that's what they'll remember fondly.
It surely was, if you were attending Assembly, Breakout or any variant of them.
You seemed to only have lived through game consoles.
Why are you always so presumptuous and obtuse in your responses? It's needless and unproductive.
No I haven't just lived through games consoles. However I focused my point on games consoles because we're talking about the "golden era of gaming" on a thread about a games console emulator. Clearly focusing my point on games consoles was the logical response contextually speaking. However I'm happy to debunk your bullshit with a dozen counterexamples on 8-bit microcomputers, 16-bit personal computers or IBM-clone PCs. As it happens 70s and 80's home computers was the golden era for me as a games developer and I converted to games consoles later in life. Or maybe you want counterexamples of games written on main frames, programmable calculators, or 70's kit computers?
Maybe with some bonus points for Arcades.
Take the Atari ST and Amiga for example, the amount of crossover games between consoles and those two computers is so big that many gamers considered those computers to be consoles in their own right (I know they're technically not correct but it does illustrate just how big the crossover library was).
As for arcades, they were often the worst for milking genres. How many Street Fighter clones were released after SF2's success? The Galaxian/Space Invaders example I made previously are arcade titles. Same with Space Harrier and Outrun...massive arcade titles who's formula got copied over and over (to be fair, Outrun wasn't even the first arcade racing game of its ilk to hit the arcades either). Then there's Streets of Rage / Double Dragon / Turtles in Time / etc. All pretty formulaic brawlers and there were hundreds others just like them. NeoGeo is another example of a publisher releasing a library of similar arcade titles. All of these are massive names too, so just think about how many similar games made it into arcades but weren't so successful that you still remember them these days.
That all said, one thing the Atari ST and Amiga were better at was innovative early 3D titles. There were a few really interesting mouse controlled 3D games that wouldn't have been possible on your traditional 80s/90s console. But those titles were far far far outnumbered by generic games (and "generic" here doesn't mean "bad").
I didn't know that about Sega in Japan; usually when I think of strict licensing I think of Nintendo of America, the 10NES chip and Atari v. Nintendo [0].
> When Mario Bros was a hit everyone seemed to jump on the bandwagon to make a Mario clone.
You're on the money here. I'd argue this pattern repeats through a number of industries; some clear examples in automotive are the 'Pony car', Minivans, and the Grill style of the Aston Martin DB9 (okay, last one's a stretch).
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Games_Corp._v._Nintendo_....
There was also a glut of mobile games that were ported to the Switch quite early on.
That all said, I have generally been happy with the quality of the games on that platform. Initially the best titles were Nintendo's own IP (to be expected) and RPGs with a few good indie titles. But now there's a real plethora of good games ranging from shorter indie titles through to AA-quality games (albeit not on the same scale of Playstation 4 / Xbox One -- but that's to be expected given the different hardware platforms). Plus more than enough older titles re-released to keep your average retro-gamer happy.
It's even written in a way that non-technical users will understand, even when it does get technical.
I'd call this the gold standard of patch/update breakdowns.
Related from 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16150777
A bit from a few weeks ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25522454
For various reasons, though, this sort of emulation has a lot of pitfalls. Either you directly run a lot of the console's firmware and e.g. try to implement the hardware devices in QEMU, or you try to recreate the console OS/firmware at a higher level, mimicking the underlying APIs. Neither are easy tasks. Take a look at the original xbox -- the emulators available aren't really great, even after nearly 2 decades of hard work.
Of course, any complex emulator is hard -- just pointing out this isn't really as much of a shortcut as it may seem. The biggest upside is just (potentially) performance, as you don't need to interpret or translate CPU instructions.
Still, I think it's a good example of how just because the xbox is basically a regular Pentium III system with a modified GeForce 3 GPU, doesn't mean it's easy to make an emulator for. And the original xbox was more "PC-like" than the PS4/5 or current xbox lineup, I'd wager.
But yes, if you could break the security and implement the (many) private APIs, you wouldn’t necessarily need to emulate (although it might be legally and technologically easier to emulate a ps5 than re-implement everything).
It's not clear HOW much of it comes from the 3DS OS, how much comes from FreeBSD and how much comes from Android.
https://github.com/Atmosphere-NX/Atmosphere/blob/master/docs...
That's not a "nearly complete reimplementation".
A bunch of not started work in a planned features doc doesn't change that.
In this era where convenience is super important it's less of a deal but when a not especially powerful PC could emulate the key N64 games and the games were both downloadable via dialup (Mario 64 was like an hour long download iirc?) at a point when they were $70 in shops... Just absolutely mindblowing stuff for the time really, especially if you were from a place like me where you'd have to get a long train journey to the nearest city to get these games.
That being said, I was far too into SNES games at the time and found the analogue controls painful via keyboard to ever look into it that much.
CD burners only seriously ramped up in ubiquity in 2000 or so too; they very quickly became common place
Was just messing about with CEMU yday and found I could play BOTW in 4K at 60fps on my computer, it looked absolutely beautiful compaired to playing on my Wii U but I can't see myself being able to settle down and play on that machine.
I also think having access to so much stuff has made the hassle of tinkering not worth it for most people. Can remember back as a kid with dial up how I would relentlessly fine tune configurations to get some emulated games to a playable state, the slightly bit of lag on an emulation now and I'm like "crap, is this gonna keep happening? can I be bothered enduring this??"
One issue they have is that they're expensive (the earlier ones can be found for cheap, note however that the first one might have some battery issues) compared to the Switch, but on the other hand they are not susceptible to planned obsolescence and extreme locked down environments like pretty much all consoles are: you can run any game of the gigantic PC game library there (assuming the specs are met... of course :-P) and new games will be released for pretty much as long as the hardware can function.
Here is me using mine with an unfinished version of an MS-DOS game jam game (i had to put my tablet between me and the handheld to record it hence the awful controlling): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BF8WqllGKg8
(yeah they're also neat demo devices :-P)