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Comment by countrymile | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why people contribute to these stand alone emulators rather than making mess work? I'd be very interested in the reasoning

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MAME/MESS has different goals; in particular, it strives for accuracy first and foremost. Hacks that reduce accuracy but improve playability and/or performance are generally not accepted by MAME, AFAIK, whereas something like Dolphin would have tons of them. (MAME is fundamentally a preservation project; the fact that you can actually play the games is secondary.)

I don't know about mess. Is it an emulator collection? Dolphin is a Gamecube emulator. Would that be a good addition to mess?

Maybe one good reason is to constrain project goals in scope.

It's an emulator collection but their goal is perfect compatibility over any effort to optimize performance. As an example, with MAME (the arcade counterpart of MESS), when trying to emulate analogue circuits, they'd rather strive for near perfect emulation via very expensive maths operations rather than just use a first or second order approximation.

So a significant portion of what makes Dolphin so good would be rejected from MESS on principle. That isn't an inherently bad thing because MESS/MAME isn't really intending to be efficient & "fun" but rather is an archival project designed to allow perfect reproduction of the works indefinitely into the future.

>> It's an emulator collection but their goal is perfect compatibility over any effort to optimize performance.

Then I can easily see why Dolphin would have no interest in joining such a project; what with the incredible focus on and borderline unbelievable achievements with performance they’ve made.

Totally different projects, totally different goals.

MESS is a low level emulator. Dolphin is not. Low-level emulation of consoles even like the N64 is mostly infeasible at the moment. MESS works as designed, and doesn't use "speed hacks" or other performance optimizations, by design.

What an odd comment. Why would they integrate with MESS? At a glance MESS wouldn't provide anything of use.

Would MESS provide anything useful to an emulator of modern (21st-century) 3D consoles like the GameCube and Wii? Would MESS help or hinder in supporting the use of physical Wii Remotes? Could MESS support netplay between users of the emulator on different computers (as Dolphin does)? Could it support integration between GameCube and GBA (as Dolphin does)?

The mame architecture is not friendly to dynarec which is necessary for GameCube and wii.

Because MAME is effectively an emulator for arcade games and dolphin is a state-of-the-art console emulator? It is generally not be possible to get the level of fidelity and performance of a custom emulator out of a general-purpose framework like MAME.

RetroArch has become the more popular multi-emulator system, and many emulators have now been integrated into it.

I know its difficult to be objective, but could you somehow explain in which way it is more popular ? I ask because I'd be happy to contribute my emulator as a core to RetroArch but I'll do it only if I know it will increase the number of my users significantly (which will be quite easy to be honest :-) ).

> I know its difficult to be objective, but could you somehow explain in which way it is more popular ? I ask because I'd be happy to contribute my emulator as a core to RetroArch but I'll do it only if I know it will increase the number of my users significantly (which will be quite easy to be honest :-) ).

It's so obviously true that it's difficult to know where to begin "proving" it. I guess the easiest way is to refer to all the emulation-adjacent projects which essentially rely on RetroArch for the majority of their intregations. LaunchBox can spin up any emulator, but by default it recommends (and auto-configures) RetroArch for all RA-compatible systems. RetroAchievements.org used to only support a few standalone emulators, but once it added RetroArch it blew up in popularity and nowadays the documentation basically just points you to RetroArch. There are entire hardware platforms like RetroPi that rely on RetroArch. The list goes on and on.

It's impossible to do almost anything in the emulation ecosystem without bumping headfirst into RetroArch at every turn.

Ok, that's rather convincing :-)

Which emulator is that? Posting it on hn would probably also increase the number of users :)

perhaps related to MESS not existing for several years, idk.

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