Love this write up (and one's like it - there's so much good stuff in their archives). The stuff GloriousCow is doing with MartyPC is just so impressive.
We didn't have hackers like these, it'd seem. Or they were (understandably) distracted by Amigas and Ataris.
>Historically, many famous emulators have relied on title patches to work around bugs or inaccuracies to get games to play. As emulators have improved in accuracy and research has uncovered more details about how systems work, gradually these title hacks became less necessary.
Offtopic: in recent years, I've stopped saying "real hardware" unless also using the term "emulated hardware". To me, it's either "hardware" vs "emulator", or "real hardware" vs "emulated hardware".
An emulator can operate on many different levels of trying to match the behavior of the underlying hardware. CPU emulators can emulate at the opcode level (easier) or try to increase accuracy by emulating the CPU pipeline cycle by cycle (harder).
In this particular case, the distinction between an "emulator" and a "hardware emulator" seem apt because the article discusses that the required fixes needed to start tracking the state of individual pins of the hardware chips. This, to me, represents that the emulation needed to "go down another level" and model the physical hardware to a certain degree to gain the needed accuracy.
Having a way to mark that difference is useful.
Back when the demo was released, there were no emulators capable of running it all the way through. People are free to believe what they want, but as we presented it at a demoparty (Evoke 2022), I can tell you that the organizers wouldn't have allowed it in the compo lineup if they didn't see it running on the hardware in person. :)
I am in awe of GloriousCow's crazy achievement in debugging it on MartyPC and making it work to perfect accuracy... that's true next-level skill, and the rest of the group would undoubtedly echo my sentiment!