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Comment by eavc | Hacker News Reader

Safe to assume it is a faithful emulation.

edit: Because that's the expectation of the scene in which this video has made waves.

Most emulators are not accurate. This makes some game's behavior quite unexpected. Here is an article describing the issues and how so much processing power has to be devoted to achieve full rendering

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-o...

Wow. The people hyping whole brain emulation should take note.

They have, but note the corollary to 'perfect emulation takes huge amounts of computing power': imperfect emulation can often be done cheaply.

The question for WBE is whether brains are the very rare SNES game which must be perfectly emulated to work at all... or one of the others. The success of machine learning stuff like deep belief networks, while using a fraction of the brain's computing power and minimal biological plausibility, suggests human brains aren't very special snowflakes.

Far from it. Many emulators over the years have had small but important quirks, and although they generally don't affect normal gameplay they _may_ affect this sort of thing, after all this is depending on the precise behaviour of the PRNG and how many times it has been called.

True, the best way to tell without real hardware is to playback the input on bsnes [1] (in accurate emulation mode) and see what happens.

[1] The name of bsnes recently changed, but I forget to what.

There are techniques out there for running TAS input files against real hardware for most of the common platforms. Some of the TASes on tasvideos.org are specifically flagged as "console verified" [1], indicating that someone's confirmed that they don't depend on emulator quirks.

[1]: http://tasvideos.org/ConsoleVerifiedMovies.html

Thank you, that's just the sort of thing I was curious to look at.

bsnes is now distributed with / renamed to a project called "higan", which is a multi-system emulator. See:

http://byuu.org/higan/

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