Programming Discussion Thread

[Ramoth]

(12-09-2014, 02:56 PM)Shonumi Wrote:

(12-09-2014, 06:54 AM)Nobbs66 Wrote: If I may add something to this discussion. The chip8 emu on that multigesture article isn't too accurate. The timers don't seem to count at 60hz which causes space invaders to be unplayable. Currently a friend and I over on the PCSX2 forums are working on a SCHIP implementation and accuracy is quite good. All SCHIP games are playable. hireschip8 is about 50% and I believe all of chip8 is playable at the moment

To be fair, Imran Nazar's Javascript GB emu is pretty darn inaccurate as well. :p

However, the point of each article (or series of articles in Nazar's case) is to get people familiar with the concepts of emulating something. IMO, there really weren't a lot of good resources that taught people how to begin with zero experience about emulation, though that has changed in the past few years or so. Personally, until recently, emulators were pure magic to me, made by level 90 super-geeks who had disassembled and hacked countless consoles with nothing more than some soldered diodes on a breadboard. Outside of thrusting my head into the source code of an existing emulator and badgering the devs with aimless questions, I felt as if there were no readily available way for me to start programming an emulator. In reality, all I needed was a little hand-holding to demystify the art.

I'm not necessarily defending the article on a technical level, I'm simply saying that fwiw it serves a valuable purpose in the emulation community. It's just nice to be able to have a resource to point to whenever someone basically asks "how do I break into emulators?" We need more of them, and we need better versions of them (I would encourage you to write a better CHIP8 tutorial ). In fact, we need more articles in general that take away the impression that only hardcore programmers can know what goes on inside these programs (like Dolphin's wonderful articles and Progress Reports). In fact, I need to get back to writing my woefully outdated blog that I started just for that purpose!

Anyway, good luck with your emulator. Let us know how that works out for you (post some screenshots here sometime).

I noticed one of your project goals is cycle-accurate GBA emulation. Are your GBC and GB emulators also planned to be cycle accurate ?