A little food for thought: Do any of you guys worry that all of the emulators which we have today, and take for granted, will one day become obsolete/incompatible with the hardware of the future? In a sense, we'd have to emulate today's computer hardware, and run an emulator inside of an emulator...
Is Dolphin forward compatible, or will the devs try to translate the code over when the time comes?
I'm really worried about the preservation of all of these awesome system/games.
They won't, because everything will move to software and last forever.
Lol, there will always be hardware. Even if everything is streamed/digital, it will still have to be processed/stored somewhere. For example, have you heard of "Quantum computers?" That may be the next big computer technological advancement, and it will be an entirely different architecture. Most software of today will not be compatible.
The x86/x64 isn't going away anytime soon (sorry ARM), so it's not like all of my software will suddenly become obsolete overnight. Only a handful of my emulators use JITs (Desmume, Dolphin, PCSX2) and even then only Dolphin and PCSX2 require them for decent performance. Everything else is highly portable (usually C++/SDL).
Quantum computers, as far as I know, don't have advantages for
all computing models, just some. That is to say, they probably won't be killing silicon. Even if it did, that's likely some decades away from now. However, 10 years is too soon to expect anything that life-changing for any of us in the emulation community. It's not like quantum computers won't run Linux anyway...
The only current issue of portability I see are getting emulators to run on phones and tablets, but even in 10 years, I honestly don't think we'll be living in a completely "Post-PC" kinda world. So in short, I don't think much will change except for how awesome the emulators get over time.
I sure hope I will still have my good old PC in 10 years. I just don't like portable tablets and whatnot, since I don't need portability anyway.
And I agree with what Shonumi says - x86 processors aren't going away anytime soon. So really, if you want to see how an emulator from today will look in 10 years, download Zsnes: fully compatible, but outdated documentation giving command line options and tricks to get more performance, and 90's-looking GUI.
Unless, that is, Dolphin stays in development during all those 10 years - as I hope it will.
I think the same about the old desktop in my house, that still has XP X86 installed.
As long as you know how to take care of things, they´ll last all the time you´d like.
Dolphin has a generic build that should work on any hardware, although with only interpreter and software renderer. The JIT, and hardware graphics backends would need to be remade if future hardware broke compatibility, but otherwise, i think everything else in dolphin is safe.
>I think the same about the old desktop in my house, that still has XP X86 installed.
One of the PCs I use every day at work still runs Windows 2000. Still works just fine for what it's used for (name badge printing, email, light internet-news-reading). As far as I've noticed, they haven't cleaned it out for the whole time I've worked there (~6 months) and there's probably tons of dust and bits of plastic in it that flew in from the CNC plastic-cutting machines nearby.
No$'s emus and ZSNES are the only emulators that extensively use assembly AFAIK. A few others use some inline assembly, but rewriting it shouldn't be an insurmountable task. I'd be more worried about if Flash games are playable in 10 years.
Dolphin will still require top notch hardware for full speed
(I hope you people see this as a joke, and not as a possible thing)