Emulators, cores, and the architecture behind preserving and playing classic games today.
A lawful optical-media preservation workflow covering drive choice, disc condition, raw sectors, audio, subchannels, retries, hashes, metadata, and repeat reads.
A provenance-first ROM audit workflow using hashes and DAT metadata, with immutable originals, header rules, set semantics, tool logs, and exception review.
A hardware-grounded guide to cartridge address decoding, PRG and graphics banks, mapper registers, mirroring, IRQs, save memory, and emulator tests.
How cartridge SRAM, flash, EEPROM, and RTC registers persist; how emulators serialize them; and why wall-clock policy, atomic writes, and testing matter.
How scanline sprite evaluation, object limits, priority, overflow quirks, flicker strategies, and emulator options shape authentic retro-console graphics.
How brightness-sensing and beam-timed light guns worked with CRT raster scanning, why flat panels break them, and how emulators map modern replacements.
Recover emulator saves by preserving originals, identifying the storage format, validating copies, and testing restoration in an isolated profile.
Eliminate emulator netplay desyncs by matching builds, content, firmware, saves, controller types, and deterministic settings before tuning latency.
Separate television zoom, frontend viewport, shader masks, core overscan, and intentional border pixels before changing retro-game geometry.
Diagnose regular emulator judder by measuring content and display rates, separating workload spikes, and configuring VSync or VRR without speed drift.