Emulators, cores, and the architecture behind preserving and playing classic games today.
Why MAME's 2016 relicensing mattered for reuse, preservation tooling, and the distinction between emulator source and copyrighted game data.
After reversing an earlier shutdown in 2021, Sony set staged PS3 closures beginning in 2026 and broader PS3/Vita closure for July 2027.
How to verify cartridge and disc dumps with hashes, DATs, repeatable acquisition, provenance, lossless masters, documented derivatives, and fixity audits.
Why classic systems sound different: channels, oscillators, envelopes, filters, sample memory, bus timing, and the limits composers turned into instruments.
How tile maps, pattern tables, palettes, sprites, scanlines, and hardware limits produced classic 2D graphics-and what an emulator must reproduce.
Why emulator code, firmware, game images, dumping, distribution, and anti-circumvention are separate legal questions requiring local analysis.
A technical comparison of CPU interpreters and dynamic recompilers, including dispatch cost, translation blocks, timing, exceptions, and cache invalidation.
Why cycle-accurate emulation requires synchronized clocks, bus behavior, interrupts, video timing, hardware tests, and careful performance trade-offs.
A practical boundary between emulation and hardware-assisted virtualization, including CPU execution, devices, memory, timing, and hybrid systems.
Diagnose stretched retro games by separating core geometry, pixel aspect ratio, integer scaling, overscan, and saved display overrides.