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11 posts
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.
A stage-by-stage account of controller-to-photon latency, including polling, game logic, emulation, GPU queues, display scanout, and measurement.
How rollback netcode predicts remote inputs, restores deterministic state, re-simulates missed frames, detects desyncs, and balances delay with artifacts.
How cartridge dumpers read ROM, mapper banks, save memory, and metadata—and how repeated reads, hashes, provenance, and safe handling establish confidence.
How emulators serialize CPU, memory, devices, clocks, and pending events—and why completeness, determinism, versioning, and validation matter.
How integer scaling, aspect ratio, scanlines, masks, bloom, interlacing, and sampling interact when reproducing CRT-era video on flat panels.
How MAME, DOSBox, libretro, reverse engineering, hardware research, and archival practice turned emulation into a preservation discipline.
How libretro separates emulator cores from frontends through a stable C API, callbacks, environment negotiation, serialization, and shared services.