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21 posts
An engineering view of emulator audio clocks, sample generation, resampling, buffer control, drift, latency, time-stretching, and deterministic testing.
A preservation-focused guide to MAME CHD hunks, codecs, hashes, parent-child images, metadata, creation, verification, extraction, and version control.
A layer-by-layer color diagnostic for emulators covering source revision, palette RAM, pixel formats, endianness, color management, shaders, and captures.
A non-destructive RTC troubleshooting workflow covering save provenance, host time, core format, latch and halt state, state conflicts, migration, and proof.
A practical distinction between HLE and LLE, firmware replacement, timing and side effects, legal provenance, hybrid systems, and compatibility testing.
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.
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.