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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.