Accuracy takes power: one man's 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator

<i>"One of the fun aspects of a cartridge-based system is that you are literally plugging a PCB directly into your system. Thus, you can put extra coprocessors, often digital signal processors, right inside of the cartridge. This gives you an extra edge against your competitors' titles. The most popular SNES coprocessors were the SuperFX for polygon rendering and sprite rotation (used in Starfox and Super Mario World 2) and the DSP-1 for 3D math (used in Pilotwings and Mario Kart.)"</i><p>Very interesting. I never thought about this even though I've recognized the differences between games. I just attributed it to better game software, but it could literally have been better hardware available to certain games. You can't do that with CD/DVD/downloadable games.

I've been follow Byuu's progress on BSNES for a couple of years, and I would like to state for the record that the amount of effort he had put into this project far exceeds the majority of "hobby" projects.<p>Just in the past few months, several SNES co-process chips that remained un-emulated for years, have been deciphered and fully emulated in BSNES. Without Byuu leading the charge into the last bastions of SNES emulation, I absolutely believe that some of these devices would be lost to history.

I wonder if such accuracy is necessary for emulating newer systems. I don't think my PS3 games are updating the graphics hardware mid-scanline. If modern systems have more relaxed timing requirements, then a much simpler binary translation may be enough. You no longer have to model the hardware, just the abstraction layer that the game itself is written against.

This might be a lot easier on an FPGA.

A similar (and IMO, better written) story on emulating the TRS-80: <a href="http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1755886" rel="nofollow">http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1755886</a>

this makes me think of full brain emulation.<p>how far are we from an in silico silicon virtualization suite?

I'm really impressed by the dedication of this guy. Kudos.