Want to know some info when authors make emulators...

**JLF65** · June 28th, 2009, 00:46

Well, ask away, but no one can guarantee answers.

**MrTeressaBond** · August 28th, 2009, 13:50

hi, sorry for the late reply, therefore in response to what u said, this is somewhat experimental then yes?

i have not yet forgotten what i intend to do, but i would like to ask now, say for example that the system (i.e. the hardware only with an OS running at least) was built, and say we contacted an emulator author who alreadty has suceeded authoring a stable emulator (like Gensis) isnt it possible to ask this person to further tweak the emulator so it would run on the system perfectly due to the high-end specs?

with those kind of specifications, i assume that if one would make an emulator that would run every bit of what the console did, but would have somesort of slowdown because an average computer (of last year?) wouldnt handle it, but that eliminated due to the case that it would be running on higher hardware specs?

**JLF65** · August 29th, 2009, 00:00

You can ask, but no one can guarantee they'll bother. If the author doesn't have one of these uber-machines, odds are he won't bother as he wouldn't be able to test the program.

**MrTeressaBond** · September 5th, 2009, 16:55

ahh that is what i was about to get at precisely, thus isnt here a way for the author to program the emulator to the specs i have mentioned to him?

like wouldnt he ask for somesort of benchmarking tools to give him an idea on how to tweak it or etc.?

**JLF65** · September 5th, 2009, 18:29

Unless the author has a machine like the one you wish the emulator to be made for, it's nearly impossible to get it working just the way you want. It's significantly more work as they can only guess at how some things would go on a machine they don't have. They only choice would be to make changes, send it to someone with that machine, wait for a response, then try again. That type of programming is a royal pain, so you're not likely to get an author to go for it.

**MrTeressaBond** · September 6th, 2009, 04:27

okay, u have made it clear that this is not practical whatsoever (even though i knew i had it coming

) and i definately do not want to stray away potential authors this way either, hahahaha.

i suppose what i might have to do and if they will agree is to send them the machine itself for them to test on and via contact eachother email wise, although a high level of trust is regarded on this and if one is willing to accept and be able to handle such machinary safely, dont forget this cost money

i suppose, i just want to sum up my last question toget it clear for me so i will revise it now;

- if i am correct, if an author makes an emulator perfectly emulate a system 100% would this cause for it to slow down dramatically?

-if that is the case, will more powerful hardware, and that the program is also written specifically for it, make up the slowdown incresingly?

I will also intend on asking quite advanced questions if this is all possible, for example, like i mentioned before, hardware emulated, so the system would boot up exactly like a video games console. And also something like tweaking the emulators so they interact directly to take advantage of hard like the grphics card for enhancement. an example would be like running a Megadrive game on the system, and even though it'll probably look wonderful already, direct interaction with the graphics card to apply the wonderous 'Supersampling'

will make the resizing aliasing completely elimated, this also goes for other intended and 3D games. Can you imagine playing a Saturn game like Sonic R at HD or 2K looking marvelous?

i know this all sounds really ambitious but i thought i would come open about it finally and dont want to stall anymore after many years of dreaming doing other wicked things (my main priority was to make a film as i am a Media/Film student but with good liking and knowlege of games).

**JLF65** · September 6th, 2009, 16:14

- It depends on the machine being emulated, but in general, emulating a machine 100% makes it MUCH slower than even, say, 95%. Most "optimizations" in emulators is determining which % of a machine to not emulate to make the program much faster.

- Yes, if an emulator runs tens times as slow due to some feature to be emulated, using a computer that's ten times as fast will let you run the emulator with that feature. That's the approach most modern emulators use compared to emulators from 1995 to 2000. They assume you have a 3 GHz PC instead of a 300 MHz PC. At some point, multi-core CPUs will be the norm and emulators will assume that everyone has at least four cores instead of one.

- In general, using a video card directly cannot magically make a 320x200 display look like high-def. The "super-sampling" you see in some emulators is basically a method of enhancing edges to look cleaner when the image is magnified, and is too complex for GPUs, so it takes a powerful CPU. What you see when people use the video card is the filtered look - instead of nice sharp blocky pixels, you get a smooth blended look.

**MrTeressaBond** · September 7th, 2009, 00:57

Well i have now a much better diea of how things go and it more or less fits to what i have originally thought, but kinda wanted more details and confirmation

Because i am dealing with alot of systems that are to be emulated, the mchine needs to be quite powerful, this definately has to go for one console that to my opinion is the most difficult video games console to emulate, the Sega Saturn. Even with 2 emulators making good progress, it has really taken this long to actually get somewhere, and i am really amazed with the results, i assume it has taken this long because of its heavy and complicated hardware that is needed to be emulated, and probably a hellalot of optimizations were done inorder to get it in a working state right now. To get good results from this, they would at least require a Dual core processor, however my system will act as if it were a current generation console, thus it will contain an Intel Core 2 Quad processor, im pretty sure that would be enough?

With that mentioned, this would alreadt counter the problem of complexity as i believ the hardware i intend on using will be over more than enough to do the job, but the extra little power it has will be where the enhancing goes in, and only the best will be used to give a fresh look on those old games.

Two techniques i will mention are 'Supersampling' and 'Anisotropic filtering'. Now i am not sure exactly, i am aware of thier job, but where does their job come in? Do these work directly onto the game natively? Or does the game get resized then the filters apply?

**JLF65** · September 7th, 2009, 16:06

They're generally part of the resizing code.

**MrTeressaBond** · September 7th, 2009, 20:25

ahhh i see then, so i am somewhat correct? but what resizer does it use?

i mean u get stuff like Bicubic, Bilinear and Trilinear resizers but all of them already tries to deal with aliasing, therefore what does Supersampling and probably Anisotropic filtering use? Nearest Neighbour and from their the filtering comes in?