this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2024
221 points (98.3% liked)
Games
32947 readers
1196 users here now
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Weekly Threads:
Rules:
-
Submissions have to be related to games
-
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
-
No excessive self-promotion
-
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
-
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
-
No linking to piracy
More information about the community rules can be found here.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Like the Mario 64 recompilation, this isn't running on an emulator, but is totally native. That means it runs smoother, has zero issues that you might get from emulation (like inaccuracies), and makes it so much easier to mod and extend it. You can see some of the features on the page like autosaving and playing on high framerates.
That doesn't make sense to me. Emulation should be 100% accurate software-wise, at the expense of performance. Can you elaborate?
Emulation is almost never 100% accurate, that's why seemingly perfect emulators like Dolphin still get updates. They mimic the original hardware as closely as possible but there are still bound to be some bugs and games that don't work perfectly. The best emulators are more like 99.9% accurate.
N64 emulators aren't that good, so you'll get occasional graphics errors and crashes.
100% accurate emulation is basically impossible for every single console. You can get extremeley close via cycle accuracy, emulating the CPU's instruction set but even that isn't perfect.
You can read this for more information:
https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Emulation_accuracy
Software-wise, sure. It's easy to dump the BIOS and game. The hard part is emulating the hardware. Consoles often have quirky architectures and special chips that don't map to PCs very well. And the chips themselves often have quirks that either aren't documented, or work in a way that disagrees with documentation. But the game developers often relied on those particular quirks for their games. For example, if there was a bug in the GPU that caused textures to become blurry when loaded in a certain way, a developer might exploit that as a free blur filter. (If you're interested in actual examples, try the Dolphin dev blog. I think it's really interesting.)
Also much more possibilities in terms of controls, ie no more janky remapping buttons and mouse axis into pretending to be controller inputs or messing with mouse injectors, instead you can get native KB+M support, dual analog, etc.
Yeah, having a proper camera for Mario 64 was really huge.