Viva Nonno is also an HLE arcade emulator, for the Ridge Racer games that haven't yet been added to MAME as proper drivers.
For the 'preservation' thing, the point is that you can theoretically take a real arcade PCB, hook it up to a PC running MAME and get exactly what you would were there an arcade machine there. You can't do that with an N64 emulator.
Speed is going to be less and less relevant as the years pass. Back in the early days, Genecyst and KGen were amazing mainly because you could get actual full-speed emulation of a variety of games. Now look at Megadrive emulation. Gens, which started out as little more than a collection of free CPU cores, is now the most accurate MD emulator there is, and getting more and more so with each release. it even has fast 32X emulation with the new SH2 dynarec.
The way I see it, there's an emulation lifecycle which has been oboeyed on many systems so far:
1. with little system info available, people try to write apps which emulate what the know of the system. These are interpretive because the important thing is getting as much of the system as is known to work, to see if any games will run.
2. once something is actually running on the system, the next step is full-speed emulation. people optimised their code, write dynamic recompilers for CPUs or even fake bits of the system for speed (HLE).
3. once full speed has been reached, compatibility is again important. The bits of hardware which are currently faked or held togeth by hacks are investigated and parts of the code are rewritten for accuracy. The key is to try and get ALL hardware emulated exactly.
4. with compatibility extremely high, speed and features are yet again of importance, and system development tends to slow because there's nothing left to do
Megadrive and Playstation emulation is sitting on 4, with Mega CD / 32X emulation on 3. SNES emulation is ending 3, although there are endless problems with getting perfect sound.
N64 emulation seems to be stuck at 3. The N64 is the first emulated home console that has such large system requirements that full speed still isn't universally accepted. Most current devs seem unwilling to compromise speed for accuracy, which is slowing progress somewhat.
Unfortunately it seems as though this isn't going to change for a while, no unless Intel starts sending people P4s for New Year.
My question is, Azimer said that low-level graphics emulation had indeed been gotten to work on PJ64. Does this mean that (theoretically) with further work on the RSP and 1964, 1964 could eventually graduate to being a fully low-level emulator? Its license makes it (along with Daedalus, which also apparently has LLE graphics in an unreleased build) and Mupen64 the most likely candidates for fute progress in the area. And how much effort would it take? Would it be possible to release LLE graphics plugin specs?
- Chris
