Tagrineth said:
Bugs? AFAIK they don't have any bugs the original games didn't have on the N64. If they have bugs with other games, that would further support the theory that the bonus disc's emulator was designed with OoT/MQ in mind.
And the data is different for the two ROMs. They would've had to run both through the proverbial conversion gauntlet.
The game libs on the rom is of course going to be different, but that doesn't make it any less portable. Thats like saying that if you made a port of doom 2, you would have to start all over again if you wanted to make a port of doom 1. The only difference between the two games is the actual game libraries themselves. If you want to play doom 1, just load the different wad files, etc, no need to port the code again, much like if you want to play MQ instead of the regular OOT, you just load the different libraries instead.
As for the emulator bugs, you did list these earlier, among other things:
Tagrineth said:
- Have the exact same frame rate issues the N64 version have, in almost exactly the same places - if it was rebuilt, it would by all rights be able to sustain 59.96FPS with ease
- Undergo a ridiculously long load right at the start, but never load again while the game is playing
- Ask if you want to use Rumble immediately (IS THE RUMBLE PAK PLUGGED IN? - N64 games don't like this changing while the game is running)
- And here's the real kicker: Loading the pause menu takes even LONGER than the N64 version, more along the lines of what PC EMULATORS used to need, and the game pops back down to 320x240 at 8-bit colour for the subscreen - WHY would it need to do that if it was recoded?
Why would they need to use a GPL'ed emulator? They're all missing numerous features and have several inaccuracies. I'm sure with their knowledge of N64's architecture they could easily write their own. Hell, they already had an emulator of sorts in the original N64 dev kits.
Sega did this with the smash pack (the emulator wasn't GPL'ed, but they liensed it from the author of kgen). And simply because they have the specs of the console doesn't guarentee that they can emulate it perfectly. Some of the parts they use are bought from third party companies, and aren't all the time completely documented to them even. Also, just because one development team within the company may have access to technical information doesn't guarentee that the rest will, you would be surprised at the beaurocracy that goes on within some companies just to maintain trade secrets. (remember the snes emulator written by internal nintendo developers called sillhouette? they didn't have full technical specs either IIRC)
Also not to mention, that some companies just see free source code sitting somewhere on the net, and don't even bother to read the licensing terms that come with it, so they often times think that they can do whatever they want with it as if it were a freebsd license. Linksys and sigma designs are two big occurances of this happening that I can think of off of the top of my head, either that or their developers were just stupid and didn't know that it was possible to prove when somebody has stolen your source by only having the binary (yes, this does happen frequently.) I somehow doubt nintendos developers are any less ignorant than linksys or sigma designs (especialy based on what the developers of sillhouette said when they left nintendo)
