A Simple N64 Emulator question

[Phuknutt]

I may be asking the obvious, but I have yet to find an answer. How come there isn't a N64 emulator out there that can run every N64 rom? I would think since the hardware for the N64 console is the same for every game, emulation would just be a matter of getting your 1st game to work. It seems that emulators out now must customize certain configurations to each rom.

Please tell me what im missing.

 

[Chris_W]

I may be asking the obvious, but I have yet to find an answer. How come there isn't a N64 emulator out there that can run every N64 rom? I would think since the hardware for the N64 console is the same for every game, emulation would just be a matter of getting your 1st game to work. It seems that emulators out now must customize certain configurations to each rom.

Please tell me what im missing.

There are Atari, Amstrad, Mame, Gens, Nes, Snes and onwards and upwards Emulators that dont run every Rom so why is it a shock that N64 cant ?

 

[MasterPhW]

ANd there's another point, why the N64 emus can't run every rom: each rom has it own boot code, like a own bios. Okay, a lot share the same, but there are some which have a unknown and undocumented code, so it's very hard to emulate them. Look to the PSX, these console has a bios, so all games boot the same way, so it's another way to emulate them. Or the NES: there are a lot more parts documented in detail...

 

[Doomulation]

Another good example: each game uses diffrent ways of running, or displaying gfx or doing effects. These cannot be simply emulated by one line of code because the n64 is diffrent from the PC.
Esepcially since it's HLEd, the hardware work is not fully emulated. The emulators use like "shortcuts" to get the work done. And imagine that each thing needs shortcuts, making it hard.

 

[straight]

Another way of looking at it is this: N64 emulators are not really pure emulators, they are all at least partly simulators. The emulators don't exactly duplicate an N64; they don't run code exactly the same way. For some of the functions, emu authors reverse-engineer what the N64 is doing then figure out a way to make your computer do something similar.

Strictly speaking, a real emulator would be a virtual machine where your computer would exactly model the N64 hardware, and run the rom code the same way the N64 does. If you had an emulator like this, it would indeed run any N64 rom just like the real thing. Such an emulator could theoretically exist, but it would require a computer way more powerful than any that exists today. Like Chris_W said, even emulators for the lowly Atari 2600 aren't exact duplicates of the real thing, so it will probably be a very long time before a perfect N64 emulator exists.