At 09:27 AM 6/27/01 -0400, John Matthews wrote:
>information present here). For example, my impression is that this
>emulator does something similar to what the N64 emulator did way back
>when...interpret the code instead of emulating it. (In the case of the
>N64 emulator, it translated calls to the N64 graphics engine into Glide
>calls for Voodoo hardware, IIRC.)
Actually, there are two major strategies for N64 emulation, the "high
level" method you describe (converting the N64 API to the GLIDE API, in the
case of UltraHLE - which worked so well that even on a P2-233 with an
additional layer of translation to OpenGL on my old ATI card, I got about
20FPS) and dynamic recompilation, where the machine language instructions
are recompiled into native code all at once prior to execution. I think
modern N64 emulators (and maybe the Dreamcast emulators that have started
to appear) use both methods. Most earlier platforms get emulated
interpretively, like a shell script or an old BASIC program, one
instruction at a time. Dynamic recompilation is sort of like the way Java
byte code or Perl works, compiled to native code transparently at runtime
to make it run faster.
Dynamic recompilation is what Otaku's emulator is apparently doing,
converting the 6502 instructions into RISC instructions as a whole before
executing them. Given the technical problems he mentions on his page (like
the RAM issue) it's pretty plausible that he could be writing this, but
he's announced a number of interesting console-on-console emulation
projects in the past which never came to anything (supposedly due to NDA's)
such as MAME, 1964 and a 2600 emulator for the PS2, and MAME for the X-Box.
So I have hope that someone else will manage it, but I doubt we'll ever
see his get released.
Incidentally, Otaku's main page has a link to a site called atarilabs.com
who recently (Monday, looks like) received a legal threat from Infogrames.
I guess now we know what they meant by "doing more with the Atari brand."
Rob
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