Subject: Re: [stella] Newbie question emulation From: Thomas Boutell <boutell@xxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 17:54:10 -0500 |
On Mon, 28 Feb 2005, nadeem wrote: > Hello all, > > Just joined the list, so bare with my newbness > > I'm new to doing emulators I understand the principles but this is my first > attempt. > > Just want opinions on this...Is a 2600 a good platform to attempt to emulate > ? how would it compare to a Master sytem? You probably realize the 2600 has already been emulated successfully (stella and z26 among other programs). I assume your interest is in doing it for the sake of your own amusement and education. The 2600 platform is very interesting to emulate because virtually *every* cartridge relies on things that would be considered "unusual dirty tricks" on other platforms. The machine is very simple, but deceptively so. You must *exactly* match the behavior of the real hardware, especially with regard to the timing of the display output, or games just won't work. You would need to write (or reuse) a 6502 emulator, including all undocumented instructions, but that would be the easy part. The hard part is emulating the video hardware. But you can find documentation sufficient to build a working emulator in the "stella programmer's guide" document in many places, including here: http://atarihq.com/danb/files/stella.pdf I once wrote a 2600 emulator, got quite far (it ran Adventure, for instance), and gave up because it was so slow and I didn't grasp how much faster computers would be in just a few years. Today's PCs will have no trouble running your emulator as long as you are prepared to write good C code. Good luck! -- Thomas Boutell Boutell.Com, Inc. http://www.boutell.com/ Archives (includes files) at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/ Unsub & more at http://stella.biglist.com
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