What I find interesting is that most attention is being spent on BSNES when the subject of cycle accuracy and proper emulation of hardware comes up, like this is a new or novel discovery. BSNES is hardly the first to aim for this sort of goal, nor is its efforts as close to complete as the efforts spent by others. The NES scene in particular is now down to the level of breaking out scopes to measure response times on real NES hardware to get the sort of information they need to further push their level of accuracy up. Even 'obscure' systems like the MSX have had this sort of cycle-accurate push in emulation.
It's no longer the 90s and people shouldn't even have to mention NESticle existed in an article unless they're that out of touch with trends of the last decade.
> What I find interesting is that most attention is being spent on BSNES when the subject of cycle accuracy and proper emulation of hardware comes up, like this is a new or novel discovery.
I never intended to convey that this is a new idea, sorry. I do believe my cooperative threading model is a new concept in emulation, but it's still a ridiculously old one in computer science.
> The NES scene in particular ...
... is not as rosy as it seems. Having recently written an NES emulator, I can tell you that they're far from completion. For just one example, all of those mapper chips are basically a big unknown. Those chips have ways of detecting scanline edges to simulate IRQs and split-screen effects. This is done by monitoring the bus for certain patterns from the cart-side. And the details of this stuff? Completely unknown. Not even Nestopia nor Nintendulator attempt to simulate this: they just have the PPU -tell- the mapper when a scanline edge is hit. I could be wrong, but I believe I'm the first to even attempt to have the mapper detect scanlines by monitoring the bus.
And we're talking chips that are dozens of times less complex in the worst case than some of the SNES coprocessors.
> It's no longer the 90s and people shouldn't even have to mention NESticle existed in an article unless they're that out of touch with trends of the last decade.
The important part of that article is that the SNES was (and largely still is) in the NESticle phase of development, which was the purpose of bsnes. Unfortunately, just as we go from NESticle (25-50MHz) to Nestopia (800MHz required); ZSNES (200MHz) to bsnes (2-3GHz) needs a huge jump. But this time, that jump is hitting the wall of where most computer users are at. While people didn't notice Nestopia because everyone has at least a 1GHz processor these days, bsnes was not so fortunate.
So the article was more about explaining what that level of overhead is required for.
It's no longer the 90s and people shouldn't even have to mention NESticle existed in an article unless they're that out of touch with trends of the last decade.