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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

> We’re looking at a situation where playing Donkey Kong in the way that its creator intended is reserved only for the most dedicated collector. It will be prohibitively expensive to recreate that experience.

While this is a bit sad on some level, the art itself will survive the transition. After all, nobody these days experiences Romeo and Juliet in the way that its creator intended, yet it endures. What I'm more worried about are those games that are going to be completely lost once the hardware expires; we can preserve the game data itself all we like, but without proper emulators you're SOL (and unless CPU speeds start doubling again, we're never going to be able to even semi-accurately emulate anything past the Xbox 360/PS3 generation). To say nothing of online games that will vanish into the mist once the servers get taken offline...

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> unless CPU speeds start doubling again, we're never going to be able to even semi-accurately emulate anything past the Xbox 360/PS3 generation

Luckily all the new consoles use x86_64 processors for their main processors, so no low level emulation will be required.

Oh yeah, having an x86 CPU makes it super easy to emulate - just look at how good the original XBox emulators are. That was sarcasm. There are no good XBox 1 emulators because the GPU is a custom, undocumented chip by nVidia and nobody has sat down to reverse engineer it. I predict that similar custom hardware parts will make it very hard to accurately emulate PS4 and XBone games. Then again, I feel like there are a lot less console exclusives nowadays, so we might not lose out on too much after the systems' deaths. And in the end, it's just games - people will always keep making more. It's sort of a philosophical point, but I feel that letting some art disappear completely, so people can re-discover and re-make it as new isn't really a bad thing.

I'd argue that the real reason there are no XBox emulators is because nobody with the requisite skills cares enough to bother to reverse-engineer it and write an emulator.

Since there are very few exclusives, there's little demand for it to be emulated in the first place. And from what I understand, the XBox isn't fondly-remembered by geeks. The XBox was the console of choice for people who liked to make fun of geeks and nerds, and as such most people who have the skills and the desire to write emulators (i.e. geeks and nerds) have a pretty strong aversion to the XBox. That the most popular games for the XBox weren't the kind of games that were enjoyed by nerds doesn't help, either. There's very little overlap between emulator programmers and people who care about the original Halo or old Madden games.

You'll just need to somehow emulate the closed down servers that run the now defunct game worlds...

Is that true? The prospect of emulating a console on similar-gen PC hardware is super appetizing, but this is the first I've heard of the possibility.

While the CPU is indeed x86-64, the architecture of the SoC and the device is rather different so emulation still won't be all that easy.

This 33c3 talk gives a lot of fascinating information on how PS4 differs from your run-of-the-mill PC and what kind of issues they hit when trying to run Linux on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMiubC6LdTA

It's really hard to predict that stuff. People thought original Xbox emulation would be easy, since it was "essentially a PC", but it's the only console of that generation that still doesn't have a good emulator. Meanwhile WiiU emulation is already advanced enough that it can almost play the just released Zelda:BotW.

Technology aside, it's also a matter of interest. Many XboxOne and PS4 games already have PC ports, so there is less need and interest to create emulators. Nintendo consoles on the other side have many exclusives, so interest in emulating them seems to be higher.

Only time will tell.

> It's really hard to predict that stuff. People thought original Xbox emulation would be easy, since it was "essentially a PC", but it's the only console of that generation that still doesn't have a good emulator.

Probably a matter of demand, too, since it's got very few decent games that aren't 1) available on another console, or 2) available as an (often superior) PC port

Yep. Both the PS4 and XBox One are using semi-custom AMD chips with 8-core CPUs and 1152 shader GPUs. So managably beefy.

The XB1 has only 768 GCN cores (12 compute units of 64 cores, versus 18 for the PS4), but both CPU and GPU cores are clocked slightly higher than the PS4 (1.75GHz v 1.6 for the CPU, 853MHz v 800 for the GPU).

The PS4P increases everything except the CPU cores count: CPU clock to 2.1GHz, compute units to 36 (hence 2304 cores) and GCN frequency to 911MHz.

The CPU isn't actually very powerful, they use low-power Jaguar cores at 1.6 GHz or so.

> While this is a bit sad on some level, the art itself will survive the transition.

The art was created for a medium. If the medium is unavailable, the art is altered. That is not unlike photographs of paintings, at a macro level the art "survives", except some masters used layers of semi-translucent paint and three-dimensional structures which the photograph can not reproduce.

And the art thus survives in the same way thylacines or dodos survive as taxidermic mounts: a pale shadow (or washed out over-exposure) of their former glory.

A small but poignant correction here - no dodos survived what occurred even as taxidermy. The most complete known specimen of a dodo consists of 'a dried head and foot'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo#Physical_remains

That's an interesting article. This bit from the top was particularly informative... I had no idea the dodo was only known to the world for such a short time before it went extinct:

> The first recorded mention of the dodo was by Dutch sailors in 1598. In the following years, the bird was hunted by sailors and invasive species, while its habitat was being destroyed. The last widely accepted sighting of a dodo was in 1662. Its extinction was not immediately noticed, and some considered it to be a mythical creature.

I'm being a bit pedantic but you can go to The Globe in London and get a pretty close thing to experiencing Romeo & Juliet as intended, albeit with the audience wearing modern clothing. If you ever get the chance you should go, its an experience worth having.

There are orchestras out there spending a ton of time, money, and energy on reproducing classical music on antique instruments exactly as it would have sounded when composed, and I find it hard to believe nobody is trying to do a historically accurate Shakespeare.

Except we know that we're only getting closer to the original sound. We're making a lot of guesses based on surviving instruments (in some case only known from paintings or woodcuts in books though) and surviving texts about how to play music, or diary notes, or notations on scores which were used by people teaching or learning. We don't actually know how any of it really sounded.

Which is, really, the same problem we've got with Shakespeare. Without really good footage of several performances, we can't really know how Shakespeare plays were really performed, we can just get as close as we can from the surviving evidence.

If I ever got a lift with the Doctor I would ask to go back to the 16th century and record as much music as possible.

So it's even easier to see why people are trying to preserve CRTs now and not when nobody really remembers what they were like.

This. Nobody ever said "my creation is intended to be seen only on this one type of display screen, and not another type that hasn't been invented yet".

I think "excessive verisimilitude" is the term for this annoying attitude.

Yes, that is true; instead, they never considered some other type of display that didn't exist yet at all, and so effects that they assumed would be there are not. The Sonic the Hedgehog waterfall is the classic example.

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