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I very much doubt that Nesticle used dynarec. With games of the era requiring precise timings, a JIT would have been more trouble than it's worth. I can't find any source for Nesticle having a JIT compiler either. It was however very inaccurate, which may have contributed to it running faster than most of the emulators of the time.

Dynarec has mostly been used from the N64/PS1/Dreamcast generation and onwards.

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It was in fact so inaccurate that many ROMs had to be modified to run under Nesticle. There's actually a tag in the goodtools filenames that indicates a ROM has been modified to run under specific emulators (I think it's [f], but I don't remember 100%, and I'm not going to look this kind of stuff up at work).

Later emulators that made use of game-specific hacks (e.g. ZSNES) would store the hacks in the emulator instead of the ROM, patching the hacks into memory at load time, so people could use the same accurate ROM dumps in both accurate and inaccurate emulators.

Vague memory hanging out with these folks while they were working on this that a lot of speedup was due to well placed inline assembly

Mhm. That's been the general solution to make emulators of the time fast. ZSNES was mostly assembly too.

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