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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

All this is about fixing a bug in some emulator for an 2001-vintage video game console.

This is about the same thing that the Internet Archive is about: Preserving culture. That is also why the developers prefer accuracy over anything else.

At some point in the future the actual machines that run these games, along with the data stores for these games, will all be broken or otherwise incapable of functioning. However as long as there is machinery that can run these emulators, or emulate an OS that can run these, they will be preserved.

TBH for most people I would say it's more about the technical challenge than preserving culture. It's a fun side project that is difficult enough without being impossible. Lots of these small bugs require tens of hours of intensive debugging and reverse engineering to root cause.

It's not just that they might all break, but that most people don't currently have access to one. Now everyone can see those games and systems.

I'm a longtime emulator fanatic, but have seriously never considered this idea that emulation ensures future generations can experience a part of culture.

So insightful. Thanks for sharing.

I recommend you to read up on byuu's work. He's the author of bSNES, an accuracy-oriented emulator for the SNES.

This article is a bit old, but it's a good start: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-o...

Seriously?

I'll start off with what should be the obvious - Dolphin runs Gamecube and Wii games. Not only does it run said games, but it runs them INCREDIBLY well. Much better than it did a year ago, and arguably better than the consoles run the games itself.

Hell, running some games at 4x resolution will get better performance than the consoles would at their default resolution. That's insane.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UouyVg70kRM

That's 1080p and 60fps. Yes, there are some dropped frames but that's a given seeing how he's recording. It's still WAY higher than the Wii generally runs games - I don't even think the Wii plays games in 720p even (stretching the image doesn't really count here).

Anyways, this is a great example of how having a project like this being open sourced can help development. Dolphin is a great emulator and you can't deny that.

Also worth a quick read: http://www.pcgamer.com/how-gamecubewii-emulator-dolphin-got-...

Dolphin is a wii emulator too.

Quite an appropriate topic here, wouldn't you agree?

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