Sunday, October 21, 2007

the mighty emulator

You may ask what is an emulator. Emulators allow your computer to act like a console system such as the Apple IIe or the Atari 2600, which are used to emulate the hardware of a number of classic arcade games.

They are all classic arcade games emulated? No, but those games are made before 1992. Not all systems are easy to emulate.

Because there is a need to emulate the classic arcade games? There are three main reasons:

1. Popularity - if the system is popular, even if it is classic, the more effort is pushed to emulate.

2. Availability of information - if the system contains a lot of information, it will be easier to emulate. If a game has never been emulated before, which require a lot of reverse engineering, which sometimes can be frustrating.

3. Technical barriers hardware limits restrictions that are hard to avoid. For example, it took some time before the Atari 7800 was emulated, due to the encryption algorithm which prohibited games are loaded. In addition, new systems may miss the absolute power to have the game run at a playable, and faster.

Although emulators are difficult to perform, especially if this is your first time, you need to download an emulator and decompress. If you are not familiar with the procedures, you must read the documentation carefully.

Emulators are compound pieces of software. Most emulators may not perfectly emulate the capabilities of the system you are trying to copy. The imperfections in some emulators may be less, sometimes it may fail to timing. Some emulators will not run at all games, or worse have some display problems. Some emulators may be deficient in joystick support, sound, and other important functions.

By writing an emulator, will undergo a difficult process, which requires the achievement of precise information system, and to understand how to emulate the software code.

There are two different types of emulators. The first is the only system or single game emulator. Examples of these are an emulator Atari 2600, NES emulator, and an Apple II emulator. These emulators can only emulate one type of game or system. The second type of emulators is the multi-emulators. The best example of this is the Multi Arcade Machine Emulator, or MAME. MAME can emulate hundreds of arcade games, although not all arcade games can run on the same type of system. This is a huge generalization, but the reason most emulators require more resources compared to single system emulators, in most cases.

The start of emulation has opened a lot of opportunities for companies to exploit their resources. Why spend a lot of time reprogramming or porting of classic arcade games to a new console when you can easily write an emulator upright. Emulation is the solution to these problems, and gives the players an exact replica of the classic games they love and want to acquire.

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