NES emulator on the Genesis

[huckleberrypie]

I've heard about Sonic programmer Yuji Naka writing an NES emulator for the Genesis back in 1990, i.e. as a proof-of-concept or for the lulz:

TNL: Rumors have it that you even programmed a Famicom emulator for the Megadrive at one point in time, for your personal amusement. Is this true?

Naka: Oh my. *laughs* How do you people know about that one? Well yeah, actually I did. I did it primarily for study purposes. It ran things like Dr. Mario, although it did not work perfectly, actually. It was something fun to amuse myself with at the time.

Naka stated that he lost the sources to it, although a similar emulator has surfaced which is just as capable of, well, running NES games on a Genesis:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-i5Ps918xM

It's obviously slow and buggy given the host hardware, but seeing a Genesis emulate another console amuses me.

[Exophase]

Here's another fun one - NES emulation on Gameboy Color:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb__CX6dHFU

You can emulate pretty much anything on anything so long as the thing you're emulating on has more memory than the thing you're emulating. And you don't care how fast it runs. Emulating consoles on consoles can be sort of interesting, if you can use the tile/sprite hardware directly in emulation. Without that the NES emulator you linked would have been a lot slower. But maybe easier to get running without those glitches.

I always thought Yuji Naka got too much credit for his claims. People probably thought it ran games at full speed, but I bet it ran more like this one does.

[huckleberrypie]

Not sure if I can vouch on that, but regardless it's lulzy to see a GBC emulate the NES.

Which reminds me: There has been a NES emulator for the GBA, amd I was wondering if they used ZSNES-esque speed hacks and/or HLE for games to be playable.

[Exophase]

There were lots of good console emulators for GBA.. not just NES but GB/GBC, SMS/GG, and I'm sure many others. There was even sort of SNES emulation, although it wasn't really full speed and it didn't have sound, and it had graphical problems.

You could do a lot because GBA's 2D hardware could emulate this stuff directly most of the time, so you didn't have to spend a lot of CPU time on rendering the graphics. For NES the ARM7 mostly just had to emulate the CPU, and an optimized interpreter written in assembly was enough to do it. I don't know about hacks, except that it had a file that listed idle loops in games.

DS continued this tradition with a lot better SNES emulators, and a Genesis emulator by Lordus.

[huckleberrypie]

Wouldn't emulating GB(C) games on the Advance be pointless, or was this due to GB support being dropped on the Micro?

[Exophase]

Emulators can have a lot of features that you don't get with the original hardware, it's up to you if you think it's pointless or not.. but yeah it's useful on GBMicro too.

[huckleberrypie]

Here's another fun one - NES emulation on Gameboy Color:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb__CX6dHFU

You can emulate pretty much anything on anything so long as the thing you're emulating on has more memory than the thing you're emulating. And you don't care how fast it runs. Emulating consoles on consoles can be sort of interesting, if you can use the tile/sprite hardware directly in emulation. Without that the NES emulator you linked would have been a lot slower. But maybe easier to get running without those glitches.

I always thought Yuji Naka got too much credit for his claims. People probably thought it ran games at full speed, but I bet it ran more like this one does.

Sorry for the bump, but this one's just as lulzy:

http://www.tni.nl/products/gem.html

I was quite astonished to read about dynarecs being possible on a seemingly-measly processor - more so as GBC games are claimed to play at a tolerable framerate if not full speed.