MAME for console games

[Agozer]

True. One of the harder consoles for MESS to emulate is the SNES simply because it has a ungodly amount of special chips, most which have been emulated very recently. Hell, these chips incorporated new prosessors even.

 

Saturn and A>tari Jaguar come second and third. Oldre consoles are easier to emulate simply because their hardware is much simpler with few having special chips.

[hi_resurrection]

Couldn't someone just have a 20mb or more program that takes all the code from other emulators such as zSNES and Gens? The guys should all collaberate and make an ultimate emulator.

[Agozer]

Frontends already do that, in a sense. There are a few extremely good console emulator frontends. Besides, all the console emulator authors don't like their personal work grouped under a single emulator, and by large, the codebase in these said emulators and so different that it would require ridiculous amount of work to make all that code fit together.

 

MAME has an uniform driver system; every game and system implemented uses the same layout, and every line of code has been written in the same programming language.

[Sultan]

This isn't really the same thing, but I've been wondering if it would be possible to make an Emulator OS that lets you play all the x086-based arcade hardware games. Look at that new sega system. Its a 3ghz pentium. A lot of arcade games have essentially been running on PC platforms for awhile now. So would it be possible to create a streamlined system to allow those games to be played on similar pc's?

I realize that one problem is that pc's all use different hardware and the arcade games are coded for specific hardware, but surely there are ways to translate commands to your particular gpu, and w/o windows running it might be a decent speed?

[ken_cinder]

Sultan, you wouldn't need that in it's entirety.

Think of Xbox emulation, if you know much about CXBX for example and how the Xbox works........it's not really a matter of "emulation" but translation of some calls that aren't native. Alot of the Xbox hardware is native and performs native functions, but some doesn't and requires translation.

These x86 based systems can mainly be pass-through direct to your PC hardware, with unsupported calls being translated.