Universal Video Game Emulator

[Rowe]

New software would play any videogame ever created - tech - 12 February 2009 - New Scientist

Software that can be used to play almost any computer game in history is to be developed as part of a European attempt to preserve digital cultural heritage.

Those crazy Europeans, they want to preserve our video game heritage for future generations. How much legal trouble are they in for?

http://cordis.europa.eu/fetch?CALLER...22f8&RCN=89496

[Correction]

Doesn't MAME already do this?

[Kiro]

I dunno, I only use MAME to play Marvel v Capcom 2, lol.

[Khamsin]

Doesn't MAME already do this?

MAME won't emulate SNES, Commodore 64, or PS3. It only emulates arcade machine games, I thought.

This will supposedly be able to run Amiga programs, PSX isos, NES roms, old Windows games that no longer work properly on XP/Vista, etc. all with one program.

[Zosi]

MAME emulates arcade games, MESS uses the same basic framework to emulate pretty much anything under the sun BESIDES arcade games. It works pretty damn good, although it's not as good as specialized emulators for the more common home consoles.

[Kerberoz]

Is there even a halfway-decent ps2 emulator available yet? Last I checked they were all in beta or just really horrible/buggy.

[Street]

Those crazy Europeans, they want to preserve our video game heritage for future generations. How much legal trouble are they in for?

EUROPA: CORDIS: FP7 : Find a project

Probably not much trouble at all if they're leaving out the BIOS files. (Can find all those on most bittorrent sites though)

[Khamsin]

Since it's a single software that emulates everything, wouldn't they have their own custom BIOS in order to cover all the bases?

And what about games from computer platforms, like old Windows games, or Mac, or Amiga, C64, or Apple ][e? It emulates all that, too.

[Akanei]

Since it's a single software that emulates everything, wouldn't they have their own custom BIOS in order to cover all the bases?

No.

Case in point, you still need to download separate BIOS files to run games that use NeoGeo/CPS 3/newer Taito/etc boards on MAME.

Edit: And if they did, I'd assume that'd be a rather large can of worms they're opening up, by doing that.

[MisterBob]

Is there even a halfway-decent ps2 emulator available yet? Last I checked they were all in beta or just really horrible/buggy.

Been one for about a year or so, but you need a higher end machine to run it. (Also at the very least, you need a dual core, preferably a quad core).

[Guitarman]

I dunno, I only use MAME to play Marvel v Capcom 2, lol.

Fucker. I can only find the first one I can beat the shit out of anyone at it by now though, lol. Ryu/Wolviie ftw.

[Khamsin]

No.

Case in point, you still need to download separate BIOS files to run games that use NeoGeo/CPS 3/newer Taito/etc boards on MAME.

Edit: And if they did, I'd assume that'd be a rather large can of worms they're opening up, by doing that.

But that's MAME. This software is revolutionary in that a single program will be able to emulate any game ever created, whether it be from an arcade machine, an old Windows game that won't run properly on modern computers and has a convoluted installer, an Amiga game, an Atari game, an NES game, a PS3 game, a mobile phone game, a DS game, a flash game, etc.

At least, that's what they make it sound like.

As for MAME, it sounds like just something to plug an already existing BIOS into to pretend it's whatever system the BIOS belongs to, rather than a true emulator in it's own right.

[kearnsy]

I just want an Emulator that'll play The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker with sound. The only emulator I found was Dolphin, which doesn't support the sound for quite a few of the Nintendo made (non-3rd party) games.

[Zosi]

But that's MAME. This software is revolutionary in that a single program will be able to emulate any game ever created, whether it be from an arcade machine, an old Windows game that won't run properly on modern computers and has a convoluted installer, an Amiga game, an Atari game, an NES game, a PS3 game, a mobile phone game, a DS game, a flash game, etc.

At least, that's what they make it sound like.

Anyone with 10 minutes of programming experience could tell you that the hype they're producing now is total and utter bullshit. It won't be a single program (at least in the sense you're using the phrase), it won't emulate everything ever made, and if they aren't relying on BIOS files, it won't happen any time in the next few decades. Implementing BIOS files for stuff like the Amiga might not be hard, but implementing modern console BIOSs and CPU/GPU emulation via reverse-engineering is *extremely* difficult and time-consuming.

It's taken MAME/MESS a decade to cover just arcade games and the basic old computer systems (Amiga, MSX, TG16, etc) with good fidelity, and that's WITH piggybacking on the original BIOS files. Don't cross your fingers that a bunch of university professors are going to reproduce the efforts of every emulator author and more, and churn out a magic program that's a universal emulator.

As for MAME, it sounds like just something to plug an already existing BIOS into to pretend it's whatever system the BIOS belongs to, rather than a true emulator in it's own right.

BIOS files are dumps of code. Just like ROMs. The only difference is that BIOSes are soldered onto the system board, whereas ROM chips are usually interchangeable to let you play different games. MAME (and the other modern emulators which rely on BIOS files, which includes PSX/PS2/Dreamcast/every other modern console) emulate the hardware and require you to provide the BIOS files because it's neither technologically nor legally feasible to reimplement the BIOS. A clean-room implementation would take man-years for a single system and wouldn't necessarily be 100% compatible, and a quick-and-dirty reimplementation would be very much illegal. That "pretending" that you brush off is true emulation. Reimplementing a BIOS file doesn't really have anything to do with it.

[Zosi]

To add a bit to my previous post, here's the various things that people call "emulators".

1) Direct interpreted emulation. This is what older emulators do. They step through the ROM image, look at each instruction and dispatch to a software function that implements it. This is basically implementing a CPU in software, and it's slooooow because of that. It takes a decent modern system to run a 100% accurate SNES emulators like bsnes, even though it's only emulating a bunch of single-mhz chips. Emulators like ZSNES and SNES9X are faster because they give up 100% accuracy for speed via shortcuts. This is "real emulation" by any definition of the term, whether the BIOS is reimplemented or not. This is what MAME does. It implements every instruction of the target CPUs and goes through the ROM image one instruction at a time.

2) Dynamis recompilation. This is what a lot of newer emulators do. It's a lot faster than interpreting because rather than reimplement everything in x86 assembly or C, the emulator just translates simple foreign instructions directly to x86 machine code on-the-fly and runs them directly. Complex instructions that aren't implemented on x86 get replaced by a jump to code that implements them in software, and the same goes for GPU calls, which get implemented using DirectX or OpenGL. This is rather speedy relatively speaking, but still slower than native code because of the recompilation time and overhead. Some VMs have to do this because they use different instruction sets than the host, such as if you're emulating a PPC Mac on x86. This is debatably emulation, depending on who you ask, although most will consider it emulation because it's running code meant for another platform. Whether it's emulation or not, it's the only way to run code meant for modern game systems with any kind of playable speed.

3) Virtualization. This is what VMware and MS Virtual PC and friends do, which is run code meant for the SAME architecture, but trick it into thinking that it's running on a different physical PC than the rest of the code executing on the system. This isn't really emulation, because the only things being emulated are the hardware devices attached to the computer, not the CPU itself. Even then, it's not really emulating a particular piece of hardware, just offering generic devices that are mapped to real hardware. True virtualization is usually done in hardware, but until recently, x86 CPUs didn't support virtualization instructions, so they had to dabble in dynamic recompilation to make sure that software running in a VM couldn't break out.

4) API translation. This is WINE, which is just a custom loader for a foreign executable format (PE) and a reimplementation of the API in question in a format the host OS can use. As WINE's name expansion says, this ain't emulation either, although a lot of people call it a "Windows emulator". It only works on the same architecture and doesn't do dynamic recompilation.

If this KEEP project wants to be portable to newer CPU architectures (which seems to be the goal), they're pretty much limited to #1, which severely limits what they can practically emulate. #2 through #4 all depend on either being able to recompile at run-time or have an actual physical processor with the same instruction set, which aren't things you can assume if you want things to be runnable 50 years from now.

[Ramor]

I'm not quite sure about '10 minutes of programming experience' but in any case it sounds like it's unfortunately not going to live up to the hype it's getting.

It'd be nice though, those crazy europeans.