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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 2nd, 2023

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  • It might seem like an overkill but cycle accurate emulation is in many ways easier, just way less performant. Back in the day devs wrote software in a way that would leverage different timings between different pieces of hardware to achieve things that wouldn’t be possible otherwise like full screen parallax scrolling on Gameboy. Software emulators have to identify those cases and implement workarounds for them. Some edge cases are unresolved for years leading to bugs of varying severity. You can see a rundown of such cases on Analogue Pocket in this video.


  • FPGA is cycle accurate which requires very powerful hardware if you wanted to do it with software emulation, especially when you get to 5th gen consoles. It’s for the people that want an „end-game” setup that’s as good as original hardware, can handle multiple systems and give you much more flexibility. It doesn’t cost all that much when you compare it to original hardware, mods and scalers it would require to connect to new displays. I’m actually very surprised how cheap A64 is, expected at least twice as much.

    But, if you’re not that type of crazy then playing on your own PC, Ambernic and similar stuff is good enough and super convenient.