Accuracy takes power: one man's 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator
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Re: Accuracy takes power: one man's 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator
#2This might be a lot easier on an FPGA.
Re: Accuracy takes power: one man's 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator
#3this makes me think of full brain emulation.
how far are we from an in silico silicon virtualization suite?
Re: Accuracy takes power: one man's 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator
#4This might be a lot easier on an FPGA.
Replicate each component of the original SNES hardware? That has been somewhat done: you can buy hardware clones of the SNES in many stores.
Re: Accuracy takes power: one man's 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator
#5This might be a lot easier on an FPGA.
I agree. Plus, I think if the goal is really to 'preserve history', making chips that replicate the original hardware is a lot better (and more accurate) way than trying to software emulate it.
Re: Accuracy takes power: one man's 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator
#6This might be a lot easier on an FPGA.
It is. I did a Sega system on an FPGA in 2003 as a one-semester senior design project. Using a modern HDL (bluespec, or something like the proprietary language my company uses internally) on current FPGAs, you could probably do a much higher level implementation in 1/10th that time.
An SNES would be much more annoying to do, but probably no more than an order of magnitude moreso, so I doubt it would take more than a semester, even for someone who'd never touched an FPGA before.
Re: Accuracy takes power: one man's 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator
#7I've been follow Byuu's progress on BSNES for a couple of years, and I would like to state for the record that the amount of effort he had put into this project far exceeds the majority of "hobby" projects.
Just in the past few months, several SNES co-process chips that remained un-emulated for years, have been deciphered and fully emulated in BSNES. Without Byuu leading the charge into the last bastions of SNES emulation, I absolutely believe that some of these devices would be lost to history.
Re: Accuracy takes power: one man's 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator
#8[deleted]
Re: Accuracy takes power: one man's 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator
#9this makes me think of full brain emulation. how far are we from an in silico silicon virtualization suite?
Very
Re: Accuracy takes power: one man's 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator
#10this makes me think of full brain emulation. how far are we from an in silico silicon virtualization suite?
The best estimates I know of is Sandberg and Bostrom's 2008 Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap: http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/3...
And yes, this is pretty relevant - it demonstrates that perfect emulation is extremely expensive (in line with the critics of the idea of AI or brain emulation), but it also demonstrates how this doesn't matter in practice. (eg. I'd be happy to be a nigh-immortal upload if the price was a few glitches in an obscure memory I never think about.)