31–40 of 57 posts
I always love reading the dolphin progress reports. They do a good job of explaining how things work and parsing it out into something easy to understand
Fantastic! I always wonder if the original console devs would be able to provide bonus insight.
Do they accept donations? I couldn’t find anything on the website.
They don't: https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-dolphin-donations?pid=...
I've seen many a fine volonteer project become enshittified because they started optimizing for financial income rather than for having fun.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right? I started reading them before I became a programmer. I think they helped me learn how to think about the inner workings of programs
I think they're the best status reports I've seen anywhere.
In the discussion of the Triforce arcade compatibility, there's some discussion of "IC Card" support needing to be implemented, and doing so unlocking a lot of missing functionality. I think this is referring to the Japanese rail payment cards? I know you can use them on things like vending machines, but from the article it seems like the Triforce cabinets let you save game progress on them too, which would be a grea…
The most interesting part to me is how often emulator development turns into discovering that the original games were doing something deeply strange but completely intentional
There were even things I thought I had to manually optimize in the early 2000s that the GCC optimizer was already taking care of in the mid-90s.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't: https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-dolphin-donations?pid=...
Wise. I've seen many a fine volonteer project become enshittified because they started optimizing for financial income rather than for having fun.
Nintendo's lawsuits they won against emulator projects in the past had donation systems as one of, if not the sole main point they drove to win the case.
The most interesting part to me is how often emulator development turns into discovering that the original games were doing something deeply strange but completely intentional
games/gb didn't save the sram in the emulator save files, so upon restoring the snapshot and saving in the cartridge memory you got a mismatch. It got fixed really fast, the emulators are really simple plan9 C compared to anything else.
The most interesting part to me is how often emulator development turns into discovering that the original games were doing something deeply strange but completely intentional
I’ve been decompiling for the past (almost) two years, and it’s fun to see the bugs, compiler quirks, programmer superstitions, things that coincidentally work because of compiler behavior not because of correctness, as well as the things modern tooling would have caught that 30-year old versions of GCC hadn’t gotten around to yet. There were even things I thought I had to manually optimize in the early 2000s that th…
What is the most reliable place for ROMs these days? Is there any sort of checksum that can accompany them to ensure safety? While I trust Dolphin, I don't trust most ROMs.
There's tons of options, no-intro, redump, tosec, mame are all doing DAT files with file checksums. That said, ROMs are basically never a malware vector as they have to exploit an issue in the emulators themselves and historically that hasn't really been seen. Typically malware related to roms happens with files included in the zip archives or by sites offering "downloaders" with embedded malware.