Moore's law never ceases to amaze (the vulgar version where we're talking compute/dollar, not the transistor count doubling rate.) It won't be too long before phones are running AI models with performance equal to or better than current frontier models running on $100 million dollar clusters. It's hard to even imagine the things that will be running on billion dollar clusters in 10 years.

It really is incredible. I've been playing through my childhood games on retro handhelds, and recently jumped from <$100 handhelds to a Retroid Pocket Flip, and it's incredible. Been playing WiiU and PS2 games flawlessly at 2x res, and even tackling some lighter Switch games on it.

I'll take a longbet with you that this or successors tackle more than a small handful of titles

We live in interesting times

I suspect we will see a proliferation of emulator development in the next few years.

In a lot of ways, emulators are the perfect problem for vision/LLMs. It's like all those web browser projects popping up on HN. You have a very well define problem with existing reference test cases. It's not going to be fun for Nintendo's lawyers in future when everybody can crowdfund an emulator by simply running a VLM against a screen recording of gameplay (barring non deterministic éléments).

They can't oppress the software engineering masses any longer through lawfare.

What the dev of AertherSx2 did to run games smooth, even on my midrange 2019 android phone, is wonders.

Too bad the dev is a very emotionally unstable person that abandoned his port, despite his big talent.

I read this as Futurama way too many times

Is it? It would be if it partially evaluated a MIPS emulator on a particular game. But it doesn't seem to work like that.

Or as in cartoons, IP lawyers with dollar symbols in their eyes.

Some context for others who were unaware: https://github.com/PSI-Rockin/DobieStation/issues/51

EDIT here's potentially a better link: https://www.gregorygaines.com/blog/emulating-ps2-floating-po...

Probably the same way as the emulator themselves, with a list of titles needing the real PS2 floating point.

A lot of titles don't actually need it and work fine with standard IEEE floating point.

PS2 floating-point behavior is one of the few hardware misfeatures so awful it affects emulation of competing systems[0]. The game True Crime: New York City is so dependent on PS2 floating point that the GameCube port installs an error handler just to make 1/0 = 0. Which isn't even PS2 hardware behavior. But it is "close enough" that the game does not immediately throw you into the void every time you step on a physics object.

[0] https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2021/11/13/dolphin-progress-rep...

Yes, but in practice that isn't a problem. People do write self modifying code, and jump to random places today. However it is much less common today than in the past. IT is safe to say that most games are developed and run on the developers PC and then ported to the target system. If they know the target system they will make sure it works on the system from day one, but most developers are going to prefer to run their latest changes on their current system over sending it to the target system. If you really need to take advantage of the hardware you can't do this, but most games don't.

Many games are written in a high level language (like C...) which doesn't give you easy access to self modifying code. (even higher level languages like python do, but they are not compiled and so not part of this discussion). Likewise, jumping to arbitrary code is limited to function calls for most programmers.

Many games just run on a game engine, and the game engine is something we can port or rewrite to other systems and then enable running the game.

Be careful of the above: most games don't become popular. It is likely the "big ticket games" people are most interested in emulating had the development budget and need to take advantage of the hardware in the hard ways. That is the small minority of exceptions are the ones we care about the most.

How many PS2-era games used JIT? I would be surprised if there were many of them - most games for the console were released between 2000 and 2006. JIT was still considered a fairly advanced and uncommon technology at the time.