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

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jonhohle an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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 the GCC optimizer was already taking care of in the mid-90s.

	▲	WalterGR an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Have you written about your discoveries anywhere? Sounds pretty interesting.

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anthk an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Heh. Today I found thanks to the 9front people that some GB games used carts' sram as 'swap'.

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.