HN Reader

Byuu/Near was a pioneer for emulator accuracy and was laughed at most of the time because his emulator (bsnes) consumed a lot of memory and cpu.

MVG (Modern Vintage Gamer) has covered this in a number of videos, his stuff is excellent - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ou66ppC8stI

The NES games inside Animal Crossing blew my mind as a kid. It's amusing to consider I was sitting there playing NES games inside a GameCube game rather than playing the GameCube game itself.

Maybe it's licensing or something, but the fact that Nintendo doesn't simply have its entire catalogue available via virtual console is a real shame. The passionate console hacking/reverse engineering community has managed to make near-perfect emulators for everything up to the Wii, and pretty good support for the Switch. Accessing this takes only a few minutes to accomplish on the high seas, but somehow Nintendo takes years to add a few games to their own service.

Good video, however on the other hand, super accuracy isn't needed for the vast majority of NES ROMs, and for the ones that do require it, they could have done some special-casing or game-specific stuff to make it work. The author should check any VC packages for NES games that are notoriously hard to emulate. Running SMB1 accurately isn't exactly the gold standard for true emulation accuracy.

One thing to note is that Nintendo doesn't really have any intrinsic advantage over the unofficial emulation community just because they produced the NES. Whatever documents they have archived internally (something along the lines of this: https://archive.org/details/famicomdocs ) would just document how the system is supposed to work and how well-behaved software should work, not any of the quirks and edge cases being tested for in the video. I think it makes sense that Nintendo didn't bother making an accurate NES emulator until they moved to the "emulator and a bunch of games" model with the NES Classic and Switch Online. The "emulator bundled with each game" model used by the Virtual Console allowed them to avoid doing all that difficult hardware analysis work. If a poorly behaved game exposed some inaccuracy in the Virtual Console emulator, they were able to add a hack to that game's build of the emulator to make the game run correctly instead of having to figure out what strange hardware behavior the game was depending on.

This should be an article, not a video. You have a video which is practically all text. wtf!!

Cool video! I do wonder though, how much cases there were those arbitrary compatibility quirks being sacrificed for performance. I could imagine a shoddy job trying to support everything axing performance.