"In my mind, I view emulators as a sort of converter in and of themselves, ones that primarily take orders designed for old processors and translate them into ones that the new target processor can understand and execute. In that sense, even if sound and graphics hardware have their fair share of differences, in the end, they’re both still fundamentally sending commands. All an emulator is doing is changing the shape and flow of those commands. So long as an emulator is fully tested, it should all work out in the end, even if that’s obviously the really tough part in practice."

Sadly, that is the most technical part of the essay. The rest of it is just anecdotes. They talk briefly about a Crash Bandicoot freezing issue just before launch, which they got around by trying to play the game repeatedly: "All I could figure out was that as long as Crash kept moving, the game remained stable for whatever reason."

In my humble opinion, the PS2 is the best retro console for tinkering.

So many of them were sold, they can be had cheaply, lots of aftermarket stuff for them (HDD/Network adapter), Crazy huge library of weird and interesting titles, vibrantly active homebrew community. And of course, the built-in backwards compatibility. Several interesting hardware revisions to play with as well (although the "fat" ones are the most moddable).

Props to everyone out there digging up, preserving and translating old interviews, articles, etc. Some others doing this work:

Did You Know Gaming?: https://www.youtube.com/@DYKGaming/videos Shmuplations: https://shmuplations.com/

> All an emulator is doing is changing the shape and flow of those commands.

Maybe if you're SIMH and you're emulating an old CPU that was connected asynchronously to like RS232 peripherals. But I think this statement understates the complexity of emulating something like a console.

Emulating a console or home computer, or even something like an old console's GPU, is HARD because you have to do these translations in a bug-for-bug compatible way, with strict timing constraints -- for the system's many components -- and you have to take into account the raster nature of CRT displays, which allowed for changing the display in significant ways between frames or scanlines.

There's a reason why emulation is these days usually only undertaken by some of the strangest most terminally online people, and it can take even them decades to get the details right. Of course, this engineer worked at Sony and probably had the benefit of being able to talk to the developers of the graphics chip he was emulating, but that's still a daunting task.

Fascinating read, even if not very technical. That type of deep work must be a joy to do. Wonder if there are still places where one might get a chance to work like that, specifically on “low level” stuff

FF7 spoiler alert

Playstation 2 and not the PS/2 port