MAMEWorld Forums - Programming - Re: can you recomend a good book on emulation?

> I've said it before, I'll say it again: emulation isn't something you can be taught
> how to do as a specific thing. You must learn assembly language for at least one
> system well enough to write non-trivial programs. At that point you have the
> background to understand how emulation actually works - it's important to know how
> computers actually work first since emulation duplicates that.

Well, pardon me for trying to encourage the guy.

Fact is that you don't have to write an emulator from scratch. If you just want to make your own emulator for laughs, depending on the platform you're interested in emulating, there may be plenty of open-source CPU cores and whatnot all ready for use. There's even a few how-to's out there to walk you through the process. And when you're done, you might have some games playable, even though getting those last few games requires knowledge and information you don't have. And at this point, you can call yourself an emulator author, even though, according to some, you won't be.

If you want to be a MAMEDEV or MESSDEV or what have you and emulate a game from the ground up, with unemulated CPUs and chipsets and video processors and audio processors - I agree, you'll need a whole lot more than just tacking some libraries together.

As far as things go, franciscohs - you shouldn't listen to me. I have no direct experience. I've never written an emulator. I've barely submitted code to MAME, and what I have has been documentation fixes. In the comments. I'm no electronics engineer, more someone interested in information science. And I tend to have these search-engine-results-augmented conversations online, and in person, I may not be able to talk knowledgeably about stuff. And I'll be the first to admit that.

But I've been "in the scene" a while, and I know what's been mentioned when this topic has come up before. I know there's no book. I know you need to have a very decent background in the fundamentals before attempting from scratch. And I know Arbee knows all this about me.

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If anything, this thread tells me that there's still residual interest from programmers wanting to learn how to do it, and there isn't as obvious a "go-to" place for "learning" how, anymore. Used to be things like "How-to Emulation" and EMUL8 list, and Retrogames' Emulator Programming messageboard, most of those places are dead.

- Stiletto