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.
>
> ---
>
> 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

Well, at this point I'm not really thinking about being a dev, I just know that my nature makes me dig further into things I'm interested which sometimes results in getting a new hobby and sometimes in forgetting about it and move along, most times the latter since I can't learn about everything.

I sometimes like to read a book as a place to read about different topics on the same subject in a coherent way. I imagine there might be different way to do things, HLE, interpreted CPUs or DRCs, etc. And probably other things I don't even know about or things already proven inefficient or inadequate that might be good to know about as well, so that you don't repeat mistakes, etc.

But I've also been reading the documents at Mamedev and other places, MAME source, etc. I know too well that there is no unified place to learn about anything and that experience is the key point on almost any discipline. I'm not looking for any magic guide to be an emulation programmer with only 10 minutes of studying a day while I sleep.

In any case, I don't see why wouldn't I listen to you, or R.Belmont or anyone for that matter. I listen, take what I can use and discard the rest. I really appreciate the input of both of you.