this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
217 points (96.6% liked)
Games
16742 readers
863 users here now
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
- News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
- Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
- No humor/memes etc..
- No affiliate links
- No advertising.
- No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
- No self promotion.
- No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
- No politics.
Comments.
- No personal attacks.
- Obey instance rules.
- No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
- Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Other communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The article notes that they are likely using a proprietary in-house emulator.
I personally don't think it's so likely that Nintendo would write and maintain a Windows emulator just for their museum if an open-source project exists that they could legally use for free under that project's license terms. Only someone with insider knowledge would be able to say for sure though.
They don't need to, they have their own studio that makes all their emulators called NERD: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_European_Research_%26_Development
Those emulators most likely have always worked on Windows since they need to be tested somewhere.
That team writes emulators that run directly on Nintendo consoles, so they would likely test it on development versions of those consoles the same way actual console games are developed and tested. Otherwise they would be testing a Switch version of an SNES emulator running inside a Switch emulator on a Windows PC that would introduce it's own errors.
The Switch is ARM and uses several components from FreeBSD and Android. It would not be surprising to learn that they have the ability to compile system components like Virtual Console for an ARM Linux with stubs for Switch-specific stuff.
The SNES Classic is also ARM, and has much less going on than the full Switch OS (Horizon). That could be the core of what they use for the museum displays, considering there’s an ARM version of Windows too.
Either way, devs gonna dev. If you can’t get feedback at your workstation and always have to deploy to your target platform to test anything, you’re gonna move too slow to catch and fix bugs or build flexible enough systems to prevent them.
So much of dev testing is about trade-offs between rapid iteration and thorough fidelity. You need access to both.
From my own experience, I’ve done stuff like:
It can get janky, cuz not everything works the same way, but most of what you work on is not platform-specific anyway and a good architecture will minimize the portion of code that only works on the target platform.