• @lengau@midwest.social
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    31 day ago

    An FPGA seems like a lot of effort, but an SNES emulator running on a Raspberry Pi seems like it may have been a better option IMO.

    • Magiilaro
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      124 hours ago

      I am sure that Nintendo is using FPGA for internal R&D, so they have people capable of writing cores for FPGA. Add to that the fact that Nintendo has all the schematics and detailed information about the original hardware and designs.

      Yes, a FPGA would have been work, but not lots of work for them. And we are speaking of 8 and 16 bit hardware, that is very small and limited hardware.

      Besides that: Windows can run on a Raspberry PI, so maybe the emulator on Windows used by Nintendo is already using that. Who knows?

      • @lengau@midwest.social
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        114 hours ago

        Making an FPGA for all of this is far more work than pulling an open source emulator and sticking it on a machine…

        • Magiilaro
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          114 hours ago

          Yes, but Nintendo did neither the one nor the other.

            • Magiilaro
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              212 hours ago

              Why should they do that? They already have their own SNES emulator with Canoe (used for example on the SNES Classic Mini). It is much more logical to assume that they compiled Canoe to run on Windows for this exhibition.

              • @lengau@midwest.social
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                111 hours ago

                I take it you’ve never ported an application to a different platform running on a different hardware architecture before.

                • Magiilaro
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                  210 hours ago

                  I have and if the code is well written and prepared then such a port can be done with just a recompilation for the different platform. Yes, often it is not that easy but the developers at Nintendo are neither dumb nor incompetent.

                  • @lengau@midwest.social
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                    19 hours ago

                    You’re making my point for me though. Each of the other things you’ve suggested is more work than requires more expertise. Popping up an emulator on an existing box and dumping a ROM in there is something an intern can do.

                    All of these other things can be done, but they’re not as quick and simple, and that’s why we’re seeing this in the first case - Nintendo went with a quick and simple solution, and someone found a bug (it still plays Windows noises).