[sbarre]

Words can have multiple meanings?

In the market space they play in, and the audience to whom they speak, "emulation" is well known to mean software emulation targeted at dumped ROMs.

And since there are lots of hardware devices out there that are generic compute devices with pre-installed software emulators that claim to play the same games (via said ROMs), they make the point to clarify that this isn't one of those products.

[elipsitz]

The issue I have is that they’re implying it’s inherently better than software emulation, perhaps because it more accurately reproduces the behavior. But an FPGA emulator isn’t necessarily any more accurate.

I think it’s dishonest marketing, and they know it. The low contrast, fine print at the bottom doesn’t make the same claim:

> 3. Analogue 3D is not designed using software emulation. It is designed using a specialty hardware chip called an FPGA, which operates on a transistor level implementation of its functionality.

[colejohnson66]

That's probably not even correct. Unless they've decapped the chip and reverse engineered the physical transistors (like Visual6502 did), it's not a "transistor level implementation". I have no reason to believe they did so because it wouldn't be reasonable. It's almost certainly an HDL-level implementation.

Unless they're stretching the definition of "transistor level" to mean "we use transistors to simulate the original transistors", but that would also include software emulation that runs on CPUs. It reads like marketing copy written by someone who doesn't even know what an FPGA is.

[sbarre]

Analogue's devices seem to be widely loved and well regarded both by consumers and reviewers.

Are you really just mad about their choice of words?

I think it's pretty clear that Analogue's offerings are significantly different than most of the rest of the "retro games" market, and I don't blame them for calling out that difference in a way that's easy for the audience to understand, and to play to their strengths (i.e. works with real physical carts), particularly given the legal grey zone around ROM hacks and console emulation in general.

If you look at the entire device they're selling, and not just the software part, I think it's totally fair to say they are more accurate. A software emulator cannot run a physical ROM cart, right?

If you have boxes of SNES or N64 carts in your basement, and you want to use those, there's no software emulator out there that can help you (without additional steps or equipment).

[belthesar]

Personally, I dislike their use of language here because Analogue is standing on the shoulders of giants that have reverse engineered video game console architecture, largely to be used in software emulation. While an FPGA does not have an operating system, a non-native call stack, and other general purpose computing bits in-between it and the code programming the FPGA, Analogue products are indeed emulating the system.

> A software emulator can not run a physical ROM cart, right?

It absolutely can. The vast majority of emulators do not build this functionality in because some sort of cartridge tool to interface with a computer would be a largely niche device that is easily solved by running an existing dump. Software emulation competitors like those from Retron do include cartridge slots, and those work by dumping the ROM and then running it from temporary space in the emulator of choice. That said, your disc-based system emulators do generally have support for running direct from physical media, because for a good long while, we all had CD and/or DVD drives in our systems.

As for "more accurate", the Analogue Super Nt at release had a plethora of bugs in the FPGA firmware that caused issues with accurate play of titles. Meanwhile, counterparts in Snes9x had solved so many of those issues, albeit still being less "console accurate" than other emulators like bsnes. So, in many ways, the solutions Analogue provides still need more work to truly be better than emulation.

That said, plenty of more causal folks are fine with "good enough", to your point of Analogue being widely loved. The SNES Mini had a handful of games that ran well enough for the vast majority of players, and hyper-accuracy is more of an issue for certain games with esoteric software or additional chips on the cartridge to augment the console's functionality, or for folks that push a game system to the limit like speedrunners.

As a result, I don't think they are bad products by any stretch of the imagination, but I do take umbrage in their marketing tactics. It is both inaccurate, and to some degree disrespectful to those that did the work that made theirs possible.

[sbarre]

> > A software emulator can not run a physical ROM cart, right?

> It absolutely can.

Cool, I have bsnes running on my PC, where do I plug in the cart? ;-)

You misunderstood my point there, which is probably my fault for not being clear but I was comparing the software emulator to the complete hardware device provided by Analogue.

Someone else mentioned the Polymega which is a device that runs software emulators but has physical interfaces for carts, which is probably more in line with what you're thinking about.

Thanks for sharing the rest of the details, it was informative!

[ehaliewicz2]

>A software emulator cannot run a physical ROM cart, right?

Why not? There's the polymega which is using software emulation and has addons to support running games via cartridges.

[MenhirMike]

I don't know how the Polymega works, but for the example the Hyperkin Retron or the Atari 2600+ are "DOM Dumpers": You put in the cartridge, the system dumps the EEPROMs to RAM, and then plays them.

The issue is that if you have a cartridge with any custom chips in it, they won't work because the software doesn't actually connect the cartridge to the emulated system. It's possible to built in heuristics to detect a known game (e.g., if I detect Pitfall 2 on the 2600, I can tell the emulator to emulate the video/sound chip on the cartridge), but if I have a homebrew cartridge, I'm out of luck.

This is especially common on NES and SNES games, there were so many custom chips around, some used on only 1 game (e.g., the DSP2 chip on SNES Dungeon Master), though other consoles also occasionally used it (like Virtua Racer on the Genesis, or as mentioned, Pitfall 2 on the Atari 2600).

With a hardware-based emulation, it's possible to electrically connect the cartridge to the system and achieve full compatibility (assuming the hardware emulation is correct), but there's AFAIK no software emulator that can be fully coupled to a cartridge connector.

So, not sure what would happen if I grab a SNES cartridge with a DSP2 chip (aka. Dungeon Master) and flash my own EEPROM onto the game - would the Polymega work for that or not?