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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. |
> 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!