[Shugyousha]

It's the man page for the Nintendo device emulators of 9Front. 9Front is a distribution of the Plan 9 operating system (most likely the most usable because it's the most actively developed one)

The link is interesting because these emulators seem to be part of the standard distribution of 9Front. Most likely those are written from scratch, given that Plan 9 is not a POSIX system (unless they are using http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/ape).

[lupire]

Without looking I'm going to guess that ape is A POSIX Emulator, so we have an emulator emulating an emulator.

Edit: it's A POSIX Environment, but it still contains features that are unnatural in Plan9 and could by bypassed with more work, so much like emulation.

[SllX]

Close. It’s ANSI/POSIX Environment. It’s been there since Plan 9 second edition. I think it was put there basically for TeX, but don’t quote me on that because I no longer remember where I read that and it isn’t in the original paper.

http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/ape

[anthk]

APE is not an emulator, but a tiny POSIX implementation, with shims for unneded stuff.

[anthk]

Also, today npe superseded ape.

[LukaD]

> 9Front is a distribution of the Plan 9 operating system

Ah that's the info I was missing, thanks! Indeed very interesting that emulators are part of the distribution.

[dangus]

Which really means this is a terrible way to emulate games.

The bug list is pretty darn unacceptable for a usable emulator.

You can’t even emulate PAL region games.

It’s a nice novelty that this is built in to the OS but the Linux/Android retro handheld scene is so much more wildly sophisticated than a half-broken command line emulator. Just jump on YouTube and search for an OnionOS overview to see what I mean.

[anthk]

Not being supported != not working.

Probably they would run faster and that's it.

Also, you can't compare GNU/Linux with 9front.

[dangus]

I’m pretty sure in the context of the manual it means PAL games don’t work.

Why can’t I compare them? If someone wants to emulate games they ought to compare operating systems. Like I said, cool that 9front has a built in emulator, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good use case of the OS.