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by tomyws 4181 days ago
This is fascinating!

Practical reuse of assembly is resourceful and this approach to portability quite cool (take a look at this non-portable approach to fixing up and executing an assembly dump[1]).

I wonder if the future of video game console emulation lies in recompilation, perhaps to an intermediate representation format for LLVM (similar to Dagger[2]).

[1] http://aluigi.altervista.org/mytoolz.htm#dump2func [2] http://dagger.repzret.org/
1 comments
brigade 4181 days ago
Static recompilation, no. See http://andrewkelley.me/post/jamulator.html for an attempt at that and why it isn't useful.
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tbirdz 4181 days ago
These issues may be serious problems, such as self modifying code in emulating older systems like the NES, but are they still as problematic in more modern consoles? I believe that modern consoles are already being programmed more in high level languages (C, C++, etc) than in assembler. Playstation even has a gcc based compiler. Since the code was initially written in a higher language and then compiled, would it not be easily to statically recompile it?

However, I am not a games programmer, and do not have any actual experience with console development. If there is anyone on here with experience in these areas, I would appreciate their thoughts on the matter.

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brigade 4181 days ago
Dynamic codegen in games might be less of an issue, but instead you get to deal with emulating a MMU among other things. And the point is that all of these issues specific to whole-system emulators mean that static recompilation isn't faster than dynamic, so there's no point in doing contortions to get static working. The original language barely matters when all you have is machine code.

As for where newer consoles are easier, the big thing is that there's more dynamic linking so there's more opportunity for high-level emulation of entire systems. Think being able to emulate entire OpenGL function calls rather than the raw GPU-specific register writes.

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vtbassmatt 4181 days ago
The Xbox consoles, at least, don't allow self-modifying code, so that particular issue wouldn't exist. I assume PlayStation is the same.
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