Tetsuo Time

I was looking at digg when I came across this article. One of my favorite things on computers are emulators because they let you play games that you otherwise can not play for one reason or another. For example they never made a home version of certain arcade games and other games that they did make home versions of weren't nearly as good as the arcade. Emulation fixes that and the games are preserved as well.

Apparently a university in the UK wants to work on a UGE (universal games emulator). I'm wondering just how big the scope of this project will be, if they will be able to do it and if it'll ever be made available to the public. I almost imagine it may work sort of like MAME however I hope they put a focus more towards optimization as well as accuracy as MAME doesn't care about speed and being able to actually play the games it emulates is said to be just a side effect.

Anyway, I imagine this UGE to be an abstracted front end with modules for the different systems it emulates. The only thing is some of the work is already done by other people such as the aforementioned MAME, DOSbox, Wine\Cider, and the various console emulators.... a lot of them especially for the newer systems are huge projects in and of themselves so is it possible that these researchers may have bitten off more than they can chew? Although most of the people working on emulators are doing it in their spare time with limited funds so they may have an advantage there.

Some people in comments wondered about legality but the thing is that emulators themselves are legal. You just can't distribute copyright material with them. Transgaming has two things that they also do... Cedega for linux typically is for when you own the game and you install and run it through it and with Cider on OS X they work with the publisher licensing the product to them and they wrap their game with cider and sell it in a box. It seems to work OK but compatibility is kind of dodgy and has to be especially tailored to the game it wraps.

In the end this UGE may end up being designed for a computer that is produced in the future such as a 10Ghz 128 core computer that far outstrips the power needed to play any of the games it'd emulate all while doing it all in software. =P

I was looking at digg when I came across this article. One of my favorite things on computers are emulators because they let you play games that you otherwise can not play for one reason or another. For example they never made a home version of certain arcade games and other games that they did make home versions of weren't nearly as good as the arcade. Emulation fixes that and the games are preserved as well.

Apparently a university in the UK wants to work on a UGE (universal games emulator). I'm wondering just how big the scope of this project will be, if they will be able to do it and if it'll ever be made available to the public. I almost imagine it may work sort of like MAME however I hope they put a focus more towards optimization as well as accuracy as MAME doesn't care about speed and being able to actually play the games it emulates is said to be just a side effect.

Anyway, I imagine this UGE to be an abstracted front end with modules for the different systems it emulates. The only thing is some of the work is already done by other people such as the aforementioned MAME, DOSbox, Wine\Cider, and the various console emulators.... a lot of them especially for the newer systems are huge projects in and of themselves so is it possible that these researchers may have bitten off more than they can chew? Although most of the people working on emulators are doing it in their spare time with limited funds so they may have an advantage there.

Some people in comments wondered about legality but the thing is that emulators themselves are legal. You just can't distribute copyright material with them. Transgaming has two things that they also do... Cedega for linux typically is for when you own the game and you install and run it through it and with Cider on OS X they work with the publisher licensing the product to them and they wrap their game with cider and sell it in a box. It seems to work OK but compatibility is kind of dodgy and has to be especially tailored to the game it wraps.

In the end this UGE may end up being designed for a computer that is produced in the future such as a 10Ghz 128 core computer that far outstrips the power needed to play any of the games it'd emulate all while doing it all in software. =P

I haven't been updating much these past couple of days because I actually started on what will hopefully end up being a nice book\other project. I'm not revealing too many details about it yet and I don't want to get anyone's hopes up too high yet (even my own). But I feel good about this project and I'm not letting anything discourage me from going through with it. If all goes well I will be announcing it here of course. I have actually been toying around with the idea for a while but haven't had the motivation\drive\etc. to actually go through with it. I think I may have that now though so I'm going for it.