Why do old emulated games still suffer from slowdown and lag when they run on modern computers?
In: 36
The short of it is that old consoles used specialized hardware for different effects. And they needed to to get playable games with slow clock speeds.
All that stuff happens in parallel in the background, in hardware not depending on the actual console cpu to do stuff. And lots of it happens asynchronously or with wierd timing that needs to be reverse engineered by poking at the hardware.
Like the SNES despite being only 25MHz had something like 5 separate purpose built processors, and some extra coprocessors types that lived on the game cartridge.
On a modern computer though you need to emulate that specialized hardware. Each bit of hardware you try and emulate takes up processing time. Eventually that just adds up and you can’t do it all without a lot of CPU power.
Here’s a good article on the SNES stuff specifically.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/06/how-snes-emulators-got-a-few-pixels-from-complete-perfection/
Latest Answers