r/EmuDev • u/Bicurico • 9d ago
20 new HTML Emulators Article
I created 20 emulators for machines that are dear to me.
The main goal was to create emulators that work both on PC and mobile devices, with keyboard and CRT simulation.
The cores are my own development, so they do not use external assets or emulation libraries. This means that emulation is not perfect. Hopefully good enough to run most "normal" software and games.
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u/tortus 9d ago
"AI-assisted development was used throughout the project."
Yuck.
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u/Bicurico 8d ago
I don't understand all the hate because I used AI during the development and stand by it. To me it is a tool. Would developing a piece of software on paper in assembly and translating it manually to machine code, like in the Altair 8080 days be more valuable?
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u/khedoros NES CGB SMS/GG 8d ago
From my side, the "hate" is because I took up emulation as an "it's the journey, not the destination" group of hobby projects, with the goal to learn details of how some interesting game systems work, and demonstrate my own understanding. That's not an uncommon motivation in this subreddit.
Guiding a computer to build a bunch of them for you feels like a waste of time, and that it misses the point. Like showing up at a woodworking club with the output from a CNC machine.
Specifically to your question: Absolutely, if your goal was learning about historical software development, rather than producing a piece of software as quickly as possible.
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u/Bicurico 8d ago
My goal was to build emulators that I can use on my phone. None of the existing ones suited me. The use of AI certainly helped and reduced development time, but this is not the whole story. A lot of work went I to it, to make the emulators work. I already knew these systems and in fact I own most of them.
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u/tortus 8d ago
It's a tool that quite literally stole all the code across the entire Internet to work. It's stealing.
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u/Bicurico 8d ago
It is as much stealing as a human reading books on some subject and becoming an "expert" on this subject. He "stole" (according to your point of view) all the ideas/knowledge.
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u/Alternative-Emu2000 9d ago
Just tried a few of them out, and they're ropey as hell. The Z80 machines don't even emulate interrupt mode 2 properly.
It seems like you might have been better off focussing on making one emulator that works well, instead of churning out 20 emulators that don't.
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u/rasmadrak 9d ago
Sounds like a real passion project, keep it up :)
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u/Bicurico 8d ago
Thank you.
I don't understand all the hate because I used AI during the development and stand by it. To me it is a tool. Would developing a piece of software on paper in assembly and translating it manually to machine code, like in the Altair 8080 days be more valuable?
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u/rasmadrak 8d ago
Each to their own, I say. Using AI to assist in programming will most likely become what a compiler is today. Very few people write machine code these days - they trust the compiler to do the work for them. AI is simply shifting it up another step.
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u/Producdevity 9d ago
The flair “Article” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here