Emulators, cores, and the architecture behind preserving and playing classic games today.
A stage-by-stage account of controller-to-photon latency, including polling, game logic, emulation, GPU queues, display scanout, and measurement.
Why Dolphin's planned 2023 Steam release stopped after Valve consulted Nintendo, what the DMCA dispute did not decide, and how platforms govern access.
Tony Cannon's 2019 MIT release opened GGPO's rollback SDK for study and commercial reuse, while leaving deterministic game integration to developers.
MAME 0.162 integrated MESS in May 2015, placing arcade, computer, console, calculator, and other machine drivers in one preservation framework.
RetroArch 1.0.0.0 coordinated one frontend across seven targets in 2014, demonstrating libretro's separation of cores from platform services.
Nintendo Switch Online launched in 2018 with 20 licensed NES games, suspend points, online play, and a subscription-dependent access model.
Nintendo's 2024 case against Yuzu ended in a $2.4 million judgment and permanent injunction, without a contested trial on broader emulation law.
How rollback netcode predicts remote inputs, restores deterministic state, re-simulates missed frames, detects desyncs, and balances delay with artifacts.
How cartridge dumpers read ROM, mapper banks, save memory, and metadata—and how repeated reads, hashes, provenance, and safe handling establish confidence.
How emulators serialize CPU, memory, devices, clocks, and pending events—and why completeness, determinism, versioning, and validation matter.