as long as analogue didnt use the devices actual hardware design and code, its completely legal. theyre not selling you games, theyre selling you a piece of hardware capable of playing said games with their own hardware design.
i dont want to say emulation in a soft sense because its not software emulation, its hardware to hardware emulatoion.
This is actually advertised as having no emulation, all FPGA. Idk if those are compatible but they also say the n64 was the first multiplayer console in the header so they’re clearly a little sketchy on the details lol
Analogue likely doesn’t emulate the hardware at the transistor level, as it’s far more difficult than doing what most software emulators do.
From an interesting (altough non-conclusive) HN-thread [1].
Without seeing the code, it’s impossible to know where Analog’s implementation falls on the spectrum of software emulation vs hardware simulation. There is nothing magical about FPGAs that automatically makes anything developed with them a 1:1 representation of real hardware. In fact, there are plenty of instances where the FPGA version of a particular console is literally just a representation of a popular emulator only in verilog/vhdl. In many instances, even the best FPGA implementations of some systems are still only simulating system level behavior. Off the top of my head, one famously difficult case is audio, where many chips have analog circuitry that cannot be fully simulated.
FPGAs would be considered “hardware emulation” but a lot of people don’t like that term, and think emulation should be a term limited to software.
Like, there aren’t real N64 chips in there. The hardware IS emulating an N64 - it’s just not doing so in a way that’s comparable with software emulation at all.
as long as analogue didnt use the devices actual hardware design and code, its completely legal. theyre not selling you games, theyre selling you a piece of hardware capable of playing said games with their own hardware design.
i dont want to say emulation in a soft sense because its not software emulation, its hardware to hardware emulatoion.
This is actually advertised as having no emulation, all FPGA. Idk if those are compatible but they also say the n64 was the first multiplayer console in the header so they’re clearly a little sketchy on the details lol
Analogue likely doesn’t emulate the hardware at the transistor level, as it’s far more difficult than doing what most software emulators do.
From an interesting (altough non-conclusive) HN-thread [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37901381
FPGAs would be considered “hardware emulation” but a lot of people don’t like that term, and think emulation should be a term limited to software.
Like, there aren’t real N64 chips in there. The hardware IS emulating an N64 - it’s just not doing so in a way that’s comparable with software emulation at all.
That’s silly, thank you for the explanation!