Console emulator: Encyclopedia II - Console emulator - History

Console emulator - History

Emulation was occasionally employed by console manufacturers in the early 1980s to allow games from other (and sometimes competing) hardware to be run on the manufacturer's device. The Atari 2600 was by far the most frequent recipient of this behavior. Atari's platform was easily the most popular and widespread early game consoles, and many developers touted compatibility with the system's vast library of games as a marketing ploy to attract customers. Coleco's Colecovision and Atari's own Atari 5200 provided add-on peripherals that allowed 2600 cartridges to be played, and the Atari 7800 provided this functionality right out of the box. Generally, this emulation was accomplished through special hardware—unlike modern console emulation, which generally reproduces the functionality of a system entirely through software.

By the mid-1990s personal computers had progressed to the point where it was technically feasible to replicate the behavior of some of the earliest consoles entirely through software, and the first unauthorized, non-commercial console emulators began to appear. These early programs were often incomplete, only partially emulating a given system, and often riddled with computer bugs. Because few manufacturers had ever published technical specifications for their hardware, it was left to amateur programmers and developers to deduce the exact workings of a console through reverse engineering. Nintendo's consoles tended to be the most commonly studied, and the most advanced early emulators tended to reproduce the workings of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), and the Game Boy (GB). Programs like Marat Fayzullin's iNES (which emulated the NES) and VirtualGameBoy (GB), the Pasofami (NES) and Super Pasofami (SNES), and VSMC (SNES) were the most popular console emulators of this era.

In April 1997, Bloodlust Software released version 0.2 of NESticle. An unheralded and unexpected release, NESticle shocked the nascent console emulation community with its ease of use and unrivaled compatibility with NES ROM images. NESticle arguably provided the catalyst with which console emulation took off: More and more users started experimenting with console emulation, and a new generation of emulators appeared following NESticle's lead. Bloodlust Software soon returned with Genecyst (emulating the Sega Genesis), and others released emulators like Snes9x and ZSNES (SNES). This rapid growth in the development of emulators in turn fed the growth of the ROM hacking and fan-translation community. The release of projects such as RPGe's English language translation of Final Fantasy V drew even more users into the emulation scene.

As computers continued to advance and emulator developers grew more skilled in their work, the length of time between the commercial release of a console and its successful emulation began to shrink. Many recent consoles such as the Nintendo 64, the Sony PlayStation, and the Game Boy Advance saw significant work done toward emulation while still very much in production. This has led to a more concerted effort to crack down on unofficial emulation. Because the process of reverse engineering is protected in U.S. law, the brunt of this attack has been borne by websites who host ROMs and ISO images. Many such sites have been forced to shut down under threat of legal action.

On the other hand, commercial developers have once again begun to turn to emulation as a means to repackage and reissue their older games on new consoles. Notable examples of this behavior include Square Co., Ltd.'s rerelease of several older Final Fantasy titles on the PlayStation, Sega's collection of Sonic the Hedgehog games, and Capcom's collection of Mega Man games for the Nintendo GameCube, PlayStation 2 and Xbox.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "History", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki