Don't Guess My Language

Love this write up (and one's like it - there's so much good stuff in their archives). The stuff GloriousCow is doing with MartyPC is just so impressive.

rbanffy•3h ago

What impresses me most is that, back then, we thought the PC to be an extremely boring machine with absolutely crappy graphics.

We didn't have hackers like these, it'd seem. Or they were (understandably) distracted by Amigas and Ataris.

vincheezel•1h ago

I might be wrong but doesn’t he mention at the start that the effect isn’t possible on real hardware? Like there’s an emulator trick happening? I’m not diminishing the skill involved in this but if it requires a trick in the emulator it can’t be said that a person could have accomplished this on the hardware at the time

sagacity•1h ago

No, the main thing to take away is that MartyPC is the only emulator that can accurately run this demo. Before that, the demo would only run on real hardware.

rep_lodsb•1h ago

The "hack" needed to be there for the emulator to reproduce the effect as it happens on real hardware, before the author managed to fix those last few bugs.

>Historically, many famous emulators have relied on title patches to work around bugs or inaccuracies to get games to play. As emulators have improved in accuracy and research has uncovered more details about how systems work, gradually these title hacks became less necessary.

LocalH•49m ago

No. The author is saying that, in order to run the demo on MartyPC, the emulator previously required a small "hack" (in this context, that means a slight inaccuracy in emulation) to get the effect started. The post then covers the process of fixing multiple bugs such that the "hack" is no longer needed to match behavior on hardware, and thus MartyPC's behavior now more accurately models hardware.

Offtopic: in recent years, I've stopped saying "real hardware" unless also using the term "emulated hardware". To me, it's either "hardware" vs "emulator", or "real hardware" vs "emulated hardware".