Emulation 101

Legal chaos and the future of emulation
Although emulation is a fantastic achievement technically and no doubt gives a wealth of joy to the end user, the legality of reverse engineering and duplicating the functions of proprietary hardware can’t be ignored. For the most part, the amateur teams involved in the pursuit of emulators go to extreme lengths to stress the importance of the developers and end users already owning the machine and software from which the emulator is based.

If an emulator requires the use of a BIOS file to run, then people are generally instructed on how to ‘dump’ that BIOS from their actual console or platform for use, so the theoretical requirement of owning the hardware already is there.

That hasn’t of course stopped the scene from being riddled with piracy problems particularly where game ROMS are concerned. It’s this darker union with copyright and patent violation that constantly nips at the heels of those developers who are showing innovative and creative ways to emulate hardware through software without pROMoting, endorsing or supporting piracy in any form.

A classic example of piracy stifling genuine creativity was in the case of Nintendo versus UltraHLE (the first fully functional Nintendo 64 Emulator) detailed here:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/02/08/nintendo_legal_rumblings_provoke_boycott/

UltraHLE became instantly popular as the first real example of a real N64 emulator, but Nintendo quickly rushed in to shut down the UltraHLE website and threatened legal action against the authors and anyone seen as supporting the software on the grounds it promoted piracy and could ‘only be used with illegitimate software’.

It didn’t help that UltraHLE was released while the N64 was still truly alive and kicking, rather than waiting till it gathered dust.

Looking towards the future and the challenges that await developers interested in emulating tech marvels like the PlayStation 3, you can’t help but wonder if the software design of these systems has in some small part been to combat the notion of reverse engineering.

You can’t emulate PlayStation 3 games on your PC just yet, but we can dream, can’t we?

Sony aren’t releasing any information on the hardware registers of the PS3, and are moving developers towards the use of their API calls to develop software for their flagship console. Everything is being wrapped up in a cotton wool software layer that makes it harder to get to the ‘real’ meat.

Combined with heavy encryption, it represents a huge challenge for programmers to author software solutions to run on alternate platforms.

Nonetheless, the progress of these incredible coding endeavors isn’t dying out any time soon. Some would argue that the use of APIs mean emulators can now take advantage of readily accessible programming models without needing to fully emulate the underlying hardware.

Whichever side of the legal fence you happen to make your camp, there’s no denying that hardware emulation represents one of the most dynamic and exigent fields of software design ever conceived and deserves a mention amongst the technical accomplishments that us geeks have become accustomed too.

Besides, any technology that allows you to flawlessly roll out the MANTA and WALRUS attack vehicles a good twenty odd years since the release of Carrier Command on the Amiga has got to be a good thing.



Special acknowledgement goes to Alex, ZeroFrog and the rest of the team at PCSX2 for their time and patience.