How do emulators work and how are they written?

Posted by Simucal on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Simucal
Published on 2009-01-15T22:10:15Z Indexed on 2010/05/15 23:00 UTC
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emulator

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game-development

How do emulators work? When I see NES / SNES or C64 emulators, it astounds me.

Do you have to emulate the processor of those machines by interpreting it's particular assembly instructions? What else goes into it? How are they typically designed?

Can you give any advice for someone interested in writing an emulator (particularly a game system)?

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