First emulator ever made?

[NoNAND]

Hi ^^.
I was playing snes9x on my o3ds and was wondering who invented emulation? When were the first emulator created. Did any emulator for any system exist back in the nes and snee days.
I wonder did the emulator require high end pcs to run nes emulator
Also can you tell me what did it feel like to have nes snes and gameboys at that time when technology was simple and easy.

 

[RevPokemon]

I believe the first gaming emulator was on the Commodore 64 and called Shado from the 80's. It was a BBC emulator that converted BBC BASIC to language of the C64. Also see http://mdfs.net/Software/BBCBasic/C64/

 

[FAST6191]

I don't think emulation was really ever invented. In patents there is supposed to be a concept called obviousness which tends to be defined as something like an item is not patentable if it is obvious to an expert in the field. At the time if everybody was mainly coding in assembly coding (not that the likes of Basic made a whole lot of difference) it would be fairly obvious that most things had similar commands and a basic concept within logic gates is you can make any other gate (and thus do any operation) with NAND gates. To that end translating commands into your CPUs, and remaking the ones that do not exist would have been pretty obvious, and memory abstraction is also a basic concept.

Beyond this we have to consider what is an emulator, what is an interpreter (SCUMM and ZZT being two nice terms) and what is some kind of recompilation.

Anyway as I have not said much of consequence I will link a talk I like that is of some marginal relevance here


and another that is probably not that relevant to history but worth watching anyway
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023470/-It-s-Just-Emulation

 

[KiiWii]

Also can you tell me what did it feel like to have nes snes and gameboys at that time when technology was simple and easy.

Ok I'll handle this part of the question:

Games booted instantly, no load times, no DLC, no scratched discs, and you actually had to play multiplayer games face to face! The horror!

Never had a YLOD or RROD on my trusty day one N64!

 

[NoNAND]

Ok I'll handle this part of the question:

Games booted instantly, no load times, no DLC, no scratched discs, and you actually had to play multiplayer games face to face! The horror!

Never had a YLOD or RROD on my trusty day one N64!

Haha that is cool. The only classic system i have is a gcn

 

[KiiWii]

Haha that is cool. The only classic system i have is a gcn

Classic lol.

I've had:

Xbox one / PS4 / Wii U > 360 / PS3 / Wii > Xbox / GC / PS2 > PS1 / Saturn / DC / N64 > SNES / Megadrive > NES / master system > GB / game gear > amstrad GX4000 > Commodore C64 > Amiga 500 > Atari.. Something or other..> BBC micro > Acorn... I forget...

Also had PSP 1000, DS, 3DS, 3DSXL and now a N3DSXL... And a recalbox.. ngage... I'm sure I've missed a few!

 

[yusuo]

Earliest console I had was, god i dont know what it was but it had battle chess on it and the pieces used to come to life and attack each other when they were being taken, that was in the 80s, amiga is the first I remember, 2 buttons, no hassle. been gaming ever since

 

[wormdood]

Ok I'll handle this part of the question:

Games booted instantly, no load times, no DLC, no scratched discs, and you actually had to play multiplayer games face to face! The horror!

Never had a YLOD or RROD on my trusty day one N64!

also there were no demos (you had to know if you wanted the game first . . . or waste 30 bucks)
no demos meant that mags like gamepro were needed to insure you did not waste your cash on a bad game
eventually due to the lack of demos some shops had game consoles connected to store t.v.'s so you can try the game
no digital downloads at all (you had to go to the store to get a new game)
everyone believed they were the shit [pro] at games like street fighter (they only had their local friends to compare to)

 

[yusuo]

everyone believed they were the shit [pro] at games like street fighter (they only had their local friends to compare to)

what do you mean believed, I was the shit

 

[KiiWii]

also there were no demos (you had to know if you wanted the game first . . . or waste 30 bucks)
no demos meant that mags like gamepro were needed to insure you did not waste your cash on a bad game
eventually due to the lack of demos some shops had game consoles connected to store t.v.'s so you can try the game
no digital downloads at all (you had to go to the store to get a new game)
everyone believed they were the shit [pro] at games like street fighter (they only had their local friends to compare to)

Light gun games rocked too. New TVs can't handle it without adaptation.... I miss the SNES scope!

Good old CRT TVs for pixel prefect gaming.

 

[wormdood]

what do you mean believed, I was the shit

you only say that cuz you never walked into an arcade i was in . . . lol

 

[TR_mahmutpek]

I've had:

Xbox one / PS4 / Wii U > 360 / PS3 / Wii > Xbox / GC / PS2 > PS1 / Saturn / DC / N64 > SNES / Megadrive > NES / master system > GB / game gear > amstrad GX4000 > Commodore C64 > Amiga 500 > Atari.. Something or other..> BBC micro > Acorn... I forget...

Also had PSP 1000, DS, 3DS, 3DSXL and now a N3DSXL... And a recalbox.. ngage... I'm sure I've missed a few!

Sorry for bump but daamn, that is quite a lot. I'm 21 years old now and when I was little, I only had super game vcd 300 which it was only a nes clone, you cant even use cartridges

 

[CMDreamer]

Well if we stick into the gaming context there should be a very old first emulator.

But in a more general context, wouldn't the machine build by Turing to descipher the Enigma be called an emulator too? Just for the sake of knowledge.

 

[Rail Fighter]

Retro Arch

 

[Hanafuda]

Couldn't tell you what emus were first, but I was messing around with Atari 2600 and NES emus on a Pentium PC in 1997. I know it was '97 cuz that's when I replaced my 486dx2-66.

 

[AmandaRose]

Retro Arch

Nope retroarch is only 10 years old and isn't even an emulator its a frontend. Even if it was emulators were out way before then.

 

[Deleted member 483379]

Retro Arch

No. That's just wrong.

 

[AmandaRose]

The first emulator actually was made by IBM back in 1963 on their IBM System/360 computers. It was used to emulate earlier IBM machines.

IBM engineers even came up with the name emulator. In the 2000s, it has become common to use the word "emulate" in the context of software. However, before 1980, "emulation" referred only to emulation with a hardware or microcode assist, while "simulation" referred to pure software emulation. For example, a computer specially built for running programs designed for another architecture is an emulator. In contrast, a simulator could be a program which runs on a PC, so that old Atari games can be simulated on it. Purists continue to insist on this distinction, but currently the term "emulation" often means the complete imitation of a machine executing binary code while "simulation" often refers to computer simulation, where a computer program is used to simulate an abstract model. Computer simulation is used in virtually every scientific and engineering domain and Computer Science is no exception, with several projects simulating abstract models of computer systems, such as network simulation, which both practically and semantically differs from network emulation.