Re: Hardware-based vs software-based emulation

On 17/02/2017 09:58, groepaz@gmx.net wrote:
> and it works 100% like the real thing.
> (minus the fact that even the so called modern display itself may introduce
> latency, but thats another problem)

Very few fpga based emulators work 100% like the real thing, they are 
usually still just approximations. So in that regard they are not 
inherently better.

The benefit of hardware emulators is that emulation and real time are 
the same, while software emulators only tend to synchronise the two at 
the end of each frame. If you discarded the operating system and 
configured the hardware correctly then with a lot of work you could get 
the timing right so that you render into the frame buffer just before it 
was output to the display and could read inputs in real time then you 
would then have no latency. It's easier and cheaper to use an FPGA.


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