Version Francaise
In the 1980s, video games were simple, graphically poor but desperatly more funny than recent games. There was not any 3D realistic images, no digital stereo sound or music, no videos... Games were smaller than nowadays : about 64Ko against 640Mo recently with CD-ROMs.
Recently, with our more and more powerful computers (Pentium and the likes), it is possible to play again these marvellous games ! With emulation, the dream cames true : the games you have played when you were young on your computer... The EmuScene is better than always with consoles emulation, computers emulation, etc...
You not believe it ? You are wrong, it is true... All you need is a fast computer (a Pentium Pro 200 is the best for Emulation, I think), an emulator for your favorite machine and last but not least, ROMS ! The emulator is a small program written by someone to let your computer behaves as the machine you want to emulate. In generally, it is written in C++. Why ? Because C++ is a portable language : emulation is possible on many computers or systems : PC (Ms-Dos, Win95), Linux, Unix, Amiga, Macintosh, BeBox... Sometimes, the program is coded in assembly or... JAVA ! ROM is the binary file for the game you want to play.
Emulating a machine is quite difficult : you need to know the technical characteristics of the machine (video, sound, memory, processor and for consoles the technics involved in sprites, scrolling hardware facilities). After that, it is necessary to implement the emulation engine itself : traduce the assembly code of the machine to emulate in your own assembly language. Many programs of this type exists and they have been used cleverly to produce great emulators that rules the World !!!
If you have any remark to this page, or you want to help me (advices, addings, ideas), do not hesitate to send me a mail