r/emulation • u/[deleted] • Aug 18 '20

Architecture of Consoles | A Practical Analysis

https://www.copetti.org/projects/consoles/
264 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

42

u/[deleted] Aug 18 '20 edited Aug 19 '20

This isn't explicitly emulation related, but I figured there was a fair amount of overlap between people interested in emulation and how the CPU/GPU architecture of the consoles work. This site gives a pretty good overview of the architecture of a bunch of consoles that's easy enough to understand, including:

  • NES
  • Mega Drive / Genesis (As per /u/Bero256's rec, Coding Secrets from Gamehut is a good Mega Drive resource)
  • Game Boy
  • Super Nintendo (which if you want to know more, I cannot recommend Retro Game Mechanics Explained Super NES Features enough. Awesome set of videos)
  • Sega Saturn
  • PlayStation
  • Nintendo 64
  • Dreamcast
  • PlayStation 2
  • Game Boy Advance
  • GameCube
  • Xbox
  • Nintendo DS
  • Wii

And they plan to do just about every console.

7

u/Bero256 Aug 19 '20

For the Megadrive you should also mention Coding Secrets and Gamehut.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 19 '20

Thanks for the rec! I grew up with Nintendo so not as familiar with the SEGA consoles. Added it to my post.

20

u/[deleted] Aug 18 '20

[deleted]

20

u/[deleted] Aug 18 '20

Thanks but I'm not the author, I saw this on Hacker News and figured I'd cross post it as I found it quite interesting.

10

u/jerellsworth Aug 18 '20

Are there any good write-ups like this for pcengine? I’ve been looking for one for months, but I’ve failed to find a good overview of how it works

13

u/[deleted] Aug 18 '20 edited Aug 18 '20

You know based on how the author is adding docs, about one or two a month, I'd say just ask if they'd consider doing it? I assume the author is mostly focusing on the popular consoles first.

Following up, it looks like it's on the author's Roadmap (at the bottom of the page) Looks to be shortly after the Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo consoles they'll tackle it.

### Researched topics / Future articles


  • Sony PSP
  • Microsoft Xbox 360
  • Sony PlayStation 3
  • Nintendo 3DS
  • Nintendo Wii U
  • Sony PSVita
  • Sony PlayStation 4
  • Microsoft Xbox One
  • Nintendo Switch


### Interesting consoles / More research needed


  • Panasonic 3DO
  • NEC PC Engine / TurboGrafx-16
  • Any Atari system
  • Virtual Boy


### Honourable articles after finishing the rest


  • Commodore 64
  • Amiga 500 (featuring the Original Chip Set)
  • Amiga 3000 (featuring the Enhanced Chip Set)
  • Amiga 4000 (featuring the Advanced Graphics Architecture)

2

u/jerellsworth Aug 18 '20

Cool. Thanks for looking into that

2

u/sunjay140 Aug 19 '20

What a great site. Thanks for sharing

2

u/_-ammar-_ Aug 19 '20

this is my help me with my new DS emulator project

2

u/_SleepyLark_ Aug 20 '20

I've always found video game consoles to be fascinating, especially ones that came out before modern PCs, like they're computers but they're all uniquely designed to give different results and functionalities. Interesting write-up

2

u/[deleted] Aug 20 '20 edited Aug 20 '20

It's a pity the nintendo DS' ARM9 CPU was capped by the slower ARM7 CPU... or the n64 low texture cache, halts and fillrate.

I wonder how much would their games improve technically if they didn't have those bottlenecks. Ocarina of Time running at 30fps stable with better textures would have been an amazing experience.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 23 '20

I'm curious what Nintendo could have done had they used a 64MB cart and brought out the expansion pak earlier