Leveling Up Emulation: The Benefits of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays in Video Game Preservation
It is worthwhile for cultural institutions to stay in tune with hardware emulation to accurately preserve video games. Gaming culture is deeply entrenched in nostalgia, specifically, how games looked and played when gamers were younger. This “feel” of a game is something the gaming community holds dearly and any alteration to game-feel is normally met with animosity. Many quirks of early console games were found within how the original hardware ran them, and so the preservation of game-feel could be a task well suited for hardware emulation, notably Field-Programmable Gate Arrays. Many retro enthusiasts have turned to these malleable integrated circuit boards to reproduce original gaming console components and run their games as they did decades ago, stating they are more accurate than current software emulators. To investigate the benefits of hardware emulation, this paper conducts an experiment, utilizing the Sega Genesis and an FPGA from the MiSTer Project as a case study. The history of both the original console and the FPGA are examined, metrics are established for which to judge the MiSTer’s emulation against, and results are presented, detailing how well the MiSTer can emulate the original hardware.