This site looks interesting :)

Hi y'all!
TheMS is my name.

I guess I should introduce myself here in some way ;)

Games are fun. I like games.
Old games are even more fun. (Why is that? Nostalgia? Or is it just that we only play the best ones from back then?)
I never really owned all the consoles. I buy old ones whenever I get the chance, but that doesn't happen enough,
so I hope I can fill the gap with emulators.
I am also studying computer science at a university, and I've really started wondering how people create emulators, how they pass through all those encryptions and simulate hardware and such. Maybe this could be a place to increase my knowledge in that area, if not, I still hope to just have some good old fun with awesome games.

Guess I'll see you around,
thems

Glad to hear we have another member! Its been rather uneventful as of late. Good to have a new member aboard.

Hey welcome. I'm a CS major myself. I got in to firmware development also. This is the place to be for learning how to use emulators but not how to create them. The creation of emulation is still mainly under ground ( irc and what not ). The only thing you can do in the CS program to help with emulation is learn ASM and try to play with reverse engineering where possible. The best bit of advice I can give you is this. Emulation at one time was about simulating and dissembling chips. Basically you created software to emulate the system. Well in 2000 that all changed for the release of something called ultraHLE. They did things a bit different.... They take a game, read the op codes and try to guess what they mean, then translate that in to calls to direct X or Open GL, ects... This is were emulation has gone, if it didnt we would still be on the n64 system. There is one project out there trying the "old way" with n64 cen64. This emulator tries to emulate the system LLE (low level emulation).

So what the difference?

HLE - immediate gratification, your game plays but is plagued with glitches and bugs.
LLE - Slow but accurate.

Ugh ASM, not really a fan of coding with that :P
It's fairly straightforward in easier programs, but gets really confusing when you use a lot of interrupts and functions.