I'm a huge fan of the underground emulator community. Such amazing things have been made in that scene - dynarecs that do things everyone said were impossible, etc.
One of my favourites is the effort to emulate the Motorola 56K DSP processor, which is widely used in many hardware synthesizers and effects units. Things have progressed so far with this emulator, that it is now possible to directly boot the firmware from many of these devices, and produce results that are indistinguishable from the original, long-since end-of-lifed, hardware.
Watching the development of this emulator from the sidelines, I was regularly amused at the competence and sheer persistence of the authors, especially when running into very hard edge cases. It seems this style of development attracts folks with the Right Stuff, indeed ..
In the last year or so of his life, Stephen Hawking's long-EOL'ed speech synthesizer was showing signs of failing, and the replacement was an emulator based in part on low-level DSP emulation code from bsnes/Higan, as the "Nintendo DSP-1" used as a math coprocessor on some SNES games was coincidentally the same processor family [1] [2]. Games using this processor had been supported by other emulators for a long time, but they did so with a high-level implementation of the Nintendo firmware calls.
https://dsp56300.wordpress.com/faqs/
One of my favourites is the effort to emulate the Motorola 56K DSP processor, which is widely used in many hardware synthesizers and effects units. Things have progressed so far with this emulator, that it is now possible to directly boot the firmware from many of these devices, and produce results that are indistinguishable from the original, long-since end-of-lifed, hardware.
Watching the development of this emulator from the sidelines, I was regularly amused at the competence and sheer persistence of the authors, especially when running into very hard edge cases. It seems this style of development attracts folks with the Right Stuff, indeed ..