What is an emulator?

Emulation is the simulation of silicon chips or integrated circuits used in a hardware system using computer software. This doesn't just mean Fruit Machines, technically you could emulate anything with a chip or circuit in it if you had enough information.

An emulator is the software used to perform emulation of the hardware used by a system. What an emulator (in terms of this site) does is to simulate the chips on a Fruit Machine and use copied original ROM images to run these machines.

Because an emulator uses ROM images which are extracted straight from the original machine, nearly all of the software that it runs is 100% perfect to the original. This means that a Fruit Machine for instance, what you are playing is exactly what you would see on the original machine, the gameplay, the graphics, the music, all of it.

Most emulators are written in C and assembly language as they are by far the fastest languages around. You can also see emulators written in other languages such as Pascal, Visual Basic and even on-line emulators using Java.

Emulators are developed over long periods of time because of the complexity involved. For instance a developer has to examine all the technical specification of a chip or circuit and one by one convert all the commands and logic it uses to match the processor and operating system that it is to be simulated on.

If you think about it, even the most basic fruit machine has a main processor (sometimes more), sound chips, I/O chip (Input/Ouput), ROM chips to store the program itself, EEPROMS (Programmable chips) for saving data and special custom chips for other things (e.g. Dot matrix displays). All of these chips and circuits have to be simulated correctly before a machine can run.

Luckily emulation has been around a while so alot of the chips involved have been simulated already. This means a coder can "borrow" someones code and "bolt" it into the program he/she is writing and without too much trouble get things working.

The elite coders out there will manually code the chips or circuits themselves which often leads to better and faster emulation.Windows Basics As you get into emulation and maybe have a look around the message forums you will see these coders asking and answering questions about their programs and sharing their wisdom with each other which of course furthers emulation and help the whole community out.

Because of the timescale involved you will often see "Beta" releases which are "work in progress" programs that may still have bugs in them but has at least have basic functions running.

Myself I can't program to save my life (well I can a little!) and I take my hat off to all the developers out there writing such fantastic programs and giving so much fun to everyone!