What am I looking at? I can see it's a man page for some emulators but I feel like I'm missing some context. The site seems to be deliberately obtuse about what it is.
It's the man page for the Nintendo device emulators of 9Front. 9Front is a distribution of the Plan 9 operating system (most likely the most usable because it's the most actively developed one)
The link is interesting because these emulators seem to be part of the standard distribution of 9Front. Most likely those are written from scratch, given that Plan 9 is not a POSIX system (unless they are using http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/ape).
Without looking I'm going to guess that ape is A POSIX Emulator, so we have an emulator emulating an emulator.
Edit: it's A POSIX Environment, but it still contains features that are unnatural in Plan9 and could by bypassed with more work, so much like emulation.
Which really means this is a terrible way to emulate games.
The bug list is pretty darn unacceptable for a usable emulator.
You can’t even emulate PAL region games.
It’s a nice novelty that this is built in to the OS but the Linux/Android retro handheld scene is so much more wildly sophisticated than a half-broken command line emulator. Just jump on YouTube and search for an OnionOS overview to see what I mean.
Shugyousha|1 year ago
The link is interesting because these emulators seem to be part of the standard distribution of 9Front. Most likely those are written from scratch, given that Plan 9 is not a POSIX system (unless they are using http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/ape).
lupire|1 year ago
Edit: it's A POSIX Environment, but it still contains features that are unnatural in Plan9 and could by bypassed with more work, so much like emulation.
LukaD|1 year ago
Ah that's the info I was missing, thanks! Indeed very interesting that emulators are part of the distribution.
dangus|1 year ago
The bug list is pretty darn unacceptable for a usable emulator.
You can’t even emulate PAL region games.
It’s a nice novelty that this is built in to the OS but the Linux/Android retro handheld scene is so much more wildly sophisticated than a half-broken command line emulator. Just jump on YouTube and search for an OnionOS overview to see what I mean.
camgunz|1 year ago