I was thinking about large ROM hacks like Only Up 64 (Vinesauce’s Joel game play video here for an example of what I am talking about) that state that they can run on real hardware and it made me wonder about ROM hacks and homebrew that can’t run on real hardware.
What kind of limitations do these ROMs face when their limitations are emulators and not real hardware? For example is there a size limit to what a GBA ROM can be? Could you make a super in-depth hundred+ hour game for the GBA that takes up 100 GB?
I guess I am curious about what limitations are hard coded into emulators for things like accuracy and what are some examples of ROMs that have gone above and beyond or notable emulated systems where the the limitations of real hardware are frequently bypassed.
Hope that makes sense. I am pretty drunk.
Limits depend on the original hardware. For instance if the device uses 16 bit “addresses” to refer to locations in the cartridge storage and read a byte at a time, you’ll only be able to make use of the first 2^16 bytes (64k) of storage regardless of how much extra data you throw in there. An emulator could in theory support extensions to get around that but then you’re not really emulating the original hardware.