Item — HN Reader

Personally I think this is the biggest selling feature of FPGA based emulation.

The reality is both Software and FPGA emulation can be done very well and with very low latency, however to achieve this in software you generally require high end power hungry hardware.

A steam deck can run a highly accurate sega genesis emulator with read-ahead rollback, screen scaling, shaders and all the fixings no problem, but in theory the pocket can provide the exact same experience with an order of magnitude less power.

It's not quite apples to oranges of course, but the comfortable battery life does make the pocket much more practical.

1 comments

When being nitpicky about latency is where FPGAs truly shine. You lose a good bit of it by connecting to HDMI (I think the Pocket docked is 1/4 a frame, and MiSTer has a similar mode) (EDIT: MiSTer can do 4 scanlines, but it's not compatible with some displays), but when we're talking about analog display methods or inputs, you can achieve accurate timings with much less effort than on a modern day computer.

For a full computer like the Steam Deck, you have to deal with preemption, display buffers, and more, which _will_ add latency. Now if you went bare metal, you could definitely drive a display with super low latency, hardware accurate emulation, but obviously that's not what most people are doing.