Difference between revisions of "User:Jscott/JSMESS"

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Examples of blog entries: "The Pond" [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/11/the-pond-building-a-multi-platform-html5-game/]
Examples of blog entries: "The Pond" [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/11/the-pond-building-a-multi-platform-html5-game/]
Emulation utilizing JavaScript isn't new. As soon as the language became Turing complete and machines became fast enough, individuals or small groups created wonderful emulators for a wide variety of systems. Some of these emulators are blazingly fast, have beautiful artistic interfaces, or provide the user with all sorts of flexibility in what sort of individual machine is being emulated.
However, these myriad implementations share multiple issues that make them harder to maintain long-term. Often done as side projects by a single person, the emulation would usually be calculated or researched once, and minor bugs in the emulation quality would be overlooked. The author might figure out how to make a floppy drive work, but not be interested too much in cassette tape or cartridge emulation. Endless peripherals or installed cards would be skipped, since the point of the emulation was to show how cool it was in JavaScript, not to emulate a board that very few people used, and very few would remember. Quirks and bugs in the original CPUs or circuitry might also be skipped in favor of just implementing the known written spec, which many of us know is not a perfect guy to help the machines actually worked.
Meanwhile, the mess project is a continually improving effort to emulate many different systems as perfectly as possible. With dozens of coders adding dozens of bug fixes every day, the effort is to emulate as much of computing history as possible, giving no precedents to the most popular systems or the most well-known software programs. Functionality works all across the spectrum, and so improvements in, say, floppy drive emulation benefit not just one platform but dozens. With over 15 years of work put into the mess emulator, it's guaranteed to have the widest amount of systems emulated. While single platform emulators can outdo mess on a variety of points, ultimately the openness and far-reaching goals of mess are a good solid bet for long-term preservation.

Latest revision as of 14:17, 21 November 2013

Shared workspace for editing JSMESS Article for Mozilla Hacks.

The guidelines for the article are in [1].

Formatting rules for the article are in [2].

Hi Jason,

Good to talk to you again! We e-mailed a bit a couple of year ago, I quite like what you do.
And yes, a post on JSMESS for Mozilla Hacks would be very cool!

In general, we want to write about things that are interesting to web developers alike out 
there. Things that can be useful, things that are good to know about and also things that 
are just awesome. :-)

I'm not the kind of Editor who tells you exactly what to write, how many words etc. My 
belief is rather to have smart interesting people write what they want to write about 
and is passionate about, and the outcome will be much better. Meaning, something about 
JSMESS that you think is interesting is most likely what I, and the Hacks readers, will 
find interesting too.

Examples of blog entries: "The Pond" [3]



Emulation utilizing JavaScript isn't new. As soon as the language became Turing complete and machines became fast enough, individuals or small groups created wonderful emulators for a wide variety of systems. Some of these emulators are blazingly fast, have beautiful artistic interfaces, or provide the user with all sorts of flexibility in what sort of individual machine is being emulated.

However, these myriad implementations share multiple issues that make them harder to maintain long-term. Often done as side projects by a single person, the emulation would usually be calculated or researched once, and minor bugs in the emulation quality would be overlooked. The author might figure out how to make a floppy drive work, but not be interested too much in cassette tape or cartridge emulation. Endless peripherals or installed cards would be skipped, since the point of the emulation was to show how cool it was in JavaScript, not to emulate a board that very few people used, and very few would remember. Quirks and bugs in the original CPUs or circuitry might also be skipped in favor of just implementing the known written spec, which many of us know is not a perfect guy to help the machines actually worked.

Meanwhile, the mess project is a continually improving effort to emulate many different systems as perfectly as possible. With dozens of coders adding dozens of bug fixes every day, the effort is to emulate as much of computing history as possible, giving no precedents to the most popular systems or the most well-known software programs. Functionality works all across the spectrum, and so improvements in, say, floppy drive emulation benefit not just one platform but dozens. With over 15 years of work put into the mess emulator, it's guaranteed to have the widest amount of systems emulated. While single platform emulators can outdo mess on a variety of points, ultimately the openness and far-reaching goals of mess are a good solid bet for long-term preservation.