#3: how emulation saved Melee

I’m writing this post to document my thought process as I work through building a Space Invaders Emulator as my capstone project. The biggest challenge with this project are that I have no experience with emulation, and we are writing the software in C++, with which I have very limited experience. I took 2 classes in C++ about 7 years ago, and that’s it.

Emulation is an interesting field that involves writing software that imitates older hardware. Software is written to run on the current day computing systems, and as technology advances, older pieces of software (video games in this example) can’t run on newer systems because the architecture is different. As old gaming systems break down and go extinct, eventually it can become impossible to play old games. To get around this problem and preserve old games, engineers build emulators which can imitate old architecture on a newer system. Lots of computer enthusiasts like to emulate old games as a fun past time. A pretty popular example is the Dolphin emulator and Super Smash Bros Melee (Melee), a Nintendo GameCube game that was originally released in 2001.

In the super smash bros community, melee is regarded as the best game in the series due to its high level of skill expression and polished fighting mechanics. To this day, Melee maintains a thriving competitive scene with large prize pools and considerable viewership, even though 3 more Smash Bros games have been released since 2001. This unlikely pedigree is in part due to the success of the Dolphin emulator

Released in 2003, Dolphin was the first emulator that could run GameCube games. Thanks to this Melee got an extended shelf life. In 2006 Nintendo released the Wii and in 2008 they released the highly anticipated successor to Melee, Brawl. By the time Brawl was released, fans of the smash series had already found a home playing Melee on the Dolphin emulator. When Brawl didn’t live up to the hype, Melee continued to be played on Dolphin, to the chagrin of Nintendo. Not only was Melee a better game, Dolphin took it to the next level by integrating online competitive play, something which wasn’t possible on the original GameCube.

I hope this story peaks your interest in emulation. It is such a cool way to preserve digital history that is so quickly lost. It can also be a really fun past time for programmers who can use their knowledge to reverse engineer game files, not something they probably do on the job.

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