Ian Parsons wrote:
| It's easy to assume that because a platform shares a CPU family with the Amiga that it makes emulation easy. The problem is code that hits the hardware directly needs to be intercepted and appropriate actions taken to mimic the response of the emulated platform. So you may end up needing to emulate the CPU anyway to catch the hardware interactions. I may be mistaken but I think BigGun once said the Apollo core MMU could help with this situation, whether that is enough to allow the original code of for example a NeoGeo game to run directly on the Apollo core without needing any CPU emulation I don't know.
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Yes APOLLO can really help to emulate the NEO GEO. a) for example SAGA does support NEO-GEO native color format. Other NEO GEO emulators need to convert the NEO GEO screen to some RTG format - we do not need this on SAGA. b) APOLLO allow "shadowing" of memory regions This means write to NEO-GEO registers can be redirected to memory areas for no cost. And Apollo also allows to "watchdog" certain memory areas. This means special registers which would trigger an action like STARTBLIT could be monitored and and action could be triggered on this. What APOLLO offers here is a lot faster and better than what old 68K MMU did provide.
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