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.
I am pretty sure the storage has no limit in software, only by the hardware used to make the games. It’s the memory usage that’s most limiting. Can only have so much stuff loaded at one time. There are some clever tricks and workarounds to this tho. Like swapping sprite sheets to increase enemy variety or swapping color on the fly to have more than 4 colors at once.
The ROMs themselves got larger over time as they started making larger capacity chips to store everything. If you simply wrote a ROM to be emulated without having to fit it on a physical cartridge, you could make it as big as the drive meant to hold it.