For context: I have basically 0 experience with anything pre-PS2 except that I had a PS1 as a kid with a few games. Never had an official gaming handheld console, Gameboy, DS, PSP or anything like that.
I’ve recently started playing the GBA game Crash Bandicoot 2 N-Tranced on my R36S (Chinese low end emulator handheld) that was collecting dust and wow, the game boots up blazing fast!
It’s very convenient as I don’t want to leave the thing on sleep mode, as that drains battery.
Is this how it was like on the real console too and how were the loading times on the previous Gameboy and Gameboy Color? How about the NES and NES? Were the handhelds more optimized to be picked up on the go: were the PSP loading times short too?
I remember having to wait quite a while on the PS1 and PS2 and that is still a thing on an emulator on an actual gaming pc while this 27€ handheld boots GBA games so so fast.
Surely it doesn’t actually run the CPU that fast when emulating GBA games? Speeding up the CPU meant actually speeding up the game as well. Emulators, especially for these older consoles, try very hard to get as close to real hardware as possible.
Oh gosh no it certainly doesn’t - while that would be absolutely halarious, part of the overhead is usually making the GBA games play well with something like the Linux scheduler.
Some games back then do crazy stuff like use the number of CPU instructions executed as a timer, so for a playable experience this has to be pretty controlled.
That being said, most emulators allow a time multiplier for their virtual console, so you usually can experience it as fast as your hardware can run (Imagine hooking up a water cooled modern CPU to a minimalist realtime linux kernel and seeing how fast that bad boy can wheel).