News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:On Emulation by pol4ko on Monday February 24, 2020 @06:31PM (#22409529)
> But regardless of these details, software has two main qualities that give it this advantage in terms of preservation: It's interactive It's deterministic

No sure if we are talking of the same thing here but a Software is deterministic, but the randomness in a Game makes it non-deterministic, even if the emulation is deterministic. See, for exampe, a loot in a dungeon crawler. It will be different everytime.

Re:On Emulation by CompuHacker on Tuesday February 25, 2020 @09:21AM (#22413393)
The randomness in games currently available boils down to picking from a set of very large numbers and executing a limited number of code paths. That is to say, there are no non-deterministic video games, because all outcomes must be programmed.

A problem that can crop up with emulators is a lack of random seed values between runs, leading to, for example, a dungeon crawler with the same loot every time.