The time the x86 emulator team found code so bad they fixed it during emulation

hodgehog11

I think we're starting to see more of this sort of thing happening now with Proton and Wine gaining prominence in the Linux community. Some games (Elden Ring comes to mind) have bad enough PC ports when they come out that the compatibility layer can incorporate a hotfix to improve performance, while users of the software on the original platform still had to suffer.

classichasclass

Betting Alpha was the native architecture in question. It seemed to have the best support.

m1r

Couldn't they just turn the optimization off for this loop?

notorandit

> they fixed it during emulation It means the fix was applied to run during the emulation loop execution, not that the fix was found and applied while the emulation loop was running. Which would have made it an emulation code escape.

jeffbee

People from Transmeta told me stories about how their translators were full of special case optimizations to fix horrors they discovered in Microsoft Windows itself.

yieldcrv

> All in all, it took this program 256 kilobytes of code to initialize 64 kilobytes of data. solidity sweating profusely

dlcarrier

SimCity had a read-after-free bug that Microsoft patched in Windows 95. That was a lot easier for customers than having Maxis fix it, which could have required exchanging copies of the game.