[Tutor] Is Python useful for emulating?

Stefan Behnel stefan_ml at behnel.de
Sun Nov 28 12:43:30 CET 2010


Mauricio Alejandro, 28.11.2010 03:59:
> I never created any emulator before, and i'm learning C++. Let's say i try to write an emulator for... SNES. Would Python be fast enough?
> Also, any useful advice you can give me? Things i should know about before i start coding?

If you want to write something like this from scratch, I would suggest you 
look at two tools: pygame and Cython.

pygame is a very useful tool for writing graphics games. Cython is a way to 
speed up performance critical Python code by translating it to fast C code. 
You shouldn't run into that many performance problems if you use both, but 
you'd likely be able to write your code a lot quicker than in C or C++.

One important advice: write your code in Python first, then benchmark it 
and move only the performance critical parts of it into Cython. The higher 
level you stay, the simpler your code will remain.

Stefan



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