Enhancement

Some emulators intentionally deviate from perfect accuracy in the interest of improving a game's appearance. Some of these can be realized in hardware; others cannot.

Overdraw

Some emulators have an option to ignore the 8 sprites per line limit. There are two ways that this can interact with sprite evaluation. One is to turn off the mapper side effects of sprite data fetching past the eighth sprite, which can't be realized with actual carts. The other way involves not making dummy nametable fetches, allowing 16 sprites' patterns to be fetched in one horizontal blank.

Control

An emulator designed for point-and-click games such as Videomation and Thwaite may support using a PC mouse, a Wii Remote, or a Kinect sensor to move a game object. This can take one of three forms:

• The emulator can directly manipulate coordinates in RAM. This can't be done in hardware.
• The emulator can patch the game to read coordinates directly from mapper ports.
• The emulator can patch the game to use a Super NES Mouse.

Resolution

The cheap way to upgrade a game's graphics from the NES's native 240p to something bigger involves pixel art resampling algorithms such as by applying Super 2xSaI, Scale2x, or hq2x. A more powerful way involves creating a large graphic for each small graphic used by the game. For CHR ROM games, this could be a CHR ROM with more pixels and more bit depth than the game's existing CHR ROM. Rendering would use the bigger one, while $2007 readback would still use the smaller one. Many CHR RAM games could use a hash table from 16-byte original tiles to larger tiles, though this would fail in games relying heavily on dynamic drawing to CHR RAM (e.g. Hatris, Qix, Videomation).

Sound

The Japanese version of Bases Loaded uses the JF-13 board, which has a sampled audio playback chip. Write a value, and a sound begins to play through the mapper sound channel of the authentic Famicom console. Emulators could support adding a virtual chip that plays higher quality sound. Each such game would come with .mp3 or .ogg files and a cue sheet to tell what sounds to play when what values are written. Games could be patched to allow the use of, say, OCRemix versions of songs.