Patent ID: 8157654

Claim:
A method of emulating a video game device of the type that includes a housing having an electronic display thereon, said housing having therein a processor that runs a video game software image out of a page-based read only memory (ROM) to present interactive displays on said electronic display of animated video game play in response to user inputs, the method comprising: executing a video game device emulator program on a target computing device different from said video game device including said housing having said electronic display thereon, said target computing device being capable of displaying graphical information on a target computing device display, said target computing device having read/write memory and receiving user inputs, said executing video game device emulator program controlling said target computing device to at least in part emulate said video game device so as to at least in part enable said target computing device to run said video game software and present interactive displays of said animated video game play on said target computing device display in response to user inputs to said target computing platform; modeling at least some display timing activities of said video game device electronic display on said target computing device; processing, with said emulator program executing on said target computing device, said video game software image capable of being executed on said video game device processor within said housing that runs video game software to present interactive displays on said electronic display of animated video game play in response to user inputs; and generating a real time interactive video game presentation on said target computing device display at least in part in response to said processed video game software image and said modeled display timing activities, wherein said video game software image comprises multiple ROM pages and said method further includes said emulator program (a) providing a pointer table system that allocates emulated ROM pages in said target computing device read/write memory to emulate said multiple ROM pages of said video game software image, and (b) duplicating at least a portion of one of said multiple ROM pages into plural of said allocated emulated ROM pages to facilitate page selection and reduce page swapping, and wherein the method further comprises using said pointer table system to control memory access by remapping native memory access instructions into function calls.