Does the core gameplay of Mega Man X Collection rely on emulation?

I was playing through Mega Man X 1 & 2 on the MMX Collection tonight and started to rifle through the files for curiosity-sake. After looking them over, I began to wonder whether or not the core of the gameplay rely on some sort of emulation. I'm pretty certain all of the sound effects and music elements have been adapted in a way that the PS2 can handle natively (for MMX 1 & 2, it's pretty obvious the sound effects were individually indexed & compressed; this is especially evident with the sound of X's buster shot), but I couldn't find anything to suggest that the core game and engine have been fully ported. Gameplay is spot-on from the SNES and PlayStation versions, even to the point where you can trigger game-specific exploits and glitches.

Can anyone shed any light on this?

 

Pretty sure that Mega Man X1 and X2 are emulated. You could always look through the data for the ROM files. Either search for the imbedded rom title or cpu vectors maybe. The titles are MEGAMAN X and MEGAMAN X2 respectively. Both have some trailing spaces after them.

I'm not sure who developed the X Collection, but it seems unlikely anything was ported. It's far more likely it was emulated. The sound effects and music could have been recorded to make emulating easier. Actually porting the game would have required the original source code, which is more than likely 65816 assembly code, not something portable. Emulation makes more sense, and the company that did it probably looked up some open source emulators and either used that knowledge to put together their own, or as in some cases they just stole the code to use in their product even though many projects forbid that in their license.

What game specific exploits are you talking about?

 

Just small things, like, for instance, if you shoot and hit an enemy or end-boss while in the middle of a dash jump with the X-Buster, it will do the same amount of damage as a charge-shot (in most cases, at least).

 

Actually, I'm pretty sure it's intended that your shots do somewhat more damage if you shoot while dashing. That isn't a glitch. Unless you mean something different like making your normal shots do as much damage as a max charge shot.

 

Not specifically, but it's known that other examples of retro games released on newer console hardware have included static recompilation.

The way this works is you don't emulate the cpu, you just emulate the graphics and sound chips. The code is either translated from one type of machine code to another, or from machine code to C & then compile that. Often any game changes performed at the same time are made by patching the original rom instead of the translated code.