Changes

Although Game & Watch emulation has recently become possible, it took quite a while to achieve due to the [http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=17884.msg259362#msg259362 lack of information] about the microcontrollers driving them and the high difficulty of dumping the ROM from a system. (To dump a game's ROM, the microcontroller often must be decapped, which is not only very costly and complicated but highly destructive to the system.) The lack of information on the Game & Watch's hardware leads to the false belief that it does not contain a CPU or ROM and therefore could not be emulated. Even though this was disproven after reverse engineering efforts of several MAME developers which led to support for a few all of the games being added to MAME, emulation . Emulation of additional the games is had been progressing slowly due to the high amount of time and patience it takes to dump their ROMs and recreate their graphics.

Even when a Game & Watch game's ROM has had been dumped, one of the biggest challenges with accurately emulating it is was with how the Game & Watch displayed graphics. Rather than by sending output to an LCD display like most cartridge based handhelds do, Game & Watch games (as well as most other handheld electronic games from the same time) displayed graphics by lighting up pre-drawn LCD segments, like a calculator. In order to recreate this as accurately as possible, MAME uses .SVG files traced from high-quality scans of the LCD screen, allowing graphics in supported Game & Watch games to be displayed crisply at any resolution without the loss of any detail. While this is the most accurate way to recreate the LCD graphics outside of obtaining the original art from Nintendo, it is a difficult and time consuming process, as not only does the LCD need to be scanned at a high resolution with all segments lit up to capture all of the graphics, but the scans must be traced very carefully to faithfully recreate the original artwork.