In addition to “format shifting,” which is a well-recognized use case, and game preservation, which is a huge and under-recognized public interest in emulator development, emulators are also used for the development of homebrew software. E.g., there’s a port of Moonlight for the Switch, which lets you play Steam games streamed from a PC using your Switch, letting it serve many of the purposes of a Steam Deck. That’s huge! It would be way less practical to develop this kind of software if you could only test on real hardware. Testing on real hardware is also essential, of course, but testing on an emulator is vastly faster for rapid iteration.

Honestly what the homework is probably looking for is that it’s equivalent to “B or not A.” But yeah.

Attention is a kind of surplus mental capacity that we have, which isn’t specialized, but can instead be directed to tasks as needed. Ironically, we also use the term for the dedicated mental system which directs this extra capacity, which makes talking about it a bit more complicated.

Most of the stuff we do, our brains just kinda handle for us. Walking is usually like that; it’s an incredibly complex feat of dynamic balance, movement planning, and adaptation to changes in the environment, but it rarely takes any conscious effort on our part. Conscious effort is directed attention.

I’ve thought about this too, and for a similar reason. About a third of the way through my first sock I realized that knitting was contributing to tendonitis, at least on top of my day job which was non-stop typing. I’ve got a tub of yarns waiting for me to figure out what I’m going to do about them. I’ve watched videos from various folks about the 3d printed options.

One thing I’ve never really figured out is how the socks compare to something like a smartwool. It seems like they might be pretty prone to becoming loose. I’d be interested to hear your evaluation of the actual end product.

Does the software have an option for closing the session? Some burning software lets you leave the session open so that you can burn additional files to the disc later if it’s not completely full yet, but many dedicated DVD players will only actually play the disc if the session is closed.

(This knowledge pulled from the dim recesses of my memory, which, like DVD, isn’t what it used to be, so bear with me if I’m mistaken.)