Once the process was finished, an interrupt would be called that basically tells the unit "writing to the memory card, finished!". In actuality, there was probably a subsystem that was us was used to write whatever block of RAM holding the data to the memory card. Devs could start a memory card write and know exactly how many CPU cycles it'd take to finish. This meant that if the developers wanted, there were some operations that could run or start while certain read and write operations were taking place. Both CD read times were fixed as we're memory card write times. Keep in mind that though the PS1 was advanced for it's time, it was still pretty basic by today's standards. It absolutely has everything to do with timing.
#DOLPHIN EMULATOR NETPLAY WRITE MEMORY CARDS PS2#
If this is the reason, then how widespread was this method of talking to storage, in those days? And was it carried into the PS2 generation or later on?
It vaguely seems like games are doing some low-level electronics with the cards, instead of delegating to the console's API-so the emulator has to preserve the original timings and can't hijack the goings-on with a faster approach. I'm curious: what limits the speed of PS1 memory cards in emulators? Considering the minuscule size of PS1 saves by modern standards, they should be read or written in moments.
Detecting a memory card is slow, writing it is slow, reading it is slow-even when the game clearly doesn't reload the game world but just reads a few numbers. However, somehow this hasn't affected the speeds of reading or writing a PS1 memory card, in all emulators that I've used. Speed of flash memory and other storage has improved quite a bit since the PS1 days-and now some emulators can provide higher-than-native reading speeds when loading a ‘CD’ in a game (e.g.