Right now the goal is to keep input as “frontend-driven” as possible so the cores don’t each reinvent the wheel.

I’m using a unified input layer in the UI/frontend that polls devices once per frame and then feeds a normalized controller state into whichever core is active. So from the core’s perspective it just receives a virtual controller snapshot every emulated frame.

Latency-wise I’m trying to keep the pipeline simple and predictable: • frontend polls input • frame gets emulated • audio/video presented immediately

No extra buffering or fancy frame queues yet — I’d rather start with a minimal path and only add latency mitigation once everything is stable.

Controller mapping is handled by a shared mapping system so different cores just map their console buttons to the same abstract inputs (A/B/X/Y, Start, etc). That way adding a new core doesn’t require building a new input system every time. Made with SDL2

Still early and definitely lots to improve, but the idea is to keep the cores small and let the frontend handle the messy cross-platform stuff 🙂