eli5 How can PC games from literally 1998 run from the PCs of today but you can’t play older console games from the current consoles?

Question

why is “backwards incompatibility” a problem on consoles and not on pc when they’re basically just the same electronic parts (cpu, gpu, ram)

In: 7

Answer 1

TLDR, money.

Some games from 1998. Try running most on current hardware and there are A LOT of issues, most will crash without tinkering or patches.

Windows has “emulators” for older software so it can still run, because the issue is bigger then games, and there’s demand for older software in general to be usable on currnt windows. If it wasn’t for these emulators, nothing beyond 10-15 years ago would run as the majority of system architecture went from 32bit to 64bit. (And 16 bit before that)

Consoles tend to be an entirely new operating system, and backwards compatibility isn’t a priority, as there’s basically no benifits to the manufacturer to add support.

Backwards compatibility could be implemented, but it would bring up a lot of issues, games wouldn’t run and there’s nothing you could tinker with to get it running, people would whinge that it never works, developer’s would need to spend time patching old things instead of fixing current issues.