eli5 If video game consoles are essentially just weaker computers, why did it take so long for PCs to get 7th gen console emulators, why are we only just getting 8th gen emulators, and how long until we see 9th gen emulators?
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Speculating.. They’re often not much weaker, particular at launch, and historically have both been entirely different cpu architectures than x86 pc’s, but often also had custom hardware funtion – as coprocessors, or on die feature etc etc.
Emulating in software bits of hardware specifically designed to do things that are hard to do in software, in a way that’s performant enough to play games is probably quite difficult, so PC’s have to progress a long way ahead of that hardware to be able to emulate it.
A stretched analogy.. you can, for example, “emulate” a video card in software, and in ye olde days of yore that’s where we did graphics processing anyway.. but I suspect you would struggle to get the performance of even a 10 year old video card out of a pure cpu/software implementation.. and that’s just talking features, not worrying about actually emulating the architecture!
Emulators, to be useful, also can’t relay on the fastest, most modern pc hardware either, further holding them back in the general case.
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