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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Different hardware speaks different languages, and those languages don’t have a uniform syntax/structure.
A PC can speak PC language faster than the consoles can speak their own languages, but to emulate the consoles the PC needs to convert console language to PC language in realtime (which is quite resource intensive). The hangup isn’t ‘taking so long to get emulators’, it’s ‘taking so long to get emulators that can translate between console language and PC language fast enough to play console games’. The modern consoles also have some security features in place to make emulating games more difficult too, since console emulation is piracy 99.999% of the time.
Releasing games on multiple platforms is essentially the same process, except it’s translating the game code into the target language ahead of time so that the console/pc doesn’t need to do that translation itself on the fly
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