eli5: Why do we need emulators to play old games? why can’t we just make the games work without the emulator?
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All code, whether for games or for your spreadsheet program at some point have to get converted to 1s and 0s that your processor can understand. These 1s and 0s are split into “instructions,” that tell the computer to do things such as “add, 3, 1” or “move, 28, to memory slot 13.”
Game consoles were built to be cheap. They used custom hardware that allowed them to use fewer instructions to do more things with each instructions. Since they knew their console was only going to be used for games, they could include specialized instructions specifically for doing game related things and forget everything else. This is great because it means things are faster for cheaper, but bad because it means you don’t have the fine grain control you would have by using many more, smaller instructions. Think of it like building something with Lego VS. Megablocks.
This also causes another problem which is that we can’t run those instructions on machines that weren’t built to use those instructions. This is where emulators come in. Emulators pretend to be the original hardware, intercept the instructions, and convert those instructions into ones the current “host,” machine can understand.
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