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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Driving analogy.
Imagine it’s a couple of generations ago – late 1940s, North America. You learned how to drive on a car with a gear lever and clutch pedal (US “stick shift”). You know exactly how to change gear, and when, and you drive around to your heart’s content.
Fast forward a couple of decades. You sell your loyal old vehicle and buy a new one. But this one has the latest technology – an automatic transmission. And let’s say (for the purposes of the analogy) that you’ve never heard of automatics, and you’re too cautious to experiment. So you get into your new vehicle – and just sit there, unable to get it moving, because what you used to do simply doesn’t work – you want to press the clutch pedal, and there’s no pedal to press. What you need is help in turning your old driving methods into ones that work for your new vehicle.
That’s basically what running an old program on new hardware can be like. The program wants to do the equivalent of putting the car into gear by depressing the clutch and then moving the gear lever – but the new hardware doesn’t have a clutch pedal to depress (or a lever to move); it’s waiting for the program to select “Drive”. Easier to do, but the program doesn’t and can’t know that. And the program certainly has no way of working out what to do instead. It just tries what it knows. What it needs is “something” to sit between it and the new hardware, that understands both, and that can translate the things the old program wants to do into things the new hardware understands. That “something” is an emulator.
(I actually had a very minor variant of the above when I bought my current vehicle – got in, turned the key in the ignition, and nothing happened. Sat there wondering what to do next. The issue was that I needed to depress the clutch as well. None of my previous vehicles had needed that, and nobody thought to mention it to me. Basically my old mental code didn’t work on the newer hardware.)
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