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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Old games know how to drive the ancient Ford Model T. When you try to make it drive a modern Tesla, it’ll try to crank the engine and not only will it not find a crank, it won’t even find an engine. It has no idea what to do.
There are two ways to get it driving a Tesla.
You can just teach it how to drive a Tesla. But that’ll take time, and you’d have to teach every individual game.
The other way is to attach adapters to the Tesla so that they can just use it like a Model T.
Teaching a game how to drive a new card is called porting it. Meanwhile attaching adapters is emulation.
(In reality, ports will sometimes/often have an emulator in the background. But there’s usually more work put in to make them work better and more reliably for that specific game.)
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