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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now, let me tell you a story from the days of old:
*long, long time ago, in the land of home 8 bit computers and 386/486 PCs…*
back then, hardware could not do as much as it can do today. so programmers reverted to some cool trickery (bordering magic sometimes 😉 to squeeze as much, from what they had, as was possible (and even a little bit more sometimes ;). this included undocumented functions of hardware and software. very often software(s) like games, demos (demoscene was notorious for using various hacks to make stuff work) were talking to hardware directly through i/o ports, direct memory access, reprogramming hardware’s behaviour at lowest possible level (which is also the quickest in execution of code.). this was done in assembly or even sometimes in machine code (lowest possible programming method – sometimes called *bare-metal programming*). so…. fast forward some 30 years, and we have memory protection, hypervisors, drivers running in unprivilleged mode and all this new stuff that makes modern computing possible. this does not allow direct communication with hardware, rather through series of “gatekeepers” so to speak. API’s, drivers, frameworks and similar.
1. todays hardware is not compatible with old software
2. we use hardware differently today (some 97-98% of the time) than it was used 30 years ago.
3. emulated software also could’ve been running on entirely incompatible platform (MIPS, PowerPC, or any other for that matter).
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