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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In the beginning, video games pre-dated the availability of home computers. What computers were available were all very different at a hardware level. It wasn’t until IBM released their personal computer that standards began to be developed. The games themselves, whether arcade or on a cartridge for a home system, like the Atari 2600 or NES, are stored on ROM (Read Only Memory) chips and were written to expect the specific hardware of that machine.
Emulators are necessary to “trick” the game into thinking the original hardware it expects is actually present, even though it is not. Some emulator projects, like MAME (Modern Arcade Machine Emulator) are very serious about faithfully modeling the original hardware of these machines. For example, early arcade machines sometimes used some strange tricks and side-effects to coax the machines to produce the sounds for the game, as opposed to having snippets of pre-recorded audio. This is often very difficult to emulate as they sometimes relied on things like electronic interference that was present on the original hardware to achieve their effect. MAME, rather than “fake” it with re-created audio, will often choose to leave the audio emulation in a non-working or semi-functional state in the hopes that someone may figure out how to emulate it properly in the future.
TLDR: Software is tied the the hardware it’s expected to run on, and for games, that hardware often was very different than a modern PC. Therefore emulators are needed to trick the game into running.
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