eli5: Why do we need emulators to play old games? why can’t we just make the games work without the emulator?

Question

eli5: Why do we need emulators to play old games? why can’t we just make the games work without the emulator?

In: 409

Answer 1

We can, and it has been done. However, doing this means rewriting every game to work on new hardware. On the other hand, an emulator only needs to be written once and then it’ll work will all games made for the emulated system.

Emulation often requires more computing power, but since that has increased exponentially in the time since the games were made, its usually no problem.