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, that’s called a “port” and sometimes it basically means rewriting the entire game from scratch to work in a different computing environment. Sometimes it’s just easier to create a program the emulates its native computing environment – an emulator – and run it using that.