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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I have an interesting anecdote about this. If not ok please delete.
I was working for msft when the moved the home operating systems to the nt code base. I was one of the only people who knew how to set up dos games, so that was my specialty.
The interesting part is there is an extra layer on an nt operating system (Neptune/windows xp) and as such, dos game audio had a stutter. I found it fascinating because everything else worked completely fine. Just… the stutter. And it couldn’t be fixed without fixing the extra layer. Which has been the same since it’s inception.
It was long ago now so I can’t remember if they fixed it or not, but I think it is a small example as to why emulators are sometimes needed. In fact, for me, I keep an old os available for dual boot if I really want to go back in time hehe!
Virtual machines were originally designed for stuff like this, but emulators are much easier for the end user.
Thanks for coming to my Randy talk.
Imagine that games are trains – those trains can only run on the tracks that they are made for.
New computers have different tracks, the games/trains can’t run on those tracks directly and need an emulator to fit those new tracks instead, which they can then run on.
For the same reason you can’t just play basketball in a hockey rink. The activity/game is only a set of rules and requires the environment/system for which it was designed.
For the same reason you can’t run an Xbox game on a PlayStation, the game is designed for a specific hardware layout.
In order to make the game work, you need to interpret your game into terms your computer can understand. That’s what the emulator does. Whereas an N64 takes your game’s N64 instructions and turns them into hardware instructions. An N64 emulator takes your game’s N64 instructions and turns them into computer instructions.
You could replace the instructions themselves, but at that point you’re creating an entirely new game. It’s easy to simulate the N64 than it is to write every N64 game.
its very similar to why you can’t always run Mac software on windows. The Operating systems are different and often the actual processors themselves are quite different. The more different the processor architecture the more difficult the emulation. Which is why we’re still having trouble with the PS3
Programs, at the base level, are a series of instructions. Let us assume that there is an instruction on a console 1 called x. This instruction always performs a certain task. Now let’s say you want to run this program on console 2. Console two does not have an instruction called x, or maybe it does but it performs slightly differently. What you need is something in between to say whatever you are supposed to do. X, do y instead, where y is a series of steps on console 2 That will give the same result as x on console one. That something is called an emulator.
You could go through each game individually, replacing the instructions as needed, that is very time consuming. The alternative is to create one program, the something, that always does those substitutions. That’s why we do it.
An emulator is just your computer pretending to be the hardware that the game was originally designed to run on. Turns out, that this is much much easier and more cost effective, than rewriting every game to run on modern computers.
This has been really informative! I remeber in the 00’s downloading snes emulators to play donkey kong and mario etc… I didn’t know this was still a thing!
An emulator is a type of software that allows a computer or other device to run programs or games that were designed for a different kind of system. For example, you might use an emulator to play an old video game that was designed to run on a Super Nintendo console on your modern computer.
The reason we need emulators to play old games is that most modern computers and devices are not compatible with the software and hardware used in older systems. For example, a Super Nintendo game would not be able to run on a modern computer because the computer does not have the same kind of processor or other hardware components that the Super Nintendo used.
Emulators work by simulating, or pretending to be, the hardware and software of an older system. They do this by translating the instructions and data from the old game into a form that a modern computer or device can understand and execute. This allows us to play old games on modern systems, even though the games were not designed to run on those systems.
While it would be nice to be able to play old games without the need for an emulator, it is not always possible. This is because the technology used in older systems is often very different from the technology used in modern systems, and it would be difficult or impossible to make the games work without an emulator to bridge the gap.
Imagine you were trying to play baseball, but you only have a football field available. It’s pretty hard to play baseball when you don’t have any bases or a pitchers mound. So the owner of the field pulls out some bases and a portable pitchers mount and puts them down about where they’re supposed to go. Maybe it’s not perfect, like the bases aren’t spaced correctly or mound is too close/too far away, but overall you can now play baseball about 90% correctly, which is good enough for most casual players.
That’s essentially what an emulator does. The game requires some certain things to be able to play the way you want it to, so you need to create an environment for the game to be played. They aren’t ever perfect, which is why you can get some weird bugs, but they’re good enough.
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