Eli5 why is Video Game emulation so difficult? And how do new glitches come about?
In: 54
In regards to new glitches, I can give a good example.
Say you play Donkey Kong. Mario moves thirty pixels per second when you press forward.
Except he is actually moving every single frame; at thirty frames, he’s actually moving one pixel per frame.
Donkey Kong gets emulated on your brand new gaming PC. They don’t correctly adjust for the fact that this game was built to run on a system considerably slower than the one you have, now.
Instead of being able to produce thirty frames a second, it produces three hundred frames per second.
Old mate continues moving at one pixel per frame, and suddenly moves at 10x the speed they are designed to move at.
Obviously this isn’t normal, by itself. Except, the physics system (what little there was) doesn’t account for this speed. It thinks Mario still moves at 30 pixels a second. Collision breaks. Mario runs through the wall and disappears. Game Over.
Modern game developing accommodates for this particular case quite well, but if the game was not explicitly coded to accommodate changes in processor speed (like if, say, they only ever intended one processor to run it that naturally has the same constant speed), all sorts of stuff breaks.a
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