Eli5 why is Video Game emulation so difficult? And how do new glitches come about?
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Check out this [three-minute video of this cool adding machine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcDshWmhF4A) made out of wooden parts!
You don’t need to understand exactly what he’s talking about, but you can see that the parts of the machine are quite simple; they just move like see-saws when marbles hit them. And if you build the machine like he has, then you’ll get a machine that can do addition. Neat!
But what if you want to do addition with it, but don’t have the actual wooden machine?
Well, you could actually just do what it does with pencil and paper. If you draw the machine and then “pretend” to drop the marbles in by drawing the marbles, flipping the see-saws around yourself by erasing and drawing them in their new positions, and then drawing where the marbles end up falling. And if you do a careful enough job, then you’ll get the same result as if you had the actual wooden machine.
But if you make a mistake by accidentally flipping the wrong see-saw, forgetting to do a step, or drawing the machine wrong in the first place, then you won’t get the correct result; your pencil-and-paper machine had a “glitch” in it.
Emulation is the same thing. A video game console has an actual computer board inside with specific chips and wires and doodads in it that your computer doesn’t. So the emulator program has to “pretend” to do what the console computer board does, but with computer code instead.
And if the computer code doesn’t perfectly match what the console’s computer board actually does, then you get a glitch.
That’s why it’s so difficult; it’s really hard to write a computer program that does what a console computer board does perfectly exactly.
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