Eli5 why is Video Game emulation so difficult? And how do new glitches come about?

Question

Eli5 why is Video Game emulation so difficult? And how do new glitches come about?

In: 54

Answer 1

In addition to everything else that’s been said here, emulators (if they want to be legal anyway) have to *reverse-engineer* all their coding.

You can’t just take the coding language for an N64, plop it in a virtual environment, and viola! N64 emulator! Nintendo will sue you into the goddamn ground. They don’t own the function of “running an N64 game”, but they do own the code the N64 uses to do it.

So you, emulator programmer, have to write your own code, from scratch, and as anyone who’s every done that can tell you, *there will be bugs*.