Eli5 why is Video Game emulation so difficult? And how do new glitches come about?
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Imagine you find never before seen sheet music attributed to Mozart, and you want to play it. The problem? It’s written in a language you’ve never learned, and it’s for an instrument you’ve never played.
Step one would be to learn the language, but you don’t have the time to become literate, so you have a pocket dictionary nearby whenever you are ready to play it, but that takes much more time than knowing it naturally.
At the same time, you also have to know how to play the instrument. But never having played it before, the best you can do alone is watch a video of another musician, put your hands in positions that seem right, and move them in ways that imitate other musicians. Follow so far?
Video game emulation is like this, but emulation developers start without the dictionary or video, so they write their own dictionary and or play it on a different, similar instrument that they do have a video of. The new dictionary is bound to be missing a few words, and the new instrument’s range doesn’t quite match up to the music, so oddities occur.
Game consoles play a specific instrument in a specific language, and do so without having to need a dictionary or tutorial video. Even if you have the same song (game) it’s useless without the correct dictionary (bios), the correct instrument (hardware), or the correct sheet music (game files, or Roms).
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