I understand that emulators have to convert “console-language” to “emulator language” which causes stutters and otherwise poor performance.
But how can that same emulator play the game at 5-10x the speed using speed up features without sacrificing gameplay, loading screens, or resolution?
I just played through an emulated gamecube version of Twilight Princess with a 4K texture pack, which had its fair share of stutters. But I could also hold the speed-up button during loading zones and while saving my file and the game would handle it just fine.
If it requires extra processing power to emulate, how come emulators can speed the game up to such high speeds?
In: 15
It depends. There was another question here on ELI5 recently, asking about how computers can wait for things, instead of running movies and games as fast as they can. It’s all about that clock.
One type of emulator will bookkeep time manually for the virtual game console. Conversely, this also means that it can simply make that virtual clock tick faster, at the price of the whole system doing a lot more work in a second.
Another type of emulator will rely on your actual machine’s clock, and instead will intercept the game’s attempts at trying to wait for some time period, and manipulate that value. This will still require more performance, but not to the same extreme.
And sometimes the emus will have game patches. With game patches you can specifically target the game’s game simulation related code paths, and only speed up what needs to be sped up, ensuring minimal (but still very much nonzero) performance impact.
There are other approaches too, but it would be too long to cover them all.
There’s no free lunch that you might be thinking however.
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