People have been able to create emulator for consoles like N64 or PS1, but how were they able to do it? and how has it become harder to do for new gen consoles like PS5?
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So older hardware like an original N64 console is way way slower than modern hardware. Improvements in technology have allowed us to fit many many times more processing power into the same size box, and so today’s computers are powerful enough that they can effectively run a simulation that does everything that would go on inside a real N64 system, but with code instead of hardware.
Basically an emulator pretends that it is the console it is trying to emulate. It knows all the specifications for the console, how much memory it has, what its instruction set is, what it does to boot up, and it uses those rules to act out what would happen inside the console in real life, like a child playing with dolls.
When you run an emulator, your computer is doing a lot more work to run the emulator than the original console would be doing since the emulator had to use software to do things that would just be done with hardware in the real console, but it usually doesn’t matter because old consoles are so slow and new computers are so fast.
This technique would not work so well for newer consoles because, for one, the inner workings of new consoles are much more closely guarded for security and intellectual property protection reasons, so creating an emulator would be very difficult, and secondly, because new consoles are very fast. They are already pushing the limits of what’s possible to compute in real time with current technology, so trying to run that in an emulator would just be painfully slow.
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