how the same video game is coded for different platforms
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Each CPU has its own language that it understand. An x86 CPU (Intel and AMD) couldn’t understand the language to a ARM CPU (mobile and Apple).
This base language is called machine code and has very basic instructions such as add, load, move or bitwise and.
Most programmers do not write in machine code. They did in the past, when efficiency was more important. Programmers code in high level languages, which is much easier to read by humans and quicker to write. However a CPU cannot make heads or tails of the high level language, so you have an interpreter to stand in the middle and convert high level code into machine code.
Since high level languages are not specific to a single type of machine code, you can have different interpretators to turn the same code into many different machine codes, to distribute to different devices.
This is the simplest way to make the game playable across platforms. However with modern Xboxs and PlayStations using the same x86 architecture as PCs, this is a less of a worry.
You need to optimise for different devices, different memory size, CPU speed, core count all have to be considered to make a program run well on a different platform
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