Why do emulations of old video games still have the same performance issues, even when played on a powerful modern machine?

Question

Why do emulations of old video games still have the same performance issues, even when played on a powerful modern machine?

In: Technology

Answer 1

Many times, the proper execution of the game on these old consoles was *dependent* on the limitations. E.g., if you used a much faster microprocessor than the original console possessed, then the game will run like it’s in fast-forward.

A recent example I ran into was the SNES game Star Fox on RetroPie emulators. As far as I can tell, there were revisions of Star Fox’s Super FX chip clocked at 20 MHz in later games, but the original revision used in Star Fox was hardware-capped at 10 MHz. So an emulator needs to know to emulate that capping or else the game will run about twice as fast.