Why do emulations of old video games still have the same performance issues, even when played on a powerful modern machine?
In: Technology
Well with hardware limitations back in the day the software had to be optimized to get the best performance out of that hardware. So if your hardware only allowed for 4 interactable objects on the screen at each time, then this is part of the software, so even if you upgrade to a system that supports near infinite objects at the same time all with their own collision dectection and whatnot then it will still not work, because that was not in the game code and you’re still running the old game.
Or the other way around some old games relied on the hardware being slow. Let’s say your snake moves 1 pixel per frame and you have a frame rate of 1 frame per second, then you have 1 move per second. Now if you run that on a machine that supports 60 frames per second or even more as it might be black/white with close to nothing changing each frame, then these games would be unplayable because they were too fast. So you’d need to emulate older hardware and slow them down.
So to make full use of modern hardware you might have to reprogram the game in a new engine.
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