Why is it that game Devs are able to port games to pc but people aren’t able to do the same outside of emulation that take a while and doesn’t always run the best. I don’t know much about game development or computers, why is it so difficult/impossible?
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Porting games means changing the code so that instead of giving commands to a particular console you have the software give equivalent commands to a PC. It requires rewriting the code of the game.
Not only is this a lot of work, but it generally requires source code. Source code is what humans can read that a compiler turns into code that a machine can read.
The developers wrote the source code, so they have it. So, if they want to make changes, they change the source code and compile it again.
Outsiders are left with the machine-comprehensible compiled version, not the human-comprehensible source code.
Many tools have been developed to make this easier, but it isn’t generally that easy, and without the source code it gets much harder. Developers are paid good money, have the source code, and have the tools. Software crackers generally do not make good money porting games and do not have the source code.
Emulators are when you recreate the game environment and translate all commands from the game to the PC on the fly. Tricky, and it means running the game on hardware that has both an additional source of slowness (the emulator) and often is translated slowly, badly, or can’t be translated readily at all.
However, PCs are powerful enough that this can be partially overcome by just throwing more power at the problem. If the console is new, this may be inadequate, but, on older games, an emulator on a modern PC is easier than porting, and it allows you to run dozens of games rather than just one. For the same amount of coding as converting only one or a few games, you might get almost every game that a Nintendo 64 ever had.
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