Emulation is the process of imitating a program, hardware or software platform on another program or platform. This makes it possible to run programs on systems that are not designed for them. Emulators, as their name suggests, emulate the functions of one system on another. Thus, the second system behaves like the original system, trying to reproduce exactly the external behaviors of the first system.
How does emulation work?
In summary, an emulator is a software which acts as hardware. In most cases, this means simulating all the capabilities of a hardware component as a software component. Additionally, hardware components that are emulated as software must operate without bugs, otherwise the emulator will not work properly. The difficulty of turning advanced and unique pieces of hardware into working software is why emulators for game consoles modern ones take a long time to develop. It takes a lot of work and effort to get the emulation process to work because modern hardware like the latest consoles from Sony and Microsoftis extremely complex.
In the case of the Playstation, for example, an emulator must emulate a special sound chip, a Graphic carda processor and many other components without even considering the emulation of peripherals like the pilots of the reader CD. The most difficult part of the material to emulate is usually the processor. It is a central component of every computer, from smartphones to video game consoles. In many ways, the processor is the most important computer component in matter emulation, because all the other components are directly linked to it.
Not all processors are the same. The main difference between processors is in their instruction set. The instruction set determines how a computer executes the commands given to it by a program. An emulator targets a system whose instruction set is different from that of the machine host. For example, the processor of the playstation uses an instruction set known as MIPS, which is different from that of a computer desktop or laptop computers that typically use the x86 instruction set.
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