Why they say that certain consoles are not powerful for certain emulators

Veridis7 · Jul 18, 2018

I see many comments in English, Spanish, Portuguese or any other language saying for example that the PS2 is not capable of running an N64 emulator or that the Wii U is not powerful for running PS2 games.
I think that's ridiculous because if they can run their own native games, for example, those of PS2 ask for more resources than those of the N64 because it is not possible to run them then the PS2 console.
I have also seen that the Nintendo Switch is not the powerful thing to run the Wii U games, when the Switch's own games ask for more resources, it seems illogical, but I think it's good to ask before continuing in ignorance.

AutumnWolf · Jul 18, 2018

Please go home you are drunk

bodefuceta · Jul 18, 2018

Well , the original device , say an NES for example , will take code that it can understand and execute it. It’s written in it’s native language . Think of it like if someone tries to talk to you in your native language .

Now say , i wanted to run an NES emulator on my PC . Most computers run an x86 processor , while the nes runs a mos 6502 . They are completely incompatible . If i want to say , add 2 numbers , both the 6502 and x86 instructions will be completely different from each other .

When running an emulator , the software has to take the original code and translate it in real time , into something that the host machine can understand. Some hardware present in the original machine may not be present in the host machine either. A modern PC certainly does not contain a NES PPU . It has to be emulated via software, and you’re effectively trying to recreate the functionality of a dedicated piece of hardware with your cpu .

To stick with my earlier example . Imagine you only speak english , and you are trying to understand what someone is telling you in german . Grammar aside , we will say you have a dictionary with you to translate each word and a piece of paper to write them down . If you were a fluent german speaker , you’d be able to respond to anything asked by your partner , pretty much instantly. However , since you cannot directly understand what he says , you have to first write down the sentence , convert it to english word , by word , and parse it together , to then form a coherent response. This obviously takes a LOT more time , and is in effect what emulators have to deal with.

Luc Boulesteix, a high schooler who likes computers via quora.

Veridis7 · Jul 18, 2018

Sinon said:
Please go home you are drunk

What?

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

bodefuceta said:
Well , the original device , say an NES for example , will take code that it can understand and execute it. It’s written in it’s native language . Think of it like if someone tries to talk to you in your native language .

Now say , i wanted to run an NES emulator on my PC . Most computers run an x86 processor , while the nes runs a mos 6502 . They are completely incompatible . If i want to say , add 2 numbers , both the 6502 and x86 instructions will be completely different from each other .

When running an emulator , the software has to take the original code and translate it in real time , into something that the host machine can understand. Some hardware present in the original machine may not be present in the host machine either. A modern PC certainly does not contain a NES PPU . It has to be emulated via software, and you’re effectively trying to recreate the functionality of a dedicated piece of hardware with your cpu .

To stick with my earlier example . Imagine you only speak english , and you are trying to understand what someone is telling you in german . Grammar aside , we will say you have a dictionary with you to translate each word and a piece of paper to write them down . If you were a fluent german speaker , you’d be able to respond to anything asked by your partner , pretty much instantly. However , since you cannot directly understand what he says , you have to first write down the sentence , convert it to english word , by word , and parse it together , to then form a coherent response. This obviously takes a LOT more time , and is in effect what emulators have to deal with.

Luc Boulesteix, a high schooler who likes computers via quora.

I do not understand much about electronics, but I suppose that must be why. The same thought that the emulators already had the architecture to be executed in the console.
Equal thanks for getting me out of this doubt, I know it's stupid but better to have asked and not be ignorant saying things that in themselves are not true, but as I say, it seemed illogical because I thought it was performance, but good to least you gave me an explanation not like Sinon who started laughing.

Ryccardo · Jul 18, 2018

The claim is literally wrong: any "Turing complete" machine - including most consoles, phones, and PCs - can emulate any other, given enough time and memory.

Memory is not an issue for those 2 platforms you mentioned - they have HDD support, and nothing technically forbids implementing swap/virtual memory...

Time is also not an issue for those consoles (as long as someone keeps paying the electrical bill, I guess); but it is for the hypothetical users of said emulators (they would prefer something that runs at least at the speed of original hardware) and its developers (knowing that such a slow/inaccurate emulator would have little audience, may as well make it only for an easy platform, like PC: that's exactly the state of Xbox/PS3/PS4/WiiU/3DS emulation)

Tom Bombadildo · Jul 18, 2018

To sort of put what Ryccardo said into better terms: Any platform can emulate any other piece of hardware, that statement is totally true and anyone who says otherwise doesn't fully understand what it is they're talking about (or they're being very, very general). The problem, however, is emulating things at a speed that is actually playable.

As bodefuceta said, you can think of it like trying to speak to someone else in a different language, but it's much, much more complicated than that. Not only do the instructions have to be translated into a different language, sometimes they have to be translated into multiple different languages, all with a specific timing, all at the same time. Doing this requires a vast amount of processing, which requires a lot of resources and a lot of power. To use the same analogy, think of it like translating between German, Spanish, Russian, and maybe even Chinese to English, all at the same time, with each translation having to be done at the exact same time as the others, otherwise everything gets jumbled up and becomes garbage.

That's what emulating another piece of hardware is like, and if you don't have power or resources enough to translate those instructions in a quick enough way, you're not going to be able to emulate a piece of hardware at a speed that is usable. The PS2 will never emulate the N64 at a playable speed, because it simply can't translate the instructions every piece of N64 hardware uses to play N64 games quickly enough with it's own hardware. It's why the Wii U will never be able to emulate MIPS CPU, and the separate FPU, the two VPUs, the IPU, and the MMU used by the PS2, all at the same time. It's why the Switch will never emulate Wii U games, because it doesn't have the processing power to emulate the ARM chipset with the Tegra GPU, and the DD4 RAM, and the wireless chipset, and the audio chipset, all at the same time.

Even worse is that, unless the hardware used has public documentation (something most consoles absolutely don't have whatsoever), we might not even have a way of easily translating those instructions to a language XYZ piece of hardware might understand. To (once again) use that same analogy, think of it like showing an apple to someone who grew up in a place that's never heard of an apple, and demanding they give you the name of the apple in their language. You'd have to go and find a similar piece of fruit, eat it, point to the Apple, eat that, to get the point across that "this is an apple, it's a fruit, it's edible" etc etc. This is why emulation for certain platforms is unstable, inaccurate, or sometimes not even feasible on a certain platform, because it uses instructions and has hardware that simply doesn't have a decent way of translating into a language the host hardware understands without using a lot of extra steps.

There's an old, general saying when it comes to emulation, that the host hardware must be at least 9x as powerful as the hardware it's emulating for it to be playable. It's an old saying, it's outdated for the most part (especially for more complex, modern consoles), but it helps give you an idea of how much power you actually need to emulate a different system at a usable speed.

Why they say that certain consoles are not powerful for certain emulators

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