What is Emulation?
Emulation is the process of simulating the hardware of one machine on another machine, so that the second machine is able to run software designed for the first machine. The most popular form of emulation is video game emulation. Usually when someone wants to play old NES, SNES, Genesis, Arcade, Atari, etc.. games on their PC. It is also possible to emulator other computer systems, such as amiga, PC, and macintosh, along with calculators, and newer systems such as N64 and Playstation.
As the name suggests, emulation is the process of provide the functions of one system with a different system so that the latter appears to behave like the first system. In the case of the Xbox 360 backward compatibility, the emulation will consist of making Xbox games think they are running on the Xbox hardware when, in fact, they are running on a different console (the Xbox 360).
(back to top) -An emulator is a computer program that mimics the processor of a game console. Using an emulator one can play Atari 2600 games on a PC for instance. Emulators are a great help to the homebrew scene as they allow programmers to test their games out without needing to actually burn the data to an EEPROM. Emulators exist for practically every console (and arcade hardware) at this point.
Emulation is what allows you to play your favorite console games right on your computer! Almost every console system can be emulated, such as SNES, NES, Gameboy, Genesis, and Turbo Grafx 16; if you own a higher-end PC you can even emulate the Nintendo 64 and Sony Playstation! There are two parts pertaining to emulation. There is the emulator, and there is the ROM. The emulator is a program that copies [emulates] the way a console system works, allowing you to play games on your PC. The ROM is the game that was taken from cartridge form and put into digital form. To play a game, load the emulator for the system you want to emulate, and load the rom from inside the emulator. Emulators are not perfect however, they do have their limits. Certain games don’t work because of the way that they were programed. A good example of this would be the Super-FX chip that certain SNES games used. To learn the specifics of any given emulator, download the emulator, and view the readme files. They will
