How do Video Game Emulators Work? [closed]

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I am curious as to how emulators work. What are they written in? Does it have to emulate even the graphics? How do people get the games uploaded as roms? Do they simulate the systems OS?

Answer 1

There are several emulation techniques. The first technique is called low level emulation. The emulator in this case can be written in practically any langauge, however because of the large amount of binary data manipulation, C and C++ lend themselves well to such a task, though there are plenty of other languages that are capable of providing such.

With low level emulation the program simulates the exact hardware of the original system. For example, the original NES has well defined hardware both from official documentation and information from reverse engineering. We know exactly how its 6502-based CPU behaves along with the graphics, sound chips, etc. With low level emulation, the exact binary data of the original game is interpreted in software in exactly the same way that the original hardware interprets the data. This includes the original machine code written for the 6502 instruction set, the graphics data, the IO, everything. The graphics and sound hardware are emulated by translating instructions for the original hardware into modern hardware by calling modern graphics and sound APIs to fulfill them.

This technique is the most accurate and successful but is also the slowest and sometimes the most difficult to implement for complex machines.

The second method is called static recompilation. The original machine code for the original system is analyzed and then recompiled for a modern computer. This technique produces the fastest emulation but has a really low rate of success. Emulators employing this technique could, at best, only support a few demos and games. The reason why is that often the runtime environment that the original software expects changes in such a way that is hard or impossible to know at compile time.

The final technique is called dynamic recompilation. In this technique the emulator analyzes the code and recompiles it as it is running. This allows the compiler to tailor the runtime environment to what the original software expects based on information available as the program is running.

Involved in most forms of recompilation techniques is something called High Level Emulation. This is the observation that most code is simply code compiled to call operating system or library C routines. The code is recompiled to the host machine, and the calls to the original operating system and libraries, such as those for graphics and sound, are reimplemented natively instead of being emulated. For example, if there is a call to draw a triangle on the screen, the emulator can simply perform the operation directly without having to emulate the exact low level implementation of communicating the draw command to the original graphics hardware. This is how almost all Nintendo 64 and PlayStation emulators and work.

The original operating systems only sometimes need to be re-implemented. For example, the Nintendo 64 actually didn't have an operating system, each cartridge was its own OS per se. The emulator, however, recognized common routines that all ROMs implemented and dynamically captured and reimplemented them. The playstation, however, had a proprietary BIOS used for setting up the basic hardware and reading the game from the CD. Emulators have to have a copy of this BIOS or attempt to reimplement its functionality.

We know that emulators using dynamic recompilation have been implemented inside, for example, the Xbox 360 in order to play original Xbox games. Such a task would be very difficult for outside developers, but simpler for Microsoft who has all of the original and proprietary documentation and the manpower to create and optimize such an emulator. In this case, the entire original Xbox operating system does not need to be emulated, however the calls that the original games make to the original operating system have to be translated into the native operating system. The technique for the Xbox One to emulate the Xbox 360 is similar, except in order to have a greater degree of compatibility with Xbox 360 titles in emulation they chose to run the original Xbox 360 operating system in their emulator.

Games from game cartridges are moved onto a computer through hardware which is specially designed for ROM dumping. ROMs on the older machines actually behave in a really simple manner. They have address input lines and data output lines. A device can be constructed using a micro controller to dump these ROMs and then transfer them to a computer using Serial, USB or some other method. Some ROMs can even be read through a computer's programmable Parallel port, largely missing in modern PCs but USB adapters for them exist.

Because of the massive amounts of dynamic code generation, emulators that use recompilation techniques almost exclusively use C or C++, however any language capable of systems programming and low level code interfacing at run-time is capable of doing this.