Programs like wine for console emulation

[Dragonwinged]

Now those of you who use Linux probably already know what Wine is. And from what i could see from their website, Wine is not an emulator, my best understanding is that it takes the native windows code and translates it into code that your operating system, in Wine's case linux, can understand. This seems to enable your system to run programs with 100% of your system resources available. And I'm starting to wonder why game console emulators don't take the same route to emulating old console games. If this method were applied to console emulation, mobile phones could run up to ps3 and XBox360, maybe higher, and they could also run Nintendo's entire console and handheld library, including the Switch. So what's preventing programmers from doing so?

[DakotaWebber]

Old Console hardware had their own specific way of working, aka not the same processing architecture, instructions, as today, and then on top of that the way that the games were developed and stored on their also very specific code, theyre all programmed differently, and stored mediums such as cartridges, and the way it had to read those mediums

 

Its not as simple as "just translate the code to run better", there essentially isnt "code" for the old consoles that can be easily translated for computers, then theres the optimisations for the old hardware, the way its compiled for that hardware,  emulation basically brute forces our hardware into creating that non standard environment to read the games developed for it

Also, alot of emulators are developed and released for free

 

Wine works because you can run Linux and Windows on the same machine using the same hardware and you dont need to 'emulate' the windows environment because the ability to run those programs already exists

 

It's alot easier to just redevelop the game to work on newer hardware, which is what alot of companies are doing

[DakotaWebber]

1 minute ago, lexusgamer05 said:

The Xbox 1 and PS4 actually do run on the x86 platform, but again, the problem is DRM.

UWP, having the same games on Xbox and PC is amazing

 

3 minutes ago, lexusgamer05 said:

The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 had PowerPC chips in them,

The PS3's cell processor was such a double edged sword, it was very powerful and alot of the later releases still had so much visual depth, but that was usually only for platform specific games, as it was so hard to optimise for