Why emulators are so hard?

[ripper101]

I've been playing Zelda BOTW on Cemu at 20fps and a lot of crashing/freezing but I am enjoying the game. This had me wondering what makes emulators so hard to get working properly. Why you can't just steal the operating system or something and put it on Windows and plug in your game? 

[ARikozuM]

You have to match the hardware and the software of a console or OS. 

[Maxinfamily]

Which cpu/gpu do you have? Id like to test It eventually, so Im just curious

 

And they are not resource-efficient because they have to calculate the behaviour of the emulated hardware to make with it calculus and also virtualise a OS which is running on the emulated hardware xD. Its pretty uneficient, moreover if the HW and SW are kinda new and complex (the NES and SNES f.e are very simple and they have been emulated for so long and they are very optimised)

[Zodiark1593]

Creating an emulator that is legally protected from litigation (due to copyright law) requires extensive reverse engineering to learn how the console works (right down to cpu/gpu/memory architecture). An emulator approximates this behavior (with varying levels of accuracy). Early emulators tend to focus on running the target code without issue before focusing on speed. 

 

 

[minibois]

The Wii U OS is made specifically made for the hardware in the Wii U. An emulator has to imitate the hardware (in software form) + it also needs to run the OS/game in software (like the Wii U normally also does).

 

This means you need a lot more power than the Wii U normally has itself.

[ripper101]

20 hours ago, Maxinfamily said:

Which cpu/gpu do you have? Id like to test It eventually, so Im just curious

4

i5 4440 and GTX 1070

[Maxinfamily]

1 hour ago, ripper101 said:

i5 4440 and GTX 1070

I would say that your i5 is totally bottlenecking you. Emulating is usually a very cpu-hungry task. Check your Task Manager when you run the emulator and you will get your answer

[Andreas Lilja]

No $ incentive to get them working properly. 

[iamdarkyoshi]

The platform they are running on isn't the same, so you have to emulate the source platform. Think of it like running virtual machines without virtualization support