The verb emulate comes from the Latin word aemulāre . The concept refers to the act of imitating the behavior or action of another person.
For example: "The young man wanted to emulate the acrobat but ended up hitting the ground" , "I would love to emulate Manu Ginobili and play for more than fifteen years on the same NBA team" , "We should not try to emulate our neighbors anymore." that the socioeconomic conditions of each country are different .
Emulation, therefore, is imitation . According to the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy ( RAE ), the notion is usually used in a favorable sense, since it is considered an effort to achieve excellence or success achieved by another person, which is taken as inspiration.
A child who starts playing soccer, for example, can try to emulate Lionel Messi . The little boy watches videos of the Argentine star to copy his movements and learn from his technique. Imitation, of course, can never be exact since talent is individual, but emulation can serve as a push to develop as a footballer.
In the field of computing , an emulator is called a type of software that enables the execution of programs that were created for a different platform . This means that it seeks to emulate the behavior of the programs as if they were running on the original device.
The most popular emulators are focused on video games . With software of this kind, you can emulate the operation of consoles such as PlayStation , Xbox and Super Nintendo on a computer, for example, although its potential is much greater, as is its complexity.
The emulator fulfills a function of great importance for computer and video game lovers: it allows them to continue enjoying the oldest creations on new computers, despite the inevitable incompatibility of architectures. In the field of technology, we understand architecture as the design and structure in which a computer system is conceptualized and operates, which is usually different from one family of processors to another or between two given brands.
In other words, we can say that the architecture describes the model on which the operation is based and the way in which a computer is designed, especially with respect to the way in which the CPU works and relates to the memory through of their addresses (the CPU is the main processor, whose acronym translates as central processing unit ). When an architecture is abandoned to give way to the birth of a more modern one, it becomes impossible to run certain programs and operating systems, and it is then that the most convenient way to keep them alive is emulation.
In the case of video games , one of the youngest and most revolutionary forms of entertainment in history, emulation takes center stage. Although most of the first commercial titles emerged in the 1980s, a time by no means remote, technological advances in this field have had an impact on more than one architectural change, which can be seen in the most significant consoles: Focusing only on those created by the Japanese company Nintendo , the NES , the Super Nintendo , the Nintendo 64 , the 3DS and the Switch are consoles that cannot run the same games natively, but rather it is necessary to emulate the original platform on the new.
Emulating a main processor, a graphics processor and the main memory is an extremely complex task, since it requires the creation of a program that reproduces the way in which each of these and other components worked but also the communication that existed between them, taking take into account concepts such as instructions, number of cores and speed.