A few weeks ago, my son asked me for play with him Mario, but not the Mario of Nintendo Switch, rather the Mario from the Super Nintendo.
What caught my attention the most wasn’t just the nostalgia the game brought back, but also the fact that this game, originally designed for hardware from the 80s, was running perfectly on a completely different machine.
This is possible thanks to emulation.
An emulator works like an interpreter. It reads each instruction from the original game and translates it into something the modern CPU can execute. It also simulates the original memory layout, the graphics chip, the sound chip, and the input devices. The game itself believes it is running on the original hardware.
Watching Mario run today isn’t just nostalgia. It’s an example of how systems can survive beyond their original environment.
Jesús Melendez 