So someone else can correct me, but the architecture for consoles has gotten less complicated.
The GameCube, Wii & Wii U run on a PowerPC CPU architecture. Switch & Switch 2 run on an ARM architecture.
But the recent PlayStation and Xbox consoles are all x86/x86_64, which is the same as your PC. So these consoles won’t need recompilation.
For the Switch series, while ARM would need recompilation, it’s also hugely popular. I know Valve is doing some ARM magic, although I think that’s to ARM and not from ARM, but it still might be helpful. But importantly recompilation of these should be much easier.
ARM is a RISC ISA, which should make it way easier to emulate/statically compile. The main difficulties wouldn’t be hardware quirks like a lot of past emulators, but system OS quirks. The wine project has dealt with a lot of both (x86 has a ton of instructions and windows has a lot of system shit going on).
I do think you are 100% correct that hardware is much simpler now. The Switch has had several emulators for a while now bc of this.
So someone else can correct me, but the architecture for consoles has gotten less complicated.
The GameCube, Wii & Wii U run on a PowerPC CPU architecture. Switch & Switch 2 run on an ARM architecture.
But the recent PlayStation and Xbox consoles are all x86/x86_64, which is the same as your PC. So these consoles won’t need recompilation.
For the Switch series, while ARM would need recompilation, it’s also hugely popular. I know Valve is doing some ARM magic, although I think that’s to ARM and not from ARM, but it still might be helpful. But importantly recompilation of these should be much easier.
ARM is a RISC ISA, which should make it way easier to emulate/statically compile. The main difficulties wouldn’t be hardware quirks like a lot of past emulators, but system OS quirks. The wine project has dealt with a lot of both (x86 has a ton of instructions and windows has a lot of system shit going on).
I do think you are 100% correct that hardware is much simpler now. The Switch has had several emulators for a while now bc of this.