[kanox]

> As another commenter here says: just use an old computer to run your old software.

Developing emulators is a much easier solution than preserving compatibility at the hardware or even the OS level. The fact that 20-year old windows games work fine is a product of Microsoft spending insane resources to maintain vendor lock-in.

Emulators themselves tend to be highly portable, for example I suspect that zsnes and dosbox will "just work" on arm64 macs or even RISC-V.

[PartiallyTyped]

> The fact that 20-year old windows games work fine is a product of Microsoft spending insane resources to maintain vendor lock-in.

And x86/x86-64 supporting legacy instructions smh.

[wk_end]

Otherwise I agree but: ZSNES is probably a bad example. It's written in inscrutable 32-bit x86 assembly language and hasn't been updated in nearly 15 years, so it's unlikely to be ported anywhere.

[thristian]

A better example would be the SNES emulators bsnes and higan, written in modern C++, which did just work when compiled on an ARM Mac the other day.

[Koshkin]

But can’t you simply run an emulator in an emulator (or a VM)?

[wk_end]

Sure :) although I don't know if that still means that the inner emulator is "highly portable" or "just works" exactly - at least compared to any other software.

(At the end of the day you shouldn't be running ZSNES anyway. In terms of accuracy, compatibility, even security: way better SNES emulators out there.)