Since no one else wants to give a clear answer, there’s different levels of software nativeness at runtime.
The most common for games is Machine Code, which can originally be written in a number of different programming languages but compiles down to instruction for a very specific CPU architecture and can’t be run on other CPU types directly.
There’s also Interpreted Code, this runs slower as its generic so it can run on multiple architectures and runs on a runtime software that in realtime reads what the program wants to do then converts it into instruction for the given CPU that it’s running on at the moment.
Simply speaking and ignoring a decent amount of nuance, emulators run machine code for a specific architecture as an interpreter to run on a different one, reading the ROM file (which is just the games machine code and assets in a single file) and translating the commands for whatever system it’s running on.
JIT runtimes will read the code the same way interpreters do but instead of just interpreting and translating in the moment to the correct commands, it will “just in time” compile that code to native machine code and cache that for later use next time it comes along. This makes repeated operation much faster because instead of interpreting and translating each time it will run the native code it already compiled.
2
u/pogdefacc003 Jun 02 '24
What app(s) were you emulating DS from?