Hardware Emulation in Brief

Hardware Emulation is a terminology used in computer technology, where a system made to falsely behave in certain aspects to get some advantages. The best easy example of Hardware Emulation will be, games for older game consoles are playable on Android devices with some software or Apps. This Hardware Emulation is for fun, but not ideal example of Hardware Emulation.

What is Hardware Emulation

A hardware emulator is an electronic device that a system such as a printer or a microprocessor can replicate functionally, electrically or mechanically including housing and pins. The connection to the processor module is using base and created a matching plug. Special kind Hardware Emulation is our  previously written In-circuit emulator.

Today’s most common Hardware Emulation is used are for printers. Many large-format plotters are emulated on modern Operating System. A virtual machine (VM) is often mistakenly referred as an example of Hardware Emulation. In a virtual machine, a large part of the instructions but is forwarded to the host system. The VM manager assumes no Hardware Emulation as such.

A Hardware Emulator allow the development of machine-oriented software, the target system is faked, but usually a special hardware allows the software running in a real environment.

Other Notes on Hardware Emulation

The main disadvantage of software emulators (versus Hardware Emulation system) is that they produce a high processing load on the emulated system. Thus, even on modern computers which configuration, such as old classic games sometimes do not run smoothly. Another disadvantage is that games can run without frame limiter too quickly when the system power is sufficient to present the play with a lot more frames per second than originally planned.

The software development for these emulations system is very expensive. This is where Hardware Emulation can be used. Hardware Emulation almost exists for almost every system.