To ensure we're on the same page about the difference between playing games natively and emulation, I brought this point back up as your previous post came across as disparaging real GBA hardware against an emulator that's trying to mimic it. If you left out save states, cheats, and frame skipping, it would be very wrong to say that VBA is better than GBA VC.
Here's that architecture analogy again I talked about last time about those dudes of different languages:
- N64 = Chinese
- Switch = Japanese
- 3DS = German
You have:
- Chinese dude reading at a leisure pace of 30 Chinese words per minute.
- Japanese dude reading at a blistering rate at 60 Japanese words per minute.
- German dude reading at a reasonable 40 German words per a minute.
Yes, you would be correct in stating that the Japanese guy is by far a faster reader than either of his Chinese and German peers in their respective languages. If each were given the exact same news article or book about the same story written in
their native language, that Japanese person would finish first followed by the German guy and finally the Chinese man.
However, some consideration would need to be taken believing that because Japanese dude is a such a fast reader, he could match reading on average 30 Chinese words per minute. Maybe he can if he's good at quickly finding unfamiliar Hanzi/Kanji in his JPN-CHN dictionary and doesn't get tripped too much by the Subject-Verb-Object word order difference. If you're not familiar what sentence syntax order is, think of "Yoda speak".
Which brings back the point about N64 emulation on the 3DS... It wouldn't be reasonable to ask that German dude to read Chinese as fast as his Chinese buddy.
Of course, where this analogy breaks down is that people have the capacity to learn new languages. Instruction sets, the fundamentally most basic language those CPUs understand, are built in at the hardware level. You can program a compatibility layer or emulator that translate between different sets, but this of course introduces
I/O R/W lag. This is why your source system needs be way much faster than the target system it's trying to emulate.