High-level emulation (HLE) is an approach for construction of emulators, especially for video game consoles, which attempts to simulate the response of the system rather than accurately recreating its internal design.
Instead of trying to accurately create or recreate the hardware gate by gate, in HLE a software platform is created on which the emulated code can be run in a host computer having different hardware and a different instruction set. The effort focuses on recreating the appropriate functionality provided by the system emulated. Thus, the emphasis is shifted from the most efficient method of processing data to getting the same (or comparable) results as if the native platform was used. By contrast, the traditional way of emulating is termed Low-level emulation, or LLE which is used to develop new computer hardware and execute legacy binary code.
The term HLE originates from UltraHLE, the first emulator for the Nintendo 64 console that ran commercial games. Initial discussion about HLE occurred to give context for the reasons behind some video games not functioning properly with the emulator. The earliest (1962) high-level emulator was called a functional simulator for executing military flight programs written in symbolic assembly language code, without generating binary code.
Read more about High-level Emulation: Criteria For High-Level Emulation, Comparison To Traditional Models, Advantages and Disadvantages of HLE, Future Outlook
Famous quotes containing the word emulation:
“Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)