High-level Emulation - Advantages and Disadvantages of HLE

Advantages and Disadvantages of HLE

Among the advantages of HLE technique, chiefly are the ability to utilise the existing host facilities much better and easier, the ability to optimise the results as the code and hardware improves, and much less or no work at all needed to achieve the desired end result, if an appropriate function is already provided by the host, as would be common in 3D graphics functionality. The progress of implementations is also much more independent of the detailed hardware documentation, instead relying only on the listing of possible functions available to the programmer, which is already provided by a software development kit available for each platform.

The disadvantages include much higher reliance on standardisation among target applications, and the presence of sufficiently high-level mechanisms in the emulated platforms. If there is no such mechanism, or applications fail to utilise it in one of the already supported ways, they will not work correctly, even if other, superficially similar applications function with no problems. Thus a significant amount of tweaks might be required to get all of the desired titles to run satisfactorily.

As a side-effect, HLE removes the common source of legality issues, by not requiring the users to provide it with the bootstrap software used by the original platform to create an environment for applications to run in. Because the emulator itself provides such environment, it no longer needs system ROM images, bootstrap cartridge images or other software obtained from a physical copy of the emulated system, a process which usually resulted in an unclear status in the light of copyright law.