• Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip
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    20 hours ago

    the wine part, its more or less based on the end goal of the software. traditional game emulation is software that is used to try to mimic the hardware in question. Wine focuses on trying to be windows, rather than the physical PC hardware itself, so the type of thing youre trying to emulate is fundamentally different.

    emulation in general is functionally a compatibility layer. Wine exists on the highest level of compatibility layer because its not trying to rewrite what the hardware is necessary doing (as both the hardware is the same)

    Wine is the same level as Teknoparrot is (teknoparrot is compatibility layer for arcade maches that use X86 based pcs for hardware), vs MAME, which emulates non x86 based arcade machines.

    it gets mega pendantic because of how closely emulation and compatibility layers are intertwined, but they arent two overlapping circles. a compatibility can use emulation but doesn’t require it.

    I just like defining the difference between the two simply by the goal. emulation targets machine to then get to software, where compatibility layers target the software directly. and will target hardware only when necessary.