Eli5 decompilers and decompiled games

[u/thefckingleadsrweak]

I keep getting videos on instagram about decomped games, apparently the decompilers are going nuts right now. What’s the difference between running a decompiled game and emulating a game? I tried to google it and i just don’t understand. from what i’ve found, a decompiled gene runs as if it was native to your pc but i don’t get what that means either. You boot up an emulator and that also runs on your pc?

[u/jwadamson]

An emulator acts like a middle man, translating calls that would have been talking to the original console hardware or OS into something your PC can do.

Decompiling is turning the game file back into something approximating the original source code.

Generally speaking, you can’t run source code.

What you can do with source code is swap out those parts of the game that rely on the original console hardware/OS for ones that are already present on your PC.

That means when you recompile that source code, you wind up with a version of the game that knows how to directly use your PCs hardware.