alt Hacker News> PSP games running in the browser without an emulator. The game's MIPS machine code is translated ahead of time into C++, compiled to WebAssembly, and linked against a small reimplementation of the PSP's operating system and graphics chip that draws with WebGL2.
Feels slightly pedantic to point this out, but this describes an emulation stack. A lot of emulators are already doing some kind of lift+JIT on the target's machine code (just not through WASM)
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That's almost what WINE does which is, apparently, not an emulator. Small reimplementation of Windows userspace and translates DirectX to Vulkan/OpenGL. So if I do x86 -> ARM binary translation AOT and run that with WINE, is it an emulator?
It appears to me like an emulator where the binary is just compiled in based on the huge amount of code like this:
https://github.com/jessicanataliagta/PSPRecomp/blob/main/pro...
I think of an emulator as a separate project/product typically. Perhaps that's what they are saying?
Most people would say that Ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation or static recompilation is not considered traditional emulation.