Emulado

Emulado is the past participle of emular in Spanish and Portuguese, meaning emulated or imitated. In computing, emulation refers to the recreation of the behavior of one computer system using a different host system, allowing software and peripherals designed for the original system to operate on other hardware.

An emulator models the target system's hardware in software, implementing the processor's instruction set, memory map, input/output devices, timing and peripheral behavior. Emulation can be done by interpretation, dynamic recompilation (just-in-time translation), or a combination of approaches to balance compatibility and performance.

Types range from full-system emulators that replicate an entire machine to application-level emulators that run programs intended for another platform. Emulation differs from virtualization, which shares the host's hardware with a guest system rather than fully imitating a separate architecture. Legal and practical issues include licensing of ROMs and BIOS images and the copyright status of preserved software.

Applications include video game preservation and retro gaming, software development for alternate platforms, and archival research. Notable emulators include QEMU (general-purpose system emulation), MAME (arcade hardware), DOSBox (DOS environments), Dolphin (GameCube/Wii), PCSX2 (PlayStation 2), openMSX (MSX family), and RetroArch with multiple cores.

Note: In Spanish and Portuguese, emulado may also describe a person or thing that imitates another, or an action performed to imitate; the context can indicate whether the meaning is nominally about imitation or about software emulation.