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To my knowlage, an emulator turns machine code for a console into something that your computer can understand. For example, assembly code from a Gamecube game is not the same as from a .exe file. That said, why are multiple emulators needed to run games that are on platforms that run 6502 code. Shouldn't there just be a 6502 emulator that runs all 6502 platforms?

While 6502 was common, it wasn't the exact same thing between two different machines. That's where the term "modified 6502" comes from. Also, there are emulators that run multiple platforms, like Bizhawk.

There are many answers to this and none might satisfy you.

• First of all, an Emulator doesn't just do a CPU, but a machine. The same way you can't run an NES game on an Apple II. So while one may do multiple ones, different can do the hob as well.




• Furthermore, there are different target platforms. Linux isn't Windows which again isn't MacOS and so on. Like any other application an emulator needs to interact with the platform it's runing on - especially for tasks like timing and graphics on frame level a rather tight integration is needed - unsing functions that are greaty different on each OS




• Similar, not only OSes do provide an enironment to adapt to, generic Emulators (like Mame), or Browsers do as well, requireing similat adaptions.




• Last but not least, since when has the existance of an implementation (here a 6502 Emulator) ever stoped a developer from writing his own implementation?