Why do emulators stutter the same was as my NES did?
I'm not asking why emulators run slow in general. I know there's a performance hit when you're faking being another OS. That's not what I'm asking, but that's all my web searching results.
I mean the game plays fine until it gets to a certain point in a certain level that I remember running slow all those years ago. Like there are 20 enemies on the screen or something and that's the same way the NES would lag 40 years ago.
The emulator is on my PC, which has orders of magnitude more power. Even accounting for emulation's inherent performance hit, it seems like it should be able to handle it.
Yea like others have said, you're operating under the assumption that the shortcomings of old hardware require modern revisionism. I guess what makes this particularly unattractive with that specific era of videogaming is that games ran so close to the hardware that overclocking it (in actuality or virtually) doesn't just fix those edge cases (if at all).
Most games/software developed for chips like that of the NES rely on a predictable environment. You can't possibly know how a specific game will react to an increase in clockspeed.
Later generations like the PS1 are less susceptible to this. Emulators of the PS1 can't just bump the clockspeeds, they can also run at modern resolutions like 1080p and higher.