High-level emulation

High-level emulation (HLE) is an approach for construction of emulators, especially for video game consoles, which attempts to simulate the response of the system rather than accurately recreating its internal design.

Instead of trying to accurately create or recreate the hardware gate by gate, in HLE a software platform is created on which the emulated code can be run in a host computer having different hardware and a different instruction set. The effort focuses on recreating the appropriate functionality provided by the system emulated. Thus, the emphasis is shifted from the most efficient method of processing data to getting the same (or comparable) results as if the native platform was used. By contrast, the traditional way of emulating is termed Low-level emulation, or LLE which is used to develop new computer hardware and execute legacy binary code.