its not very hard actually - you can map the PPC instruction set to the x86 one with a bit of framework around it. more trivially you can write a C program to p

its not very hard actually - you can map the PPC instruction set to the x86 one with a bit of framework around it. more trivially you can write a C program to perform the same functionality as the original CPU. what this means is that you don't have to re-write the game at all - you run the original compiled code, just not on hardware. I did this many years ago when I learned about the existence of the x86 instruction set as a stepping stone towards understanding/making interpreters, virtual machines and compilers. I recommend anyone do it as a learning exercise. This stuff is incredibly simple at its core but there is a common misconception because it is 'low level' that is is some how hard or complicated... Once i knew it was just simple instructions, registers and a few flags coupled with a memory model it was obvious how to achieve... you write C functions for the various flavours of ADD, SUB, LEA, MOV, FSTP, ADDPS etc. by iterating through the stream of bytes and interpreting them in the same way as the CPU (this is always described in the CPU manual in my experience) you can call the right ones in the right sequence. you use some appropriate blob of memory for your registers, flags and other CPU state and some big array of bytes for your emulated memory... this is what an emulator is at the simplest level, an interpreter for CPU instructions. (of course making the implementation of instructions might necessitate that you do more - e.g. emulating memory, BIOS or more...)