How does emulation work?

[Cakeisawesome]

I need some help with the whole emulation thing... How does it work?

[robinelitenn]

hmm what you mean how it works :P? can you formulate little bettre? what is it in emulation you want to know or want to learn :P?

[mag1212]

emulation is many things

[mgX]

Emulator - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Cakeisawesome]

My friend said somthing about needing to copy realm data or somthing On WoW to make a private server and I wanted to know how to do it if you get my crappy explaination ;P

[Vindicated]

Are you looking for an in-depth, technical answer. Or a general Joe answer.

[Cakeisawesome]

Technical would work :P... xD

[Lonehwolf]

Well, as to how it works, rather than how to make it work yourself:

The WoW client you have is just like a cable that has to plugged into its port. The port being the server.

The client has all the visual content you see, the interface, the physics and such are all represented by the client.

But in the case of an MMO it needs a server that tells it what to does (e.g. show a character 2 meters in front of your character character, which is done by sending a string of values, known as coordinates) as well as various other things, spawning objects, mobs, their movement, behaviour, tackling damage values, rolling of dices, etc. are all done server side.

This is what Blizzard has running on their server computers: A core which supports all of that functionality. It serves all the clients as is necessary and shares/carries the various information around, while generating data.

An emulator is basically an attempt at rebuilding blizzard's core which allows the functionality of WoW. There are various emulators written in various languages, which basically manipulate data from the database and make various calculations that generate the results which are then sent to the players themselves, that makes the game what it is.

Now clearly, this wasn't technical, but I don't think a technical explanation would be something you'd quite grasp at this stage (no offense ). I'm guessing if you're really interested in learning about it and you'd like to work a bit with some basic stuff, you should contact someone who's hosting a server, rather than starting out by making the big step and starting your own.

Then again, that's how I grasped most of it, by just getting a dummy server up and running and poking around in the code, database, and see the results generated You can always drop me a pm if you want a convo going on this. Can't guarantee you I can answer everything though!