I’ve fallen down the hole that is X4 Foundations. It is consuming my every waking thought. It has a frustrating learning curve and a lot of things to criticize but I do so love building my space empire and learning the subtler points of the game.

Software emulation is very much possible. There is software for x86 and even ARM processors that emulate PS1, PS2(doesn’t work great on ARM I many cases) and PS3 (x86 only currently)which work well enough. If Sony cared to they could develop their own software emulation layer to run on PS5 to run just about everything from the previous generation.

Also Microsoft had similar issues in hardware emulation because, while the original Xbox and the Xbox one were on x86, the 360 was a Power PC architecture similar in some ways to the PS3 which ran Power PC with other proprietary coprocessors. They had to develop a Power PC emulator in software to run 360 games on the Xbox one.

If you haven’t had the joy of perusing it-he.org I highly recommend it for the various “anti-walkthroughs” as the creator of the website has dubbed them. I’m always on the lookout for modern games that are broken in the kinds of ways that allow an anti-walkthrough but it seems quality control has generally improved for most of the gaming industry and it is difficult to achieve such a feat in many games without speed runner like tactics and abilities.