latest generation consoles are too high tech. I mean a legal way not like people who make emulators. How do people who make emulators get their knowledge? is such knowledge legal? I don't want to reinvent the wheel but how would I learn the fundamentals if I did want to reinvent the wheel?

Are you talking about making a physical game console or a software emulator of some kind?

I am interested in how one can obtain the knowledge legally for both

Most folks in this forum support the ideal of "Knowledge should be free" .

To program an emulator, you must know what type of system the games were written for, and EXACTLY how the system and game interacted .

This takes a lot of knowledge of hardware, firmware, and software.

Learning each system can take months of study ... for example HERE is the basics of the guts of an N64 .

Of course there can be "shortcuts" if you know exactly how the games were codded ... another N64 example .

Thanks Shippou but are those the only places to get knowledge about the n64? some parts do not make sense I have seen the second site before but I thought it did not cover everything and what it covered was not very elaborate. I am glad people on this forum believe knowledge should be free I am more motivated to seek that knowledge now does nintendo have a problem with sharing that information and how do employees get that knowledge if they have not directly worked on manufacturing and designing the hardware of the n64 console. It seems only few can know that knowledge

There's a lot of information online, of course those are not the only places to get it.

Most of the times, to create an emulator people search for documentation of the CPU or any other piece (if you open a NES console you can see the processor model and you can search for the instruction set). If there's no documentation for a certain piece, they reverse engineer the hardware. I'm not sure if it's legal or not but I guess it's legal, as long as you don't create the same thing with that knowledge. Another source of information could be the emulator's code itself, if it's accurate you could get some details there.

The thing is that reverse ingineering a piece of hardware is HARD, even understanding the documentation could be a hard task. That's why emulators take years to be developed, and even the most advanced ones have issues with some games.

Anyway, why would you create a console with outdated hardware? You can create a console with current hardware and it will probably be a lot easier. Understading an old hardware could be fun, and could be usefull to write an emulator or a compatible console, but I don't see the advantages of using that knowledge to create something new.

Hardware would be nothing compared to fact you would need a custom OS for your console. You can dwell into some Unix core, write driver for your GPU issued inside, and provide development kits for your setup.

I was worried I would have to know reverse engineering of hardware where can I learn these skills? the problem is most hardware electronics used in consoles are probably designed heavily on a computer so you can't backtrace the steps used to make the electronics details. I just graduated from electrical engineering though. Sorry if my writing seems disordered

The Dreamcast had/has a big homebrew scene - you might look into homebrew dev for that console. You can buy used Dreamcasts for ~$25 or so.

Matter of fact, you can just google "<consolename> homebrew development" for your consoles of choice. Some will require you to buy more hardware than others - unless your PC has ports for writing N64 cartridges.

Or you can get something like the Ouyo which encourages homebrew, or look into the Pandora.

You might also be interested in the Raspberry PI, or similar offerings.

[Edit:] I misread the subject as "How do I develop for a console"

Thanks