Emulation

In digital preservation, emulation is a technical strategy employed to artificially replicate the environment in which a digital object was originally created. Where
digital objects have significant executable or interactive elements (a computer game, for instance; or a legacy metadata wrapper), it may be safer and more cost effective to recreate an object’s original technical platform than to migrate individual object to a new format. See also: Migration.
Reference: NOF Digitisation Guidelines [http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/nof/support/manual/digital-preservation/intro.htm#Technology%20emulation].