How do you learn to do this stuff?

[Weroxig]

I've been very interested in how/where and what emulator developers have to learn to do their craft.

Do you have formal training in this field? I'm guessing if you did computer science or software engineering at school, some kind of "operating system fundamentals" course is mandatory, but the one I did was very baseline. Also, I'm guessing these kinds of emulators calls for a lot of graphics knowledge, which wouldn't be part of a base computer science degree.

Do you specialise in areas which also happen to help you create this emulator? Personally, I only know C++ by itself, I can read individual parts of code in this repository just fine, but can't connect the dots on what the functions are doing together and how it's "emulating the system", so emulation projects always seem so insane to me. e.g. the best example would be the shader_recompiler/* files I can read c++ but what it's doing is so arcane to me, but is this standard spirv compilation code? or is it converting a custom ps4 shader format to spirv?

What kind of knowledge do you think someone (like me) would have to learn to at least begin having a chance to understand what emulator developers (like you) are doing?