> If your goal is to play a perfectly cycle accurate emulation of your game without worrying about emulated transistor state at every clock edge, then a CPU can

> If your goal is to play a perfectly cycle accurate emulation of your game without worrying about emulated transistor state at every clock edge, then a CPU can do just fine CPU limitations are reached long before emulating a system at gate level! I think emulating a lowly 1 MHz 6502 at gate level could not run anywhere near realtime — even without any support chips. As someone who has written CPU based emulators, accurately synchronizing between multiple video, audio etc. support chips and even other CPUs can be very very difficult to do in real time. Trying to leverage modern multi-core CPUs has no advantage over single core ones, because inter-CPU synchronization latency far exceeds theoretical gains. You can get pretty close by cheating a bit as long as no software depends on exact timing. That's what most CPU based emulators do. I believe we should try to accurately preserve these early systems for the future generations. They'll be part of our cultural heritage and history.