> I'm of the belief that hardware is not truly preserved until you have a fully-accurate emulation of it. This makes sense in principle, but exact emulation i

> I'm of the belief that hardware is not truly preserved until you have a fully-accurate emulation of it. This makes sense in principle, but exact emulation is something computationally prohibitive even for a (probably) 386¹. The computational problems of exact emulation have been described in a famous article about emulating the SNES². I suppose that emulating even "just" a superscalar architecture is going to be prohibitive (due to the split into micro ops), and an out-of-order one would probably require transistor-level emulation (or at least, another, lower, level of emulation). ¹=Fairly arbitrary; I'm basing this just on the complexity of emulating the SNES, and the following considerations. ²=https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-one-mans-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-...