Reminded of this incredible Ars Technica article on why it's so hard to build a good emulator. In short, you need to emulate all of the hardware features and al

Reminded of this incredible Ars Technica article on why it's so hard to build a good emulator. In short, you need to emulate all of the hardware features and all of the bugs, which have now become features that some games depend on. "It is possible for a well-optimized, speed-oriented SNES emulator to run at full speed using only 300MHz of processing power. You will also end up with hundreds of obscure bugs. What typically happens is that the problems are specifically hacked around. Both ZSNES and Snes9X contain internal lists of the most popular fifty or so games. When you load those games, the emulators tweak their timing values and patch out certain areas of code to get these games running. It's an improvement over the Nesticle days of the games themselves being hacked externally, but it is still cheating, regardless of the visual end results. The casual gamer who only plays the most popular twenty or so titles will see no visible differences between an emulator requiring 300MHz and another requiring 3GHz, so they will of course go with the former. Although I do respect and appreciate speed-oriented emulators, one concerned with accuracy can't help but lament the way this approach stalls progress. Without more players using the more accurate emulators, we won't find the bugs in all the games the emulator supports. The more people we have playing the games in the way they were intended, the better the emulator can become as issues are found and stomped out—not by fixing specific code for each game, but by fixing the accuracy of the emulator." http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-one-mans-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator/ http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-o...