This is so wrong on multiple levels. First, self-modifying code is still extremely present on modern consoles, at least on the current generation (PS3/X360/Wii

This is so wrong on multiple levels. First, self-modifying code is still extremely present on modern consoles, at least on the current generation (PS3/X360/Wii/WiiU). Loading code from external media is basically the same problem as self-modifying code (statically recompiling it is trivially equivalent to solving the halting problem). Second, modern hardware might be similar, but game consoles SDKs export a lot more features to the developers than PC drivers do through DX/GL. The example I take every time is fetch shaders on the WiiU: these are a kind of shaders supported by AMD R600 GPUs but completely abstracted by DX/GL. Third, maybe there is no more mid-scanline framebuffer tricks, but you have a ton of other problems with the framebuffer: while a PC assumes separate CPU/GPU memory, on modern consoles the framebuffer (and a few textures) are often stored in memory that is shared and synchronized with both CPU and GPU. This is incredibly hard to emulate because a full GPU->CPU FB transfer induces a lot of latency (several hundreds of us last time I checked). IGPs and APUs make this problem a bit more manageable, but we're still missing the graphics API support for shared FB and shared textures. Some things are better than older consoles but some other things are also a lot worse. JIT-ing shader bytecode is another problem that I don't think has been tackled yet (except maybe for Xbox emulation - which is still in its infancy and for a console using a very old GPU with no use of stuff like compute shaders).