Aside from one lame comment, your post hasn't illicit any flammes afaics.
I just have to say: Excellent article. I wholeheartedly agree with you. As you no doubt know, this issue has been raised in the past. Namely by Matthew Kendora and (a -few-) others. Like I've said before,I've always agreed that the right way to do emulation is to try to virtually recreate the actual hardware as close as you possibly can. That includes original hardware limitations among other things.Well, that includes -everything- that the hardware was..how it behaved, how it did -not- behave.. Basically I believe that emulation should be used as a replacement for the real (commercially dead) console/arcade/computer, as these hardwares are not immortals. Edit: Of course the end goal of emulation will always be about playing the games,but emulating correctly the hardware should always be the mean to achieve this goal.
It seem that most people fall in the "software" category. As long as the games run more or less correctly from a user's pov,everything's fine.
When the emulator fails to recreate an aspect of the original hardware because the coders just don't know any better, that's forgivable. But when the author(s) just doesn't care about accuracy because "it's fine the (inaccurate) way it is"...that's a bit of a shame.
The problem with inaccurate emulation is that it may very well create game bugs that are not apparent to most.(Maybe because no one played the game on the original hardware in the first place) We all know about the really obvious stuff, the emulation bugs that everyone complains about, but what about the subtle stuff? These suble bugs (caused by loose and inexact emulation) will always remains because no one bothered to do things the correct way. So it goes far beyond a pseudo-meta-physical compulsion to recreate every aspect of the hardware just for the sake of it...Ultimately,inaccurate emulation DO affect the games. What you end up with is games that runs -mostly- like they did on the original system. Regrettably, for most people that's good enough.
(Yeah,I realise since this was posted the convertation has moved on but just for sake of putting my own 2 cents in..)By the way, it -may- be possible that some games take advantage of this. Think about it like this: When the SNES first powers on, you check $7ffffe, if it's set to #$1337, then you know that the SNES was reset. If it's not, then you know the system was just powered on. Then you store #$1337 at $7ffffe. Now you can display, say, the company logos and all that junk upon powerup. But when you reset, rather than show all that again, you can just jump directly to the title screen. Just a thought...
Indeed..it's not just a possibility but a plain old fact. Many games did not reset high-scores and/or options settings upon reset. I posted a thread in the old forum about this issue. I'm glad to see it's been fixed.