Emulators that lack in accuracy but make up for that in speed definitely have their place in the rich emulation ecosystem. There’s nothing wrong with aiming for some quick, cheap fun on the quick – everyone, even the most die hard old console enthusiasts will sometimes find them selves in dire need of some quick emulation and not really care about being close to the original.
This is especially true for emulation on less powerful hardware. This can be older PCs, net-books, but most of these moderately accurate but lightning fast old game emulators are built to bring games from systems such as Sega Genesis, NeoGeo, old pre-Pentium PC systems and various Nintendo’s consoles to devices such are cell phones.
Processing power also needs electricity. If you are playing those good old games of your youth on a laptop, netbook or a tablet, how often did you find yourself surprised when you found out that that old Mario ROM you downloaded of the internet for free was draining your battery faster than the latest 3D shooter? That’s why you need an emulator that was coded for speed, not accuracy if you are planing on taking your games on the road.
Another obvious usage of less accurate emulation solutions would be the free online SNES, Mega Drive and similar emulation websites that you can find online. Although such websites run on servers that are just as strong, and often much stronger in pure processing muscle than your average home, office or gaming / multimedia rig, the fact that they serve their games through web browsers – often by using Flash or other CPU intensive technology for web multimedia content means that they need to carefully think about finding the balance between speed and accuracy. Often this balance goes in the favor of the latter.
Also important to notice in the above scenario: free online emulation websites are incredibly popular these days, and it’s often the case that they have several thousand, if not more users playing their favorite console games online at any time. This number of users can put a lot of strain on the servers, and even though most emulator websites run on distributed cluster systems, it’s important to manage the system load before it becomes too much.
Blindly chasing speed when it comes to arcade and vintage console emulation will most likely only take you to a wall. Here’s a quick example: Drawing shadows under objects was a really tough task for hardware back in the day, so they used to create complicated hardware circuits to achieve it. Most accurate emulators can’t really replicate those circuits accurately enough for shadows present in the games to be the same as they are when those games are played on the original hardware. This may not seem like a big deal, but imagine playing a game where you are flying a plane over the land, and dropping bombs on the targets below you. Developers often used shadows as a targeting system – so if the shadows are off, how can you expect to hit your target when it matters?