The question most casual emulator users, and even some classic game enthusiasts are often asking can be summed up as: what’s the difference? If it looks good enough, runs smooth enough and works without bugs, why should we care if the emulation is really not all that accurate?
The simple answer to this is: Accurate emulation teaches us things that we might not yet know about popular software. Let’s take an example. Everybody knows the Legend of Zelda – along with Mario Bros, it’s one of the oldest and most popular games that were ever created on any classic platform. Everybody who ever played Zelda for any period of time remembers the spinning tri-force animation sequence from the game opening. Now, take that snippet of animation and compare the way it looks and runs on any two different modern emulators. In this example, lets take two that everyone is familiar with: ZSNES and bsnes.
When you run Legend of Zelda on ZSNES, you’ll notice that the animation in question runs way to fast to be considered accurate. The tri-forces will spin way to fast on ZSNES because the ZSNES emulated CPU is running at almost 50% more speed than the processor in the original Super Nintendo Entertainment System. This may look like small details, but just imagine trying to avoid and dodge projectiles that some boss is shooting at your game character. Everyone knows that was made to be as hard as possible, and you really don’t want them to run almost 50% faster.
Dozens of games developed for older computers suffer from weird little quirks. It’s often the case that the correct way of emulation that is supposed to be closer to the original will actually produce a result that looks and feels wrong. Take Super Bonk for an example. it’s demo desynchronizes, causing the player to get stuck close to a wall on most real systems. Star Fox suffers from serious slowdowns throughout all the levels of the game. No one actually wants games to act this way, but those are actually the correct results. Trying to emulate just what we consider good and getting rid of the more difficult aspects of classic computer titles would be like trying to round up the number Pi down to two decimals.
The advantages of treating vintage games as a bases that can be improved on with modern knowledge and means are obvious. If you are going down this path, you can make Nintendo 64 games that run at high definition 1080p upscaling and have high-resolution textures, and also enable anti-aliasing while you are at it. The games emulated this way will look better than the original, and while there’s nothing wrong in trying to use all the advantages of modern hardware, it’s something of a missed point. To “improve” games classic games in this way will make the possibility of accurate, correct emulation that more difficult, if not impossible, and most users like classic games exactly for their quirks and that retro look anyway.