"Video games are a piece of our history, and we need to respect the fact that there is a "true" form they had when released. Imagine if we only had a JPEG of the Mona Lisa... etc"
I respect the work of the creator of BSNES, but somehow this does not really make sense to spend so much effort to achieve 100% accurate emulation. The essence of games is the playability, not in having the exact right timing from the hardware. I doubt that in the design document of super Mario, the game designers wrote that "a jump has to take 0.47s and no more, if not it will mess up the whole game!" -
There are very noticeable differences in speed and reactivity between arcade games and their ports on home consoles (at least 10-15 years ago it was certainly the case) and still gamers did not value their port "less" than the arcade ones. They were slightly different, but the essence of the game remained identical.
Humans are certainly able to adapt to get past these kind of details and still enjoy the experience. I'm pretty sure you would not find many players who could tell you, without direct comparison side by side, if a game is faster/slower than what it used to be on the actual hardware. It's not like having a JPEG of the Mona Lisa. For games, you'd need to be very, very acquainted with a certain game to know for sure the emulation is not right.
"Let's take the case of Speedy Gonzales. This is an SNES platformer with no save functionality, and it's roughly 2-3 hours long. At first glance, it appears to run fine in any emulator. Yet once you reach stage 6-1, you can quickly spot the difference between an accurate emulator and a fast one: there is a switch, required to complete the level, where the game will deadlock if a rare hardware edge case is not emulated. One can imagine the frustration of instantly losing three hours of progress and being met with an unbeatable game. Unless the software does everything in the exact same way the hardware used to, the game remains broken."
Yes, I have read it. I agree about this point, this is where good emulation is very relevant.
However the BSNES creator also makes the point about the importance of having accurate speed, and this is where I fail to see the critical issue of having +/- 10-1% in speed in a game. Most of the time it does not break the game itself.
These exact emulations are important for speedrunning and other high-performance playthoughs. I know that several games (and I think Super Mario is among them) that don't accept Emulator speedruns as records because emulation errors make glitches that aren't possible on console are on emu and vice versa.
I respect the work of the creator of BSNES, but somehow this does not really make sense to spend so much effort to achieve 100% accurate emulation. The essence of games is the playability, not in having the exact right timing from the hardware. I doubt that in the design document of super Mario, the game designers wrote that "a jump has to take 0.47s and no more, if not it will mess up the whole game!" -
There are very noticeable differences in speed and reactivity between arcade games and their ports on home consoles (at least 10-15 years ago it was certainly the case) and still gamers did not value their port "less" than the arcade ones. They were slightly different, but the essence of the game remained identical.
Humans are certainly able to adapt to get past these kind of details and still enjoy the experience. I'm pretty sure you would not find many players who could tell you, without direct comparison side by side, if a game is faster/slower than what it used to be on the actual hardware. It's not like having a JPEG of the Mona Lisa. For games, you'd need to be very, very acquainted with a certain game to know for sure the emulation is not right.