CG Education. Accuracy takes power: one man’s 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator. Emulators for playing older games are immensely popular online, with regular arguments breaking out over which emulator is best for which game.
Today we present another point of view from a gentleman who has created the Super Nintendo emulator bsnes. He wants to share his thoughts on the most important part of the emulation experience: accuracy. It doesn't take much raw power to play Nintendo or SNES games on a modern PC; emulators could do it in the 1990s with a mere 25MHz of processing power. But emulating those old consoles accurately—well, that's another challenge entirely; accurate emulators may need up to 3GHz of power to faithfully recreate aging tech.