Where we are
Today, SNES emulation is in a very good place. Barring unusual peripherals that are resistant to emulation (such as
a light-sensor based golf club, an
exercise bike, or a dial-up modem
used to place real-money bets on live horse races in Japan), every officially licensed SNES title is fully playable, and no game is known to have any glaring issues.
SNES emulation has gotten so precise that I've even taken to splitting my emulator into two versions:
higan, which focuses on absolute accuracy and hardware documentation; and
bsnes, which focuses on performance, features, and ease of use.
Some amazing things have come out of SNES emulation recently, including:
... and much more!
So that's it, right? Kudos on a job well done, thanks for all the fish? Well... not quite.
Today, we enjoy cycle-level accuracy for nearly every component of the SNES. The sole exception is the PPUs (picture processing units), which are used to generate the video frames sent to your screen. We
mostly know how the PPUs work, but we have to make guesses for some functionality that result in less than total perfection.
The remaining issues are relatively small ones, in the grand scheme of things. If you're not interested in the pursuit of one hundred percent faithful emulation perfection for its own sake, I am not going to be able to convince you of the need for improving SNES PPU emulation further. As with any goal in life, the closer we get to perfection, the smaller the returns.
I can tell you why this is important to
me: it's my life's work, and I don't want to have to say I came
this close to finishing without getting the last piece of it right. I'm getting older, and I won't be around forever. I want this final piece solved so that I can feel confident in my retirement that the SNES has been faithfully and completely preserved through emulation. No stone was left unturned, no area left unfinished. I want to say that it's
done.