Also, although the above is probably not the best case scenario comparison on the software side (MAME on an underpowered laptop), having written an emulator myself (not necessarily a great one), and particularly going through a convenient portability layer like SDL, there's just a lot of code between you and the hardware, which itself isn't representative of what you're emulating - for instance, sound and video are running at different clock rates and will drift apart, whereas on real hardware there's a single oscillator driving everything, so you have to jump through hoops to adapt the sound to the video rate, and latency creeps in.

If you are playing on a CRT, definitely. FPGA hardware emulation is sufficiently accurate that those with CRTs can use lightguns and have them work as expected.

I personally am not wild about latency issues, I didn't expect to really feel a difference between a good emulator and the MiSTer when I built one a few years ago, I was just bored and looking for a new toy which I could justify as a development tool to learn FPGAs if it didn't work out.

The first game I played on it, Sonic 2, I was shocked how much I could immediately feel the difference compared the RetroPi instance I normally played on.

It does depend on the game and platform though, I can't tell the difference when playing Super Mario All-Stars for example, but SMB1 is night and day.

In general the more "to the metal" the platform was, the more critical clock-accurate emulation of every component is to correct software operation, the more the FPGA helps. Modern platforms with buffers everywhere are less tightly coupled. I don't understand, for example, the desire for Dreamcast FPGA emulation. Once we got to the point of framebuffered 3D and PCM audio being the standard, when consoles started to gain operating systems, IMO the cost/benefit analysis just doesn't play out. Those platforms are usually quite friendly to efficient high-level emulation and don't require the level of low-level clock-for-clock perfection that a "racing the beam" era platform does.

It is worth noting that there is no inherent reason a FPGA hardware emulation would be more accurate than a software emulation, it's just that FPGAs make synchronizing the emulated components at a cycle-accurate level so much easier than it is in software. Doing it in software usually requires a lot of CPU cycles which means you need a beast of a machine to run it at full speed (see all the articles early in bsnes' existence about how it needed a top end PC of the time just to play in real-time) but if you have the cycles available it can be done.

Latency is another matter, a software emulator running on a normal mainstream PC operating system has a lot of layers between it and the hardware that a FPGA doesn't, so the FPGA will always win there. In theory when using native inputs and analog outputs latency is exactly identical to the real thing.

https://hard-drive.net/hd/video-games/spend-80-snes-classic-...