> its not like the people downloading/running ZSNES are under some illusion > of accuracy.
Actually, yeah, it is. The majority of casual people downloading emulators and using them to play ROMs don't know the first thing about accuracy. Since they don't know anything about it, they go with something like ZSNES, or something like RetroArch, and just assume that it's accurate. They assume it's accurate because they don't even know that there is such a concept as accuracy in an emulator.
These are the same countless people, hobby programmers included, who have overlooked MESS simply because they didn't know it even existed, and for whom the merging of MAME and MESS has been a wake up call.
Most long-time emulation enthusiasts assume that every other emulator user is as aware of the history of emulation as they are, and that just isn't the case. The fact that the most common emulation-related searches on search engines turn up outdated, inaccurate emulators is actually, literally, a problem for those of us interested in accurate preservation of history. The average person is going to go through the path of least resistance.
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