Interesting. The mentioned emulator (bsnes) appears to have source code in the Ubuntu repositories, so I'm going to try taking a look at it.
On an unrelated note, does anyone here have a sense of how useful semi-specialized hardware could be for emulators. Obviously emulating a specific system in hardware is easy (at least in principle). However, would it be possible to create hardware specialized for emulators in general. This would probably be multi-core devices that could synchronize between cores at a configurable rate. The obvious downside to any hardware approach is that if the assumptions are wrong, it is likely far more difficult to patch the problem with sacrificing most of the benefits hardware gives you.
On an unrelated note, does anyone here have a sense of how useful semi-specialized hardware could be for emulators. Obviously emulating a specific system in hardware is easy (at least in principle). However, would it be possible to create hardware specialized for emulators in general. This would probably be multi-core devices that could synchronize between cores at a configurable rate. The obvious downside to any hardware approach is that if the assumptions are wrong, it is likely far more difficult to patch the problem with sacrificing most of the benefits hardware gives you.