What am I looking at? I can see it's a man page for some emulators but I feel like I'm missing some context. The site seems to be deliberately obtuse about what it is.
The link is interesting because these emulators seem to be part of the standard distribution of 9Front. Most likely those are written from scratch, given that Plan 9 is not a POSIX system (unless they are using http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/ape).
Ah that's the info I was missing, thanks! Indeed very interesting that emulators are part of the distribution.
The bug list is pretty darn unacceptable for a usable emulator.
You can’t even emulate PAL region games.
It’s a nice novelty that this is built in to the OS but the Linux/Android retro handheld scene is so much more wildly sophisticated than a half-broken command line emulator. Just jump on YouTube and search for an OnionOS overview to see what I mean.
Probably they would run faster and that's it.
Also, you can't compare GNU/Linux with 9front.
Why can’t I compare them? If someone wants to emulate games they ought to compare operating systems. Like I said, cool that 9front has a built in emulator, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good use case of the OS.
Edit: it's A POSIX Environment, but it still contains features that are unnatural in Plan9 and could by bypassed with more work, so much like emulation.