Accuracy takes power: one man’s 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator

It's interesting to know how much effort is put into making a good emulator. Especially the part with reverse engineering the coprocessors inside some of the cartridges:

> LLE is also a very expensive operation, monetarily speaking: to obtain the DSP program code requires melting the integrated circuit with nitric acid, scanning in the surface of a chip with an electron microscope, and then either staining and manually reading out or physically altering and monitoring the traces to extract the program and data ROMs. This kind of work can cost up to millions of dollars to have done professionally, depending upon the chip's complexity, due to the extremely specialized knowledge and equipment involved.