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Newer emulators tend to favor [[High/Low level emulation|High-Level Emulation (HLE) as opposed to Low-Level Emulation (LLE)]], which '''may''' results in lower accuracy because as supposed to mimicking the hardware these games were released on, High-Level emulators mimic how the games themselves behaved on the desired system. While emulators like [[Dolphin]] favor accuracy but still retain HLE for performance and have successfully used it to an advantage, these types of exceptions are uncommon and it can still hinder accuracy.

An emulator isn't accurate when it has a large amount of visual and audio glitches and favors performance as much as possible. To work around these glitches, emulator developers typically include game-specific hacks (and prioritize popular games) to skip over problems, such as compatibility issues that can cause games to break. Many times, these emulators will be deemed incompatible with the less popular (obscure) games. As Near (then known as byuu) explains in a 2011 Ars Technica article linked below, ''Speedy Gonzales: Los Gatos Bandidos'' will soft lock towards the end due to a specific hardware edge case that isn't emulated in [[ZSNES]] or [[Snes9x]], but is properly dealt with in his own emulator [[higan]] due to his documentation of the system. This can also become very problematic when ROM hacks abuse software errors (aka. emulator oversights) to create otherwise impossible behaviors to achieve what they can. When a ROM hack can only be used in that one specific emulator, he explains, it becomes incompatible with real hardware (either through a flash cart or printed), and that such an issue has occurred with [[ZSNES]] before and continues to occur with Nintendo 64 ROM hacks.

High accuracy is a level of precision that emulator developers strive for when achieving [[#Cycle_accuracy|cycle accuracy]] or even [[#Partial cycle-accuracy|partial-cycle accuracy]] is not practical or necessary. In this approach, the emulator replicates the components of the original system as closely as possible, aiming for a faithful reproduction of the system's behavior. The pursuit of high accuracy often results in the need for more processing power, leading to fewer audio and visual glitches and improved handling of edge cases used by creative game programmers. Emulators with high accuracy may or may not be cycle-accurate, but they generally exhibit a notable level of fidelity to the original hardware. Achieving 100% compatibility with commercially released games is a common goal for emulators with high accuracy.