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To start off with I apologize for getting into an "edit war" on the NES emulation page, I thought that my changes hadn't saved. I regarding to the changes, I was wondering what qualified as cycle accurate emulation. To my knowedge bsnes, cen64, gambatte, and I think bgb were the only cycle accurate emulators for nintendo consoles. What would you say qualifies as cycle accurate? Is there standard that an emulator needs to be to be cycle accurate, or is that just a term that is thrown around.
Cycle accurate simply means that the emulator syncs up to the clock cycle of the original console as closely as possible and will sync perfectly.
An extreme case of an emulator not caring about accurate timings, if you try playing The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on ZSNES, you'll notice that the intro doesn't sync up to the sound at all like it does on real hardware and more accurate emulators, such as SNES9x and bsnes. Another example is Star Fox on ZSNES, where the game runs at a much smoother framerate than the real hardware (without overclocking the SuperFX chip). An emulator doesn't have to advertise being cycle accurate to be cycle accurate. Take Stella for example. It is very hard to make a functional Atari 2600 emulator that is NOT cycle accurate, as many of the games rely heavilly on perfect timing. Stella doesn't say it's cycle accurate even though it is.
Check out this page for more info: http://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Emulation_Accuracy
