It actually has been insane though. I remember as a kid losing my n64 in a flood and waiting months at a time for single bug fixes to pj64 and some other emulator, plus the graphics, audio, and control plugins. Then in recent years while I was too busy with work recomps like ship of harkinian dropped and gave native+ performance on literally any hardware.
Now on top of the existing iffy at best legality we have llm code, but its moving freakishly fast. Literally 2 days before ocarina released I tried it out on one of the myriad forks of the eden switch 1 emulator, and based on the before times I would have said its months away from 80% playable.
Its been 6 days? It started at playable if you are okay with relaunching to clear full screen graphical bugs and just tolerating things like leaves disappearing when you get close to them, or inconsistent fps that capped at maybe 46fps even for people with bleeding edge gpus. Now barring specific gpu issues you can expect fairly consistent 60 frames with some new scene hangups from shaders compiling, and maybe the occasional model flashing white or glow from behind geometry seams for like 1 frame. On a still decent am4 cpu and a 5700xt gpu.
It’s most definitely not just one kid’s multiple ai subscriptions though. Its like 30+ with some of them also having multiple. There are so many forks of forks of the emulators just cherrypicking single bug fixes amongst many that are just ai bullshit that only had the appearance of working under very specific conditions. Currently as the gamer finding which fork gives functional performance on your specific hardware is the hard part, but eventually the working fixes will consolidate on the main forks.
they need a “not happening”/“the damage has been done” option for how likely to subscribe again