It's like a really complicated puzzle. I have this game that's not working, and I have this 2 GiB trace log of millions of lines of CPU instructions and registers. I have to sort through it to understand where things went wrong. Sometimes it's obvious and takes five minutes, sometimes it takes two weeks and is mind-bending (like a loop reading from a non-existent I/O register that only breaks because eventually a DMA transfer occurs in between cycle instructions that fetches the correct value onto the data bus, which stays persistent through to the next cycle that compares the value read to finally break said loop.)

I really enjoyed over-architecting the code, and I would build these massively elaborate (read: slow) designs to handle the most ridiculous edge cases (like stacking Game Genie cartridges one after another recursively. It's an incredibly inefficient way of getting more cheat code slots, but you can do it on real hardware, and so I wanted to preserve that experience.)

> I don’t get the sense that it was something to do with making the people who used your emulators happy

That of course brought me joy as well. The tone of the farewell post aside, 98% of people throughout my time in emulation have been absolutely wonderfully supportive. It's meant the world to me.

> in a way where it’s not necessarily true that anyone else would have come along to do the same thing if you hadn’t done it.

I'm under no delusions of granduer, these were "just video games", but I definitely had the sense that if I didn't do this, no one else would. The SNES was a large part of my childhood, and I had the skill and time to do this, so I went for it.