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Console ports rant
Consoles are good for one thing: console games. As substitutes for arcade games, they are pretty lame. Granted, things have gotten better since I was a kid. Back then, I'd try to play Donkey Kong or Moon Patrol on a console, and it would be a pathetic shell of the arcade game. Nowadays, many arcade games are based on console hardware, so the ports are much closer.
When I first started getting into emulation, I started with the Atari 2600 emulator Stella. But then I discovered MAME, and realized that I pretty much didn't care one bit about any console games. I used to use the console as a substitute for the arcade. Now that I didn't have to, why would I bother with consoles?
I often see people suggest that to verify something in MAME, someone should try the SNES version or the 32X version or the PSX version. This is completely useless advice, and in fact is outright detrimental to the goal of achieving accurate arcade emulation! Please don't waste anyone's time thinking this is a good idea.
Most console ports are just that: ports. They were done by people with access to the game source code, and that code was recompiled and hacked to run on the target platform. But in order to implement the video and sound for a given console, you pretty much have to rewrite that code -- and those are the exact areas where people are often suggesting to check the console for comparison! Furthermore, gameplay is often tweaked for consoles, in order to make the game more appealing as a console game. And since console ports generally don't have DIP switches, how do you know that the console port is configured the same way as the arcade? The answer is: you don't.
Now, one could argue that if the console port was in fact emulated, then it could be used as a reference for MAME. However, this is also a bad assumption. Those console emulators are written under time pressure and tweaked to run on the lower end CPU hardware that is in consoles. Shortcuts are taken for playability's sake. And once they ship, they are never revisited if a subtle timing error is found or some other minor bug is found. You don't see console authors going back and fixing the old Taito drivers that mostly worked but weren't quite 100% accurate, do you?
In short, if you don't have a real arcade PCB with the real arcade hardware, then you really can't verify anything in MAME in a way that helps us confirm anything. End rant.