[chrissmithuk]

Not really. The OS syscall interface, ABI and the fact everything is abstracted via your C compiler normalises the differences between the machines pretty well meaning you only end up dealing with portability issues.

Portability issues is where real hardware benefits. It's where you have battles of unusual register sizes, endianess, host/network order differences, different memory models and memory protection, different performance characteristics, different timings and different exploits.

Unless the emulation is 100% accurate, including timing, which is a really difficult thing to do (look at the effort MAME goes to), then the benefits over real hardware is moot.

Emulators are also expensive to write due to the above, have their own bugs and don't always recreate the bugs in the real hardware (which are sometimes exploitable).

[rbanffy]

I was thinking about MAME (more specifically, about MESS). If two groups benefit from a single effort, it seems to be an good investment, even if it costs nearly twice as much.

Also, using emulated hardware could cut down the usage of the real pieces, which could then be better studied and preserved. Doing less builds on vintage hardware is, actually, a good idea.