Question about cycle counting accuracy when emulating a CPU

Question

I am planning on creating a Sega Master System emulator over the next few months, as a hobby project in Java (I know it isn\'t the best language for this but I find it very

Answer 1

Was a quite interesting article on Arstechnica talking about console simulation recently, also links to quite a few simulators that might make for quite good research:

Accuracy takes power: one man's 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator

The relevant bit is that the author mentions, and I am inclined to agree, that most games will appear to function pretty correctly even with timing deviations of +/-20%. The issue you mention looks likely to never really introduce more than a fraction of a percent timing error, which is probably imperceptible whilst playing the final game. The authors probably didn't consider it worth dealing with.