[matheusmoreira]

Hardware emulation is also just as impenetrable as the original systems themselves. Software emulation serves as documentation for the hardware and is therefore much better at preserving that knowledge.

[emodendroket]

You could look at the Verilog/VHDL/whatever they use, right? Either way the source code has to be available for it to be useful in that way.

[monocasa]

Sticking another emulator under a decompiler is probably at least a couple orders of magnitude easier than looking at an FPGA bitstream. Particularly for the kinds of people who hack on emulators.