[Borealid]

This is conceptually similar to Ship of Harkinian ( https://www.shipofharkinian.com/ ). If someone cares enough about a particular game to put this level of tailored work into it, wonderful.

There is a down side, though: because emulators handle a much wider variety of games, they get better feature sharing for things like save states, shaders, controller bindings, etc. With libretro things even go a step beyond that and different systems' games can all share the same launcher UI and the same support for things like RetroAchievements!

So a recompiled version is better from a performance standpoint, and might have more game-specific quality of life features, but it also means more development time is devoted to that particular game.