Recent consoles are well abstracted from the hardware. The only case where this is usually not true is the GPU, and it's rare to have something completely custom there nowadays (the 3DS and its weird PICA chip is very much the exception). Most of the difficulty is in properly emulating the operating system, and this is not helped by having SoC datasheets.

> Most of the difficulty is in properly emulating the operating system, and this is not helped by having SoC datasheets.

That’s assuming that you reimplement/HLE parts of the operating system rather than running the whole system in the emulator, in which case you wouldn’t need to care much about how the OS works. I suppose you think HLE is nevertheless easier overall?

Plus timing issues, bugs & errata, etc.

Meh. Timing issues become almost irrelevant in a world where consoles have dynamic clock scaling, deep sleep modes, etc. Games are usually not written around specific timings anymore.

Bugs and errata can be a concern (I think I remember some issues regarding PowerPC atomic instructions misbehaving on the Wii U for example) but I would expect them to be fairly minor compared to the whole work of REing a custom microkernel and its associated services.

Hopefully it will be comparatively easy. But (presumed) similarity is not a guarantee - see the XBox emulation: http://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Xbox_emulators#E...

yuzu is a fork of the Citra 3DS [1] emulator, maintained by the same people [2].

[1] https://citra-emu.org/ [2] https://yuzu-emu.org/