Ah yeah true, no I don't think you're misunderstanding. Actually sorry I misspoke - what I've seen in the game re/decomp projects is that the binary gets turned into a direct C implementation of the instruction stream, and it's basically a sort of emulation with CPU/memory state and emulation of whatever hardware it might need to talk to.

I agree on this description. It looks like a wrapper for an app alias demo, not a generalization for all app following the hardware possibilities at the time.

On the other hand, at least these folks build and create and I prefer wrapper demos instead of a perfect emulator that will never finish.

Nevertheless, on the feature side of these wrappers I really miss a fast-forward option. If you go pseudo-emulation, then at least come up with some convenience features.

Maybe this is the irony: the ff button is perfectly legit, I used mine many times with the 486DX3-100 and Pentium 133. Back then it was called turbo button.