My experience contradicts that. The video game emulators I know of were written at about the time that the fastest of desktop cpus was just fast enough to run some of the games usually near realtime, with plenty of others still too slow to be playable. Emulated games may not become popular until you can run them reliably with plenty of leeway, but people start trying as soon as it’s barely feasible. Though it is also true that the barely feasible point is when the computers are a bunch faster than the consoles, since you lose an order of magnitude or so in emulation overhead.
My experience contradicts that. The video game emulators I know of were written at about the time that the fastest of desktop cpus was just fast enough to run some of the games usually near realtime, with plenty of others still too slow to be playable. Emulated games may not become popular until you can run them reliably with plenty of leeway, but people start trying as soon as it’s barely feasible. Though it is also true that the barely feasible point is when the computers are a bunch faster than the consoles, since you lose an order of magnitude or so in emulation overhead.