And incredibly annoying as the developer - so much work translating and debugging gates, and it's still not "correct" for some definition of correct ;)
Reminds me of hearing about how Crash Bandicoot was developed, as well as being something of a masterpiece in itself they successfully debugged an issue that caused the memory card to get corrupted when the controller was touched in a certain way. I can't remember the precise reason but they eventually discovered that running one of the chips at a higher frequency introduced subtle electrical interference with nearby components on the board. This was after much debugging for a supposed software issue in the memory card logic. I often think of that when I have a tricky bug to sort out.
If you want a great and long read, Andy Gavin has a pretty extensive series about Crash Bandicoot on his blog, some entries more technical than others. I've never even played the games for more than a few minutes, but I had a great time reading through these
Don't be too annoyed. There are significant differences across models and even batches within the same generation of system. There is no completely correct definition of a system.
Some of these differences are CPU observable, so I made this ROM to identify different Game Boy models and revisions:
https://github.com/mattcurrie/which.gb
So is this saying that a possible modern day commercial for a Game Boy might feature: "The artisanal properties of the Nintendo Game Boy make each and every one a unique playing experience!"?
I guess it's impossible to ever have it correct. The gates are just another level of abstraction. You could also simulate the silicon atoms and the electrons flowing and use that to have transistors and then gates. And so on.
