Probably not a good as the original games. It's hard to capture that feeling now with newer games... well, it can be done with homebrew but big devs...
I further doubt it was never documented before. Just because something fails to turn up on Google, it doesn't mean the internet never talked about it...
GDEMU clones are not expensive? Hm, most clones I saw were in the 150-300 euro range. In comparason, a 50 CDR spindle is around 15 euros. But, yeah,...
