Funny that they are finally starting to bypass a few of the protections of the closed-source version of the Homebrew channel. This highlights how hard it can be to accurately emulate some hardware (mis)features.
I'd have to dig up the old code but I'm fairly sure some of them rely on an operating system (Nintendo IOS, unrelated to both Cisco's IOS and Apple's iOS) running on the co-processor (nicknamed "Starlet"). Dolphin doesn't emulate that part at all because IOS exposes a high-level interface that can just be emulated instead. Works amazingly well for games, but will probably trip our protections.
I think a lot of software companies would do like what you did. Where they would check for some sort of thing that should be there, or not, or too much of something. But the emulator would or would not have it. I think in many cases it would be things like checking to see if 512k of memory was available, when the real box would have 128k. That was usually for things like copiers I think?
[1] https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/02/01/dolphin-progress-rep...
What makes you think we did it for any of those reasons? And how does us abusing hardware bugs make video game preservation any harder?
This was not for a commercial game, this was for an entry point to load your own software on a locked down video game console.
And back then people were selling our (free!) software and we added those protections to make sure we could show a "you have been scammed if you paid for this" screen that couldn't be removed. Unfortunately that also meant breaking our loader from running in emulators, but that didn't matter at all: Those could just directly launch actual .elf files anyway and didn't need the detour through the homebrew channel.
The code (minus those protections) for the Homebrew Channel is also available as open source these days.