It doesn't ignore it; it explicitly says "Lots of work has been done in open source realms to create modern, and improved, versions of these interpreters for pretty much every device imaginable."
That opening sentence may be a bit clumsy, but what it's trying to say is that the games don't run directly on hardware on any of these machines, but instead runs in an interpreter.
Right, but those interpreters have been available for decades. That opening paragraph is an attempt to generate hype based on a false premise. That a sentence tacked on at the end of the second paragraph completely obviates the problem set up by the introduction only underlines the point: this article is much ado about nothing (blogspam) so we’d be better off linking to and discussing the original source.
The details about the original interpreter are what is most interesting for the Hacker News audience, and that’s been buried by that clumsy attempt at sensationalist journalism. For anyone here interested in playing the old games, my original comment gives them the details directly.
The point isn't that interpreters weren't available. It's that the original source wasn't available. The blog post talks about comments and variable names, that's what is valuable here.
That opening sentence may be a bit clumsy, but what it's trying to say is that the games don't run directly on hardware on any of these machines, but instead runs in an interpreter.