I just saw that hardware, the analogue pocket, that is a replica of a gameboy, but pluggable for TV, and it say "not emulation", so is it allowed for speedruning gameboy games that don't allow emulator or at least not count as emulator ?
Check the rules for the specific game you want to run, and ask in the that game’s forum if you’re still not sure.
You're right that it inappropriately markets itself as not emulation - but it definitely is. There is an early review that points out sound errors. Flash cart author krikzz showed Pocket's unstable IO writes that give issues with his his product that only Analogue can fix. Then there is a blog post by emulation legend endrift called Analogue Pocket: A Hate Story that admits to them accepting inaccurate emulation so long as it runs at the right clock cycle rate.
Of course there is no test suite proving its accuracy or anything compared to real hardware, MiSTer core or mGBA or gambatte. All we got to go on is a marketing claim to sell an expensive product. If it's accepted as real hardware for any game, that should be stopped.
FPGA emulators are programmed in VHDL, Verilog or SystemVerilog programming languages. Most accurate software emulators are programmed in C++ programming languages. There is no "not emulation" here.
