It's a shame Furnace doesn't put more effort into actually getting tracks to run on hardware, since it has already become somewhat of a de-facto standard in the scene and attracts a lot of young talent. But here's the point: That young talent doesn't have access to actual hardware for the most part, so they don't care if it runs on hardware. For them, this is as close to "real" as it gets. That's the reality of chiptune in 2024, like it or not. Can't blame the Furnace devs either - they focus on providing what the majority of their users want, and that works for them, both in terms of number of users as well as number of people involved with development.
The only chance for setting things right from our perspective would be to implement hw support for the two Furnace players ourselves. I think it's doable, the specs are relatively sane. There are a couple of issues - if I understand correctly both engines assume 50Hz updates, which is not feasible for QuadTone, and QuadTone seems to assume an internal loop time of >224t, which obviously is going to have much more of a parasite tone than what is currently emulated. But with a few minor adjustments it could be done. I'm not willing to work on it though for a number of reasons, at least not the C++ side of things.
A well-deserved win.
Would like to give more talks in the future, in any case.