Nothing you said disproves that. It's not a hack, just turning the og console into an emulated version of itself, at that point you might as well emulate the entire thing on a modern pc. Because you're no longer using real hardware and any advantages that come with that but all the disadvantages of imperfect emulation.
A hack would be tapping into the internal video data lines/output/traces to input into an hdmi encoder chip for an hdmi port. But no we don't do that now, we just cram a raspberry pi, and emulate the entire video subsystem to get an hdmi output. Or in this specific case. a Hack would be overclocking the actual chip.