There was and is a lot of suspicion that Silhouette was really just a variant of Snes9x. The interfaces are almost identical (icons included), and they both use the same file formats (.sms ROMs, .frz savestates). Gary Henderson (one of the two original creators of Snes9x) was considered the most likely culprit–Nintendo supposedly killed the Snes9x project, but Henderson apparently said somewhere that he would keep working on it regardless, he just wouldn’t release the work. So the theory is that he released a new version anonymously, with the whole “Silhouette” thing as a sort of ironic cover story. Of course Nintendo could just deny Silhouette came from them, but hey, the story already has an answer for that (“I wouldn’t be surprised if they denied that it ever existed”). Also interesting to note that Snes9x had two original developers and this is also the number of people who supposedly worked on Silhouette. Anyway, the next year they just open-sourced their work on Snes9x and that brings us more or less up to date. AFAIK nobody has ever confirmed that Silhouette was a hoax and nobody has ever verified the internal-Nintendo-project story, so it’s all still speculative.