Per game bugfixes/ patches

[IamCarbonMan]

I recently read an old article (http://bit.ly/1n1fzl7) which stated:

Both ZSNES and Snes9X contain internal lists of the most popular fifty or so games. When you load those games, the emulators tweak their timing values and patch out certain areas of code to get these games running.

And:

I can name a few examples. The fan translations for Dragon Quest 1&2, Dual Orb 2, Sailor Moon: Another Story and Ys 4 all suffered invisible text issues as a result of writing to video RAM while the video processor had it locked out for rendering the screen. Only half of these titles have subsequently been fixed.

We've known about this hardware limitation since 1997, which consists of a one-line code fix, but the most popular emulator still does not support this behavior.

How do these bug fixes get found? Are they just figured out by smart people who play retro games, or is there a pattern (like, certain types of rom should have a certain value for this generic tweak?)

I ask because I am working on a "universal" emulator recently, (kind of like retrosach, except instead of cores being reconfigured versions of standalone emulators, it will have cores built from the ground up to use common code.)
I would like to find a way to either "find" possible bug fixes and when a rom is loaded, or set up a domain where users can upload their own patches which would be added to a "list of your most popular games."
Any help is greatly appreciated!