Oh I recognize where it is, I've wasted away plenty of time in Mario games over the years.

I brought it up because I'm told that the general idea applies to all pipes. They take you to the secret area for that level, and if there are multiple pipes that lead to different areas then that secret area has to be switched out. That sounds like it's relevant if the secret area in this case is an empty space, perhaps that memory hasn't been initialized or there's a specific load instruction that's doing something different in the emulator as compared to the hardware. (And for all I know the emulator could be following the spec correctly, but the hardware worked differently)

Either way, thank you for the video link.