Right, the overall emulation should work fine without battery-backed ram. It will do a cold boot every time instead.
In MAME, it's awkward, since (in SciSys case), you must press the STOP button before exiting. Or in Companion 2, you need to press F1 to simulate a power-off.

@Mychess: Super VIP has a fairly easy to dump EPROM, but also internal ROM on a QFP HD6301Y0. It's not like Super Nova where the whole program is on EPROM.