so bizhawk can't load luasocket and it turns out the reason for this (which has changed between now and the last time someone apparently asked about this in 2015) is that bizhawk switched to using NLua which uses kopilua as its vm instead of the normal Lua runtime... and kopilua has a bunch of 5 year old hastily ported code. and whoops the code that actually would load external dlls is behind a preprocessor directive that means it literally is as good as commented out.