This paper describes and discusses the work carried on in the context of the CORTEX project, for the development of adaptive real-time applications in wormhole based systems. The architecture of CORTEX relies on the existence of a timeliness wormhole, called Timely Computing Base (TCB), which we have described in previous papers. Here we focus on the practical demonstration of the wormhole concept, through a demo with two complementary facets. The objective is to illustrate the effectiveness of the concept from a practical, yet rigorous, perspective, which is done with the help of an emulation framework that we present in the paper. Furthermore, the paper also describes two different ways of implementing timeliness wormholes on top of both wired and wireless infrastructures.