My friend and I both had Amigas in the 90s and they did feel special at the time.
A few years ago we felt nostalgic and emulated a bunch of games, and while it was nice to play them again some of that magic had been lost.
Some time later we were round at a friend's house and he had a real Amiga 500 hooked up to an Amiga monitor and a joystick. He loaded up Turrican 2.
All I can say is playing the game on real hardware was a far more satisfying experience than playing on an emulator. My friend played it for about half an hour and was hooked!
I can't really define why it is that real hardware feels better. It's probably placebo but that's not the whole story.
Amiga emulators often don't do the music correctly, Amiga had very special sound hardware. Turrican 2 has really good music using their own homemade audio code, getting a bad quality version of that just doesn't feel the same.
Modern computers can easily get the same sound of course, but it is hard to emulate that sound based on the original game data.
A few years ago we felt nostalgic and emulated a bunch of games, and while it was nice to play them again some of that magic had been lost.
Some time later we were round at a friend's house and he had a real Amiga 500 hooked up to an Amiga monitor and a joystick. He loaded up Turrican 2.
All I can say is playing the game on real hardware was a far more satisfying experience than playing on an emulator. My friend played it for about half an hour and was hooked!
I can't really define why it is that real hardware feels better. It's probably placebo but that's not the whole story.