When I was a kid I was swapping out our NES to play a genesis game and I had the big brained idea of
>"What if...there was ONE console that could play ALL the games!"
Little did I know emulators were being developed online. When I finally found out I downloaded Sonic 3 and was stunned at how clean it looked. My setup was so shit that I couldn't make out the fine details, I never noticed the "3D" parallax scrolling effects in the background.
Also, our NES also barely worked. I would hit the top of the console until the game would work, until it crashed 10 minutes later. Emulators just werked.

I still have a few working CRTs and get the warm and fuzzies playing old games on them, but emulation has been so much better in general.