>>716283685for something like a handheld it includes the specific way those console displayed images, which gets less standardized as you go further back. for the rest of it, it's basically that physical attributes influence how the digital instructions are processed in ways that are very precise and hard for me to observe or care about, but the purists feel strongly. you're right that it's digital and technically all of those things could ultimately be emulated on the software side, but at a certain point you reach "i am running a simulation of the laws of physics to avoid just building the hardware in a way that matches the original"