fuctfuct wrote:YES! Nobody ever talks about this. This is a big part of that feeling I imagine. Sitting in a dim room. Lit only with the warm gentle glow of a CRT.
Donkey Kong Country 3 made me realize this. I've posted this before, but there was a few years that I didn't have room to set up a CRT so I did all my retro gaming on my HDTV with a Framemeister. Finally I decided to pick up a 13" Sony CRT (then later a 13" PVM) and was enjoying retro gaming so much more than on an HDTV, I had forgotten what a CRT was like. I noticed how reflections look in the CRT glass, versus how annoying that can be on digital displays. And I've definitely observed over the yeras how harsh I feel my HDTV is late at night with the lights down or off. I didn't feel a "warmth" of the CRT, per se, but the lack of harshness from it. Then all these thoughts just clicked when I was playing DKC3. There's a flickering light coming from Granny's Save Cave, and it's from her CRT! Also, the save and high scores screens are on her TV, but you see the curvature of the glass and some reflections. It's awesome.
fuctfuct wrote:I wonder if people with optical drive emulators miss the spinning and seek noises? Probably not. The people that install them are likely not people who would care about such things.
So I've posted this story before, but whatever... Shining the Holy Ark sometimes clues you in that you're about to have a random encounter because of the drive noise. I played a lot of this game off-disc years ago. I recently got a Fenrir ODE to give life to my model 1 Saturn with a dead disc drive, and I played through this game for the first time in many years. I kind of missed that little touch, perhaps purely from nostalgia.
I don't yet have an ODE for my Dreamcast, but I can't say I'll miss the drive noise from that thing. I mean, the silly noises the DC makes kind of makes me grin. A long, loud beeeeeeep from the VMU every time I power on the console because the batteries are dead and I'll never change them, then some seriously loud drive noises while the game is loading. A few years ago I had thought of disconnecting the speaker in my VMUs so I wouldn't have to hear that annoying beep, but it's been that way for so long that I'm not sure if I'll miss it LOL. The loud drive noise though, even though it reminds me of when I first got a DC, I don't think I'll miss. It's just so damn loud, it's often distracting during gameplay!