> Do you think you would get a similar or diminished experience with e.g a raspberry pi and a little LCD screen etc that booted straight into a minivmac emulator?
With vintage hardware, you are constrained by what the machine can do. With emulation, you are constraining what the machine can do. It does make a difference. To give you an example of what I mean:
I collected vintage hardware in my university days. It was a time when you could get something like a Mac IIfx for next to nothing and still expect it to work. Well, crunch time came and I found that I was getting far too distracted. A vintage Mac provided an ideal work environment since it was great for preparing technical documents and didn't have all of the distractions of the Internet. Boot it into System 6 with Multifinder disabled, and it reduced the distraction of other software installed on the machine. Doing something similar with an emulator simply would not have been as effective. It is too easy to escape the sandbox in a multitude of ways.
Is this a physical differentiation (i.e. based upon the capabilities of the hardware) or a psychological one? I really don't know and I really don't know if the distinction matters. The outcome is the significant part, and that outcome suggests physical hardware does make a difference.
With vintage hardware, you are constrained by what the machine can do. With emulation, you are constraining what the machine can do. It does make a difference. To give you an example of what I mean:
I collected vintage hardware in my university days. It was a time when you could get something like a Mac IIfx for next to nothing and still expect it to work. Well, crunch time came and I found that I was getting far too distracted. A vintage Mac provided an ideal work environment since it was great for preparing technical documents and didn't have all of the distractions of the Internet. Boot it into System 6 with Multifinder disabled, and it reduced the distraction of other software installed on the machine. Doing something similar with an emulator simply would not have been as effective. It is too easy to escape the sandbox in a multitude of ways.
Is this a physical differentiation (i.e. based upon the capabilities of the hardware) or a psychological one? I really don't know and I really don't know if the distinction matters. The outcome is the significant part, and that outcome suggests physical hardware does make a difference.