I almost always try to play on original hardware on an appropriate display (CRT) whenever I can. The deluge of remasters and remakes we've been getting can be nice - but I find a lot of the time that they can be hit or miss. They often feel like they've lost a lot of the magic created when the developers of the era had to work with the limitations of the hardware of the era. Pixel art on those old CRT's vs pixel art on new games with modern displays is a good example, when working on those old CRTs you just had to create your art in a specific way that just doesn't look good when you slap it onto a modern OLED display. Even the modern pixel art that's designed FOR the new displays just doesn't quite capture the same feel.

I recently played Panzer Dragoon Saga on original Saturn hardware and I have to say that was one of the most profound experiences playing an RPG I've had in my life and playing it on the Saturn itself was a big part of it.

It doesn't help that some of the porting studios sometimes just do shoddy work. Aspyr, for one, can be hit or miss. The Deus Ex remake that's coming out, from what I've seen, is particularly egregious. Just based on the footage I've seen the artistry of the game is completely ruined.

On the flipside - Nightdive doesn't miss. They're the only ones that I will buy their remasters without researching the port quality because they just "get it". The Nightdive remasters of Turok, System Shock, Rise of the Triad, Blood and even some of the more niche ones like Powerslave and Killing time have all been fantastic. Even their full remake of the original System Shock is phenomenal.

Panzer Dragoon Saga is a great game: some cool gameplay elements that later games didn't really ever seem to pick up to my knowledge. Really tight too, not long and grindy like so many JRPGs in the '90s. The solitary main character means it skips a lot of the RPG-with-several-party-members tropes too. It's too bad it never got a rerelease of some sort to make it more accessible to people (plus it was stupidly rare even when it was released; Sega even put out baffling magazine ads about how hard it was to actually buy), though as you point out so many of those are terrible anyhow.

Definitely agree with you about CRTs. I wish I had the room for one. It's fun to use a MiSTer hooked up to one and a modern flatscreen at the same time to compare.

Finding a good CRT locally has been pretty difficult. I think everyone is caught on the "this is worth gold now" trend.

Nightdive's Blade Runner Enhanced Edition is pretty infamous, so they've had a few bombs here and there. But not often.

There's something fundamentally different about playing these games on the hardware they were designed for