Ian Bogost has an article up describing work done by some of his students at Georgia Tech to try to modify Stella, an emulator for the Atari 2600 platform, so that it would accurately reproduce the visual appearance of a game being played on a CRT when the game is in fact being displayed on a modern LCD screen.  They actually did a remarkably good job of reproducing after image effects, color blurring and noise.  This provides yet another case where hardware can have a subtle but profound impact on how someone might interpret the game.