The emulators can be pretty good, but for people looking for the nostalgia, it might not really cut it. It doesn't fully send you back to your childhood, so if you have money to spend on this, and are passionate about it, it actually makes sense to get the full experience.
It's not too different from wanting to experience old music in vinyl rather than digital.
As someone who does often play retro games on a CRT TV, this monitor wouldn't cut it either. Same reason I never understood those "retro consoles", even the official ones made by Nintendo/Sony. At the end of the day it's just a plastic shell made to look like the old thing around something new.
The Nintendo ones are plug-in-and-start-playing, come with controllers as good as the originals (I can side-by-side them—the new ones are excellent reproductions) and that feel exactly the same, and have a UI that a kid can figure out and that you don't have to set up or configure yourself, at all.
The SNES Classic in particular was one of the best deals in gaming I've ever seen. So much zero-hassle entertainment in one package, all ready to attach to a TV and go. No downloading, no updates, no horse-shit, it just plays like 30 amazing games providing hundreds of hours of entertainment for around $100, and you didn't have to do anything to make that happen (that you can do nerd-shit and add dozens more games to it is simply a bonus)
Other retro consoles I've seen have kinda been shit, but the Nintendo ones are great. Not everybody wants to or knows how to screw around with computers in their spare time so they can play Mario.
"But the Switch et c. can play many of those games, and more" True, however, 1) The original controllers are really nice to have for the games, especially on the NES where they're far easier to learn than even the SNES controller for very-young new gamers, and you can get them for the Switch, but that's an add-on and getting two of them costs about as much as a whole NES Classic did, 2) Maybe you have two TVs and you don't want to buy a second switch for price reasons, or perhaps because you'd rather one of the TVs be more chill so you don't have to police it as much for the kids, or whatever, and 3) Playing those games on the Switch costs a subscription—with the Classic consoles, you pay once and it's yours until it breaks.
That's all fair, I definitely see the appeal (especially regarding the controllers, which is something third-party companies have struggled to get right for decades). They're a good way to play the games. But for me at least (and I've heard similar sentiments from others), a big part of the "retro experience" comes from playing on a real console and a CRT TV. Something about the built-in firmware and knowing it's basically just a raspberry pi under the hood puts me off the whole thing and I would rather just emulate on a PC because it's less hassle. But ultimately of course if you enjoy it then keep doing so!
Oh, sure, they're no substitute to a "hardcore" retro gamer. Folks who won't be happy with anything short of an FPGA recreation (if not original hardware) outputting to a Sony Wega, or a powerful modern computer getting a real workout doing fancy render-ahead tricks to fake real-hardware input latency (so: remarkably low, by modern standards) and neat multi-step high-fidelity CRT-mimicking shader output, won't be satisfied by the classic consoles. But they're damn good for what they are, and especially for folks who don't know WTF an emulator is, or do but don't want to mess with them—the Nintendo ones, at least, the rest seem to have fallen short on one or more important measures.
A lot of console and arcade games up through roughly the first Playstation arguably look better on a CRT than with any amount of upscaling or smoothing or whatever, even without factoring in nostalgia.
But of course we have shaders for that, now, that can get one pretty damn close and take up zero extra space in one's house.
What is your point? As I said that overpriced think is NOT CRT and I actually think the hype about is not justified. I do not own a CRT but I think they would cause eye strain and modern up-scaling and smoothing and all that stuff makes games look objectively better.
But then you might as well get a real CRT to go along with your real consoles, and get the actual childhood experience of zero-lag inputs and CRT blur smoothing out the image.
Why spend more money on an inferior experience? CRTs might be out of production, but there's still plenty floating on ebay.
Right. These Checkmate folks seem to be doing it the right way, IMO. The housing matches the look of old CRTs while adding new capabilities, and the pricing is practical.
I spent the better half of my youth trying to make CRTs look as crisp as what we take for granted with LCDs. I have no desire to go back to those days (and no desire to lug my 32" CRT up and down stair cases). So to all retro enthusiasts: let's celebrate those older systems but let's also appreciate what we have. Old systems have never looked better than they do on modern screens.
It's not too different from wanting to experience old music in vinyl rather than digital.