The difference is fidelity through ruin .

Legend says it modeled the specific DAC distortion of the Sega System 16 board. It had a knob labeled "Coin Tray Rattle"—a physical modeling algorithm for the sound of quarters shaking against metal while the bass hit.

Because we aren’t looking for a sound . We are looking for a feeling . Most developers get the arcade aesthetic wrong. They conflate "Arcade" with "Chiptune." Consequently, we have a market flooded with 8-bit bitcrushers and LSDJ emulators. These are wonderful tools for Game Boy nostalgia, but an arcade cabinet is not a Game Boy.

When I play my finished tracks back through the cabinet, they sound perfect. When I render them to an MP3 and listen on my AirPods, they sound thin.

Not constant noise— rhythmic noise. A sine wave at 60hz (or 50hz for PAL regions) that modulates a band-pass filter. It should feel like the audio is being transmitted through a wire that runs alongside the flyback transformer.