Ports generally only go so far and often contain accidental or deliberate differences from the original.
Emulators are the best way of preserving the original experience.
Perhaps the most famous example of this is MAME - originally just a PacMan emulator, it has grown to encompass thousands of arcade machines and many home computers and video game consoles. It has a strict philosophy of accurately acting as documentation of the real hardware and being able to play the games is just a convenient bonus.
Even with emulation there are limits to recreating the original experience: Did you know that when playing Q*bert in an arcade, falling off the platform caused a mechanical solenoid to kick the inside of the machine?
A fun Master’s project would be to re-write Blood and Laurels using a more contemporary platform to preserve it and make it available for the masses to play… Not sure if your prof would go for it though.
Admittedly, I suspect haptic feedback on modern gamepads simulates that feature of the original cabinet even worse than a modern gamepad simulates the controls of a traditional arcade cabinet, and that haptic feedback on an Arcade pad wouldn’t be much of a substitute for an actual cabinet.
Of course, that gets into the fact that arcades have much more flexibility in the IO department, and there’s only so much that can be done to replicate a bespoke, game-specific setup in something the average person can afford and doesn’t need a dedicated gaming room to store.
It wasn’t the only one - I used to love to play After Burner in the late 80’s. That game had an entire moving cockpit that rotated side to side in response to the controls. God I put a lot of money in that game.
My point was that recreating original experiences can be really hard or near impossible. Still emulation is among the best ways of doing so.
