It's also strange how, for example, Outrun 2 plays really well on a joypad (the controls feel exactly the same as the home PC conversion) which is amazing when you think the arcade code is designed for a steering wheel.

But it plays PC games from 2007 very well, so I'm using the Teknoparrot emulator and playing Afterburner Climax, Sega Racing Classic, Daytona 3, Outrun 2 and Sega Race TV and they are all running superbly. It wouldn't run stand a chance of running, say, a PS3 or Xbox emulator. I have a 2007 PC with a second hand Nvidia 560Ti graphics card in it. The results of my experimentation (and thanks so much to answering my questions when I got stuck) have blown me away.

You're effectively running PC games on your PC, so it's far less demanding than emulation. This means that the process of getting them on your home PC isn't the traditional emulation route (where your computer is emulating a different machine entirely) but an arcade loader (where a loader program sorts out what you need to run the original PC based code on your own PC at home). For a particular era of arcade games (2005 up to the present day), the games ran on PC hardware and were written in regular PC code. So, what I learned this week is that there's a type of emulation that isn't really emulation in the traditional sense. Updated OP after a week of playing about with this.

Download sega racing classic