Is anyone making physical lenses to go over an LCD? Old CRTs were convex instead of flat, which is almost more noteworthy than the look of the actual pixels, especially in up close in an arcade machine.
Exactly. The convex display allows for an impression of the intended image whereas a flat LCD is more of a “soulless” pixel-by-pixel translation of the visual data. A flat display will inherently always be off due to this.