I once considered spending a few weeks reviewing various games from the era when differences in console configurations actually resulted in slightly different graphics and/or forced new solutions. Unfortunately, it's one of those topics that serves as cool, yet ultimately unnecessary (for the average person) knowledge. It's nice to know, but you can do other things in the meantime.
It's great that there are people who care about preserving the memory of such games.
Back when I was heading up a self printed gaming magazine we started off with an idea similar to that - we paired off the SNES and Sega Genesis with games that hit both platforms and used pics to compare, discussed the differences, etc.
The #1 complaint over that angle was the SNES version was newer and it was unfair to compare Ghouls 'n Ghosts against Supe Ghosts 'n Goblins but no one complained about Contra Hard Corps against Contra III: The Alien War. Lol. Others complained about comparing closer released games but each was inherently different than the other console version making it an unfair comparison.
Moral of the story, do what you enjoy and ignore the haters. Don't let others ruin your fun. Life is too short.
That's right, the moral is very true. Yes, I've heard that sometimes lower-end Nintendo consoles performed better at certain things because the components they chose worked synergistically. And certain processors (or other parts) performed better at certain things than others.