Other than "hacker spirit" (which is completely legitimate), is there a reason you'd want to play Halo 2 this way—going through the effort of modding your console to add memory and overclock the gpu—instead of playing the PC version?
I've played lots of Halo 2 as part of the Master Chief Collection on Steam. It's a lot better than the box-release version. I couldn't even play Halo 2 standalone on PC without forcing vsync on via the Nvidia Control Panel, which is an option the game does not give you, or it misinterprets and mistimes all of its control inputs and you can't aim worth a damn.
MCC was allegedly an entirely fresh port by 343 without using either of the previously deficient PC ports. It is said the port/rewrite was a big part of 343 getting familiar enough with the engine(s), documenting what Bungie hadn't entirely documented and 343 hadn't pulled in as headcount in the messy divorce, and making the engine their own in the path to building Halo 5. In my experience that seems to track in that a lot of the "feel" changes from the original Xbox versions seem to me to align with how Halo 5 feels to me.
Whenever an old device is supposed to be unsuitable for doing something it usually feels great to use it for just that, proving it's well capable or even better.
This probably is a psychological disorder (usually mild and fun to have though) - an opposite counterpart of obsession with being among the first to buy the newest model of the most popular gadget. Both give a sense of superiority :-)
This is subjective. I personally always loved upgrading the hell out of old PC (install the maximum possible memory and CPU after patching the BIOS and soldering the socket, add a SATA card to a computer which only had IDE etc).
Its just hacker spirit. You can play halo 2 right now in online lobbies or the campaign with either the original graphics or remastered hd graphics from 343.
Modern 4K games have almost 150x the pixels per frame of Space Invaders.
And the framerate has increased by... erm, no, decreased by 50%, in many cases.
Yet the push for 8K resolution, seems to be be getting started, with PS5 Pro rumors. The imbalance between the push for spatial resolution and 'temporal resolution' is quite ridiculous. But likely mostly about selling TVs.
