A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

What's the best way of getting into preserving/modeling video output devices, without ending up going down the video equivalent of the audiophile snake-oil woo path?

My concern is one of qualia: Someone's memories are beautiful to them, but are faulty, and I worry that if I start concerning myself with modeling video output devices beyond what I've already done in MAME, I'm going to end up chasing rose-tinted memories instead of ground truth.

I see tweets from folks like @CRTpixels and wonder if maybe emulators could do more in terms of the final presentation, but it just strikes me as a really slippery slope. An accurate emulator's palette isn't "wrong" in the sense of modeling the circuitry, but it exists in a void.

It can be mathematically verified, but it'll look wildly different depending on if you're tapping RGB signals directly on a logic analyzer, versus a PVM over S-Video, or a consumer TV over composite, or any number of output devices.

The amount of tweakability in e.g. CGWG's shaders are great, but it's still an idealized model. How do I go from where we are, to "Give me this console as seen on a terrible 1970's Zenith set with poor vertical deflection"?

I want to accurately model this or that display device, with this or that fault mode, but I don't want to go down the path of buying rare jungle-wood discs to put my receiver on for more "body", or buying gold-plated S/PDIF cables for more "warmth", as audiophiles do.

To an extent it feels like chasing illusions, because even with the best shader, and the most accurate model of a given TV set or monitor's circuitry, the color gamut is just *different* on flat panels vs. CRTs.

You're getting into the difference between recreating the thing itself and recreating the experience of the thing. Pong on my early 1970s tv was absolutely mind-blowing, IN 1977. You will never achieve that again. It was ephemeral.