A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

There's an entire philosophical discussion (and entire potential community) to be had here about accurately modelling output devices, which most emulators don't bother with. Beyond most CRT shaders presenting an idealized model, there's even more nuance.

The way the TV, or PVM, or monitor, or any other thing extracted the signal back *out* of the transport layer has an effect on the video output before even getting to the point of modeling the visual effects of the 'tube itself.

A TV with a particularly bad single-chip composite decoder would impart a significantly higher amount of smearing and other effects during the decode. Does anyone try to model that accurately? Do they, hell.

That's without even getting into the realm of audio, where the majority of emulators tend to treat things as if the signal path between the audio chips themselves and the speakers was a straight pair of wires, with no attempt at modeling any backend LPFs, amps, or anything else.

As much as there's a robust, varied community revolving around preserving consoles, I've often wondered why there isn't an equally-large community working on researching this or that display device, and accurately modeling the analog effects of the signal path.

To be glib, I suspect same reason nobody cares about preserving things like java mobile games. Once people can play the games they want, they lose interest beyond that. That and, for audio specifically, I think there's just not many people with that knowledge and technical skill

That's not glib at all, I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head. It's why the brutal hack to get Primal Rage 2 working in MAME has never been merged in: It's known to be a hack, and merging it in would eliminate what little motivation there is to find a solution.

Regarding technical skill in modelling analog signal paths, it's mainly a matter of abstraction. I don't know the first thing about analog circuitry, but I hooked up discrete audio emulation in a few games last summer. Have schematic, will travel.