[0] http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/KylePittman/20150420/241442/C...
(Yeah, I know there is possibly a bit of memory cheating, plus I used RGB SCART for the later period of CRT use that avoided the composite problems).
I've never met a single gamer into old games that prefers the artifacts the old, cruddy CRTs we used to use had. We're all quite relieved they're gone, to be honest.
Of course, that was most certainly intended, and the effect could be seen on any CRT (afaik).
And my arcade monitor is not a good CRT at all (sadly...). Good CRTs look like this: http://imgur.com/a/Ad0pe In the last photo of the fighting game, that "grid" pattern in the back of the meters would look like the Sonic waterfall on bad CRTs, but is clearly defined on good ones
There are some CRT specific effects. For example the black shadow under the ninja in this video should be rapidly moving back and forth between each character to accomplish a transparency effect. But most modern TVs can't do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYsa8NQICnY
(For the record good upscalers fix that shadow effect.)
My point is that the article that started this thread that claims old games are supposed to look like this http://i.imgur.com/Pq2Yra4.png is just utterly not true. It's a terrible myth that someone who is misinformed started.
You didn't actually read the article, did you? Look at the image right after it [0]. Look at the shading on Samus and the pillar nearby. This image clearly demonstrates that the original artwork was designed to achieve a dithering-like effect due to the presence of colour bleeding in the signal. This effect occurs even on higher-end CRTs. What you are complaining about is the bloom effect of the phosphors, a separate phenomenon.
The article specifically talks about CRT televisions with NTSC signals. So he's clearly an American. He also talks about how his shader was created to recreate what games looked like in his youth. That's fine. But that's his youth (and incidentally, my youth too). The problem is to suggest that how the typical American saw video games at home in the 80s and 90s is somehow representative and correct and what the developers were shooting for.
Have you ever seen an old video game on a very good CRT? Perhaps a Sony PVM or BVM? Even some of the nicer consumer Trinitrons will do. Color bleed is practically nonexistent, and it's very easy to clearly make out every single pixel the artist laid down. I included several examples in my previous reply. This would be true of 80s and 90s arcade games, most of which got ported to home consoles. It's also true of 80s Commodore 64 and Atari computer games, 90s PC, Mac and Amiga games, and basically every game played in the 90s in Europe, as they've had proper SCART with analog RGB since the 70s.
Now to be fair, the NES natively outputs composite video straight from the PPU. So you could maybe argue the case for this specific console. But every console since in the SD generation output s-video, RGB and/or component.
In your original comment you said "these artifacts are important for correctly rendering NES games according to their original design." But Nintendo released an arcade version of the NES called the PlayChoice 10 which completely lacked any of those artifacts. Metroid was released on the PlayChoice 10, and so in that environment there would be no "shading" caused by dot crawl and bleed in the background tiles.
EDIT: and to credit the article, he does state he is trying to recreate the look of his 80s TV. So I was a little harsh on this particular article. But these articles still bug me, because they lead to comments like yours where things like "according to their original design" get said.
The NES is the only console I have been talking about. It is the topic of the original article. I am well aware that this is not how any other console works.
The earliest (better than) console smooth scrolling PC game I can think of is Monster Bash, which runs at 70fps.
I don't like the sharp and blocky video you see today on modern LCDs when using old consoles. I also don't like the video filters that some emulators use to make the games not look too pixelated.
I just want it to look approximately (emulating it perfectly is probably out of scope for this price) as it did back in the 80ties. Hope Nintendo provides an option for scanlines.
The built in upscalers in these TVs aren't designed for consoles and will mangle the video output into garbage.
For some consoles that output different types of resolutions depending on the game you'll also need to change the settings on a per game basis.
So it's only something for enthusiasts.
(PAL tvs had 100 more lines and refreshed a little lower 25, vs NTSC's 30 frames per second)
Seems like it would be a pain to make that work. Knowing the pain of PAL <-> NTSC tv conversion.
PAL console gaming was a GREAT experience, as you can imagine.
Things got better from the Dreamcast onwards as they could software switch to 525 line / 60Hz modes (usually with PAL encoded colour for composite video, except for the PS2 which used pure NTSC), and it's all now moot with HD.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUI5xFEW_tg
They show more graphics at the top and bottom, probably nothing that affects actual gameplay, but it's nice it's not just black regions.