Thanks again to everyone that helped get me to this point and pointing out exactly what I needed to do to get here.

I'll keep this updated here and there as entries get completed! There is a lot of bizarre stuff coming up. Hope you guys enjoy these.

I'm going to be brutally honest here... Blurry, phosphory footage with the CRT curve looks absolutely terrible. Either go for clean pixels, or some scanlines.

Can we see a cleaner version for comparison?

I too have been looking into CRT shaders a bit recently, primarily from the perspective of working in Unity and seeing most of the CRT image effect assets out there be total garbage that's just a mess of scanlines, noise, and blurring that makes no sense.

I'm going to assume that if you've been looking into this, you're probably already familiar with RetroArch and the library of CRT shaders that they use. As far as I can tell, that set of shaders encompasses the broadest and most comprehensive set of CRT effect techniques out there, and clearly the people involved care a lot about it. That being said though, even if you address the fundamental issues that a lot of the worst shaders get wrong, I still think a lot of them go a bit too far with the noise, blurring, and distortion - sacrificing too much clarity and playability for the sake of trying to be more accurate or just trying to make it look cooler (in their opinion).

For your particular case of doing videos on Youtube, one thing you'll need to watch out for is CRT shaders primarily intended for higher resolutions - some of them use phosphor glow or shadowmask effects that only work well at 1440p or 4K resolutions. You could also run into some bitrate related issues.

After looking around a bit, I personally ended up doing an implementation in Unity based on CRT-EasyMode. It's generally a much more understated effect. It gets all of the basics with the mask, scanlines, and blurring right without overdoing anything. Obviously, it can be configured to be more extreme or paired with other shaders that do another pass that layers in other glow or distortion effects, but on a fundamental level, it seems like the most straightforward take on a CRT shader that I could find.

Here's a look at what my personal implementation of CRT-EasyMode looked like applied to a screenshot of Road Fighter, but the original implementation included with RetroArch looks similar.

The clean one looks better by a mile.

Use clean pixels and tell your viewers to watch it on a CRT.

I think I personally like the third video. XM29 I guess, but it could be brightened slightly.

Personally? I think the XM29. Maybe I am crazy, but the "fake" scan-lines actually look nice.

Updated the original post with the first entry after all was cleaned up!

The updated video looks good

Thanks a lot! It took some elbow grease but we got there!

If you look closely, the clean one ruins all the dithering effects (most noticeable in the brown/blue dithered layer of sea). It's by far the most noticeable distortion effect when you aren't using an actual CRT to display graphics. It's even more jarring when in motion.

So we're now in the SNES forum! Which I guess makes sense!

Added a couple more videos. If they don't have an attract mode, recording footage takes quite a bit longer, so I am working through the next batch of 5 right now!