> Is it just me, or does HLSL look nothing like a real CRT monitor?
The default settings for HLSL are similar to the so-called "torch mode" that modern HDTVs default to where the picture is unnaturally bright and vivid because that's what uneducated consumers prefer (and also because your average Best Buy has way brighter lighting than your average living room). In the case of CRT simulation, emulation users have shown a marked preference for a look that I describe as "the monitor PCB is on fire while the CRT is being sucked into Cygnus X-1": extreme curvature that you'd never see on a real physical object that could hold a vacuum, all the settings that correspond to "fucked up capacitors" cranked to 11, and so on.
Many users have come up with much better settings; if you actually learn what all the settings do you can accurately simulate the trademark foibles of pretty much any monitor on the planet, because it's all mathematically based on the actual physics of CRTs and their associated electronics.