Quote: And I say that arguably the most significant improvement to the emulation of 80s games since the invention of emulators just happened: HLSL.
I disagree. HLSL is cool and I do enjoying playing around with it, but honestly all it's really doing is emulating flawed display technology of the past. It's not as if the hardware was sending flawed/degraded signal to the display, just the display doing the best it could to present the picture. As a kid I wished I could afford an RGB monitor so I could play my Nes, SNES and Genesis games with nice crisp, color-bleed free graphics like on PCs and some arcade systems back then. Most good monitors had controls for adjusting the screen size, pincushion, etc. in case something was being cut off. Go back in time for a moment. Did you really enjoy the eye strain, blurry NTSC output, runny colors and game information being cut off around the corners? As impressive as this technical achievement is, HLSL is something I'll mess with for a little while but eventually disable. Again, I'm grateful for its inclusion, but its just extra seasoning for nostalgia.
Edit: I don't think the NES was capable of RGB, but the Genesis and SNES were with the right cables.