There’s a couple of high-end scalers for retro games that can apply a facsimile of various aperture grilles and shadow masks from popular consumer and professional CRTs.

In fact, the RetroTINK 4K will even use a HDR container to boost the brightness to offset the loss from drawing scanlines and other unlit areas over the image.

It’s a super cool effect and one of many signs how much a labour of love those things are, but it would never fool anyone into believing it was an actual CRT.

I don’t have any evidence to back it up, but I’ve often thought the “CRT look” is as much biological as it is physical, it’s almost like the phosphor glow and persistence and the mask overlaid on the image convinces the brain to start filling in detail.

With the RetroTINK 4k and a good 4K HDR tv I think it might be good enough to emulate the CRT look. LinusTechTips did a video on it on YouTube and its really amazing how good it loonks.

It falls apart immediately in motion sadly. Though if combined with BFI/strobing it can indeed get “close”.

Source: I have a house full of CRTs and am continually trying to move away from them as I know I can’t keep them going forever (I can do basic repairs). I have a collection of consumer TVs, VGA monitors and broadcast monitors I use currently, including a 21” trinitron that still sits on my desk.

My endgame for “close enough” will be a reasonably size 4k oled with like 60hz strobe which will cover a large enough portion of legacy content.

I had a trinitron in the 90s and absolutely loved it. I would love to get another one, but it’s quite pricey and I’m worried about keeping it running.

Cool, but I'll still get the OSSC Pro[0] instead, as that one is Open Source Hardware proper.

0. https://videogameperfection.com/products/ossc-pro/

Exactly correct. If you wanted "authentic" warping you could install a unity lens with warping around the edges on the face of the OLED. I built a simple hexagonal phosphor simulator module in HDL that one could use in an FPGA to reproduce the characteristics of any tube[1]. It has been suggested that I build a "retro" terminal kit out of it (but with selectable phosphor colors :-).

[1] My thought was that you could "restore" old test equipment for which tubes were no longer available without changing the interface the electronics in the gear expected.

I'd buy a few units of that :)

The recently released product 'Retrotink4k' is somewhat along these lines.

but can you make it squeal with the high pitch that a CRT can make?

Yeah, I don't miss the age of CRTs at all, and that's the biggest reason. Why anyone pines for those noisy squealing things, I have no idea; I guess they're all deaf. Even decades later, I can still hear that annoying sound the rare times I find myself in a place with a CRT TV.