You have many options! Haha probably too many right? Do you have any previous experience with CRT shaders?
Lots of good advice coming from @anikom15 btw
Tons. But in my old age it’s precisely those endless options which are giving me difficulty in which of those thousands of shaders is closest to what I’m looking for. The paralysis of choice. In the “good old days” there were so few shaders (relative to now anyway)!
@CaptainKoloth yeah with the geom comment I should have deduced you have experience, my bad 
Well don’t worry too much about the mask being “Trinitron”, that’s just a cool name for an aperture grill (and the term amazingly still sells 30 years later!). Regarding resolution, @anikom15 comment is technically accurate, but I think you can get away with 2x horizontal resolution for the mask no problem, even when pixel peeping (with human eyes). Mathematically not enough, but perceptually fine I’m sure.
You have to bear in mind that the lower the “crt resolution” you want to replicate, the more noticeable the effect will be. If you go for something like 1600x1200 you won’t see a lot of it. 640x480 or even 800x600 on the other hand will look like a hires tv (which is pretty cool btw and makes 6th gen consoles shine, but probably not the look you want). I would start with something like 1024x768 or 1280x960 (which is a nice 2x horizontal fit for a 1440p monitor).
And even though you can get where you want with tons of different shaders, I would suggest guest-advanced, since it has all the features and controls that you need and then some. Don’t forget that small radius halation and a bit of magic bloom! They will make the highlights look way more organic and “analog”.
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This was if anything even more of a thing than you are suggesting. Like, scanlines are completely invisible on an FW900 at 800x600 or higher. The image just looks “transparent”, but less harsh than a fixed pixel display at lower resolutions.
You can only barely see the scanlines at 480p with the naked eye when you get your face about as close to the display as you possibly can, and that’s if your eyes are even capable of focusing that close. (I’m honestly not sure if mine can focus that close anymore even. I know I was an edge case for ever being able to do that as an adult, and that was years ago now.)
Megatron at integer scaled 480p on a 4K display (so 4x to 1920p) is actually pretty close to the way it looked on the vertical, but the horizontal is of course more diffuse at the 600 TVL setting.
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Well I don’t have any experience with the FW900, but you know your onions so I will take your word for it.
Regardless, you probably agree with me on the fact that if someone wants to try and replicate the look of a CRT computer monitor with shaders, they don’t want to go with low resolutions like 480 or high ones like 1200, and that the sweet spot is likely around 768 or 960.
(btw I can focus superclose, the one and only cool thing about myopia. I use this “superpower” to pixel peep shader presets all the time, looking no doubt like an absolute weirdo in the process)
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Since my personal experience seems to be of relevance to what OP is trying to capture here, I will share a bit more about how i used my FW900 when I got it in 2007 until i replaced it with my current display in 2022:
I used 1920x1200@85hz as my daily driver desktop resolution.
I played WoW at the time, and I often used that same resolution for ease of alt tabbing.
However, the FW900 couldn’t support 120hz at 1920x1200, 1920x1080, or 1600x1200, so I used non-standard resolutions for 3D games that I wanted to play at 120hz. 1680x945 for 16:9, 1504x940 for 16:10, and 1264x948 for 4:3. Sometimes, those resolutions would cause issues for one reason or another, and i would fall back to standard resolutions like 1440x900, 1280x720, and 1024x768.
And as @anikom15 mentioned, 2D games were often resolution locked to 640x480, 800x600, or 1024x768, which the FW900 could of course swap to without issue.
The FW900 could also run 1024x768 and below at 140hz, which was lovely for DOS games that ran at low framerates in a 70hz container.
I use an LG C1 now, and while i sometimes miss the flexibility the FW900 offered (and how damn good it made games look at those weird almost-1080p resolutions with 8xMSAA), modern 4K OLEDs are, on the whole, a better, much less fiddly experience.
My recommendation remains the same: don’t chase a dragon you will never catch. The current tech just isn’t there, no matter how much money you spend. As @DariusG pointed out, these high end later day Trinitrons had an absolute bonkers TVL. Somewhere in the 1400-1600 range or something absolutely ludicrous like that.
Just get a nice, high refresh rate OLED with 120hz BFI, get it calibrated, run everything at integer scale, and you’ll get about as close as you are going to get, with some things even being better. There is no point trying to simulate things like phosphor masks or aperture grille damping wires for these higher resolutions. We are in a golden age of relatively affordable display quality. Don’t lose sight of the forest for the trees.
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Having come directly from the FW900 to an OLED, i honestly don’t even think there is a point to trying to simulate a CRT for anything beyond 480p. Match gamma and gamut? Definitely. But the rest was, effectively, nearly transparent.
Coke bottle glasses gang for the win! xD
Again. no experience with the mighty FW900, but I can see 800x600 scanlines on computer CRTs, and I “feel” them at higher resolutions. The effect is pretty cool. I run xenia and rpcs3 with crt-hyllian via reshade for that reason. Tiny scanlines + mask + halation makes those 720p games look very similar to my defunct 32", two metric ton HD-CRT, which my x360 loved.
lol yay!
And @Azurfel I have a C1 too, 65", and as much as I love it I wouldn’t recommend buying one (or something similar) to someone that asks about running a shader experiment. Comes off as a bit callous. He knows he isn’t getting a free FW900, I don’t think that was ever the point.
Antialiasing and dedithering effects of CRT shaders are doing a great job on 480p and 600p content. You guys should try it someday. Definately helps also to aesthetically blend 2D and 3D with a common grain.
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I suppose that’s the flip side. At a full 10" bigger than the FW900, it makes sense that scanlines would have been much more visible at 720p. I’ve experimented a little with Megatron at 4K for 720p games (i remember taking a look at Braid in particular), and the result is definitely compelling, tho i don’t think we have the resolution to really make it shine at 4K. It would probably take 16K to make it work as well as 240p does on 4K displays, and the way the world is going, i’m doubting 16K will ever be affordable, even if it does end up existing.
Oh, i certainly wouldn’t recommend going that route at this point, i was just specifying what i personally use. (Also, getting an FW900 when it was cheap and using it for 15 years was something a money saver on the whole compared to getting LCDs in that span, which offset the cost a bit xD)
At this point, there are a number of more affordable OLED monitors that have become available in the last few years that i would far sooner recommend over using a 48" TV as a desktop monitor (unless that is what you are into.)
@Obsolete absolutely! And even higher resolutions too. I just told Azurfel, I run Xenia and RPSC3 with a shader and I absolutely love that 720p crt look. Those games appear tragically flat and soft without it.
So if you want to get really into the weeds (or the aperture grille, or something) what started this whole line of thought for me was my beloved 19" Gateway VX900 from 1998. It still runs like a champ and I still use it for older PC games. But it occurred to me that that monitor won’t last forever, so I wanted to figure out how to best capture that high-end VGA CRT monitor experience for whenever it finally bites the dust (hopefully still many years in the future).
And then I thought, well not many people will know that particular monitor, but the GDM is pretty well known in CRT circles, so I’ll use that as a stand-in for “awesome high-end late VGA Trinitron suitable for Windows 98/XP gaming”. So that is my rationale, not an attempt to perfectly emulate an actual GDM so that I can avoid paying for it or whatever (heck, I still hope to find one of those one day).
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Monitors had a ‘design resolution’ where the beam was sized so you wouldn’t see any scanlines. The last CRT I had, a Dell monitor, only started to show scanlines once you got down to 640x480. Way cheaper than an FW900 but you see the same thing: clean transparent image from 800x600 up.
I agree past 480p, CRT effects aren’t really necessary. Scanlines still look good on 480p. 1080i is kind of the oddball though. It might look better with one of the interlacing shaders (haven’t tried it; I like how 480i looks with them), but there weren’t many 1080i games anyway IIRC.
There were hardly any CRT TVs that could do 720p (I’ve heard of exactly one). Monitors could them though. 720p TVs were mostly flat panels.
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They were, they were. And man that TV looked so much better than any LCD from the time (mid 2000s). When I first slapped the shader over Xenia, it almost brought a tear to my eye. In fact, 720p for me is still a “TV” resolution, and 1440p the first actual pixel count that looked really great on flat screens, with 1080 landing somewhere between the two. Obviously, very few CRT TVs could do 720 or 1080, and the ones that did were rare, expensive, heavy and prone to failure.
If you want to emulate something that was transparent, then you dont need shaders at all I guess. 480p games didnt look good on high-end SVGA screens IMO, it was already too crisp, with dithering too apparent.
I remember a time when the fog of war in Warcraft 2 was properly blended and transparent, aesthetically pleasing. Something they now have to redo in the remasters.
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There were a few. I had the Samsung 32" and boy did the xbox360 like it. Was just talking about that, I run xenia and rpcs3 with a crt shader for that look and it works very well, both on the 27" monitor and the 65" oled. So well in fact that I can’t play those 720p games without it.
Now imagine this
https://crtdatabase.com/crts/sony/sony-bvm-d32e1wu
Based on my experience with HD-CRT-TV simulations, I’m pretty confident that you are going to be able to make a preset that will look a bit different than the crt, but in many ways better, and will leave you more than satisfied.
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add also that brightness of crt vgas was way too tiresome for the eyes. Majority of users had monitor filters
CRT-Guest-Advanced-hd preset was the base, IIRC. Key parameters being intres = 1.5 to avoid moiré at 1080p, hiscan = 1 and shadowmask = 4.
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Oh i’m using this preset already so i’ll tinker with it a bit thanks
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