Welp, turns out Guest-Advanced can blend dithering just fine by itself. Just had to set Downsampling-X to 0.95 and voila:
The difference is a bit subtle (I think the edges around brightly colored pixels may be a tad bit rougher as opposed to when using TVOut-Tweaks), but what’s important is that it runs on my toaster. I didn’t think TVOut-Tweaks combined with GDV would make my GPU buckle like it does (even the Fast version can’t hang), so it’s good this option exists within GDV itself.
Yeah, one of the things I noticed about shaders that blend dithering is, in the case of NTSC shaders, the colors suffer as a result due to color bleed and general washing out, whereas dedithering shaders like mdapt can result in false positives. I thought, then, wouldn’t it be ideal to preserve the quality of the colors while still blending dithering in a way that doesn’t result in pixels being blended that shouldn’t be? This does mean a certain level of horizontal blurring, but it can be minimized. Blur just enough to blend the pixels and no more, is what I’m thinking.
Of course, there’s certainly a case to be made for accurately representing what the games actually looked like on real hardware using composite cables and such, but hey, if we have the option to have our cake and eat it, too, why shouldn’t we?