To me this is sounds like the tube vs solid state amplifier in guitars debate again.
I think the question should really be: can they do a good enough job?
My take is that with the right display they can.
CRTs didn't have an impossible refresh rate, colour gamut, contrast or resolution - arguably they kind of suck in each of these areas compared to modern displays.
I mean, we didn't see screens show deep teals until OLED arrived.
It's a similar argument, but as with all engineering questions the details matter. The human auditory system can be entirely fooled with 2 channels of 40 kSamp/s 16-bit data: 1.3E6 bits per second. The human visual system is much more difficult. It's hard to put a hard number on it due to the stochastic nature of "pixel" sampling in the eye, but generally 1000 Hz is accepted [1] (pulled from blurbusters). I'm also going to gloss over foveated rendering since I'm assuming a one-way "trick the system" box. The human visual system would need 2 channels of 7500 x 7500 (120 degree / 0.016 degrees per pixel) x 1000 Hz x 3x16-bit color: 2.7E12 bits per second.
To get to my point: it is technologically trivial to work with audio compared to video. Audio simulation and reconstruction has been a mostly dead area of research for decades while video is still flourishing. Audio did not stop at the actual technical best place it could have, but when it was good enough and diminishing returns hit.
They most certainly can but the requirements are steep. Being able to run at 4K/120Hz is where you start to get very accurate simulation of a CRT. You need a high resolution to draw the phosphors, mask, and bloom. You need the high refresh rate to be able to have realistic phosphor draw and decay.
Playing on an original Asteroids cabinet with vector monitor these days is an interesting experience. I was surprised by the brightness/dynamic range, it seemed way beyond what you get from an LCD. Its like it's got an bloom effect on the brightly-glowing bullets.
Yes they can, I saw them in the video we are discussing, my screen showed me smooth pixels instead of blocky ones even though I don't have a CRT screen. Of course it isn't perfect, since my screens doesn't have infinite resolution, but it is good enough. Nothing stops a filter from getting the exact same result as taking a picture of a CRT screen.
It cant replicate what CRTs look like because how the light is emitted from a CRT looks nothing like how the light is emitted from a LCD. No matter how many shaders you use, you cant change any of that.
They fundamentally don’t but a high quality / high refresh OLED display can come very close and if implementation done right IMHO can even surpass experience in some cases. I still play old games on my old beloved tubes but to be frank often just for purity / nostalgic reasons and because I like the original 4:3 format without (“perfect black” even) overhead on the sides. I hope Apple will finally Switch to OLED for their iPads as the aftermarket / replace displays for those usually are well affordable and usable for e.g. a wall mounted “cabinet”.
