Persuasive Games designer and frequent Gamasutra contributor Ian Bogost posted about an intriguing project he's working on with a group at Georgia Tech Computer Science (where he serves as an associate professor) to modify the Stella Atari VCS emulator to "better reproduce the visual effects of a CRT television of the late 1970s and early 1980s."

Similar to NFG's argument that modern monitors have difficulty displaying games the way we remember them, Bogost believes that our huge, sharp LCD monitors fail to give an accurate impression of what Atari games looked like in the 1970s, missing the texture, afterimage, color bleed, and noise of older televisions.

"Many of today's players may only experience Atari games in emulation," he laments. "Indeed, many of my students may have little to no memory of CRT televisions at all. Given such factors, it seems even more important to improve the graphical accuracy of tools like Stella."

The Georgia Tech Computer Science capstone group has modified Stella to add in those absent characteristics, and is working with the maintainer of the free and open-source emulator to include their CRT-emulating changes into the main build, where they will be available as a configurable option. Bogost hopes that the software will eventually be extended for use in other emulators for systems that relied on televisions for their primary output.

You can see some examples of the modified emulator in action after the break, as well as on Bogost's site.