Only other romhack that comes to mind is Emerald Rogue. It's not particularly polished, but it's an interesting concept and the runs aren't that long (because I'm retarded and bad at it).
that pokeyman thing sounds sorta neat, but yeah I'm not picky about it being a hack or not
Everybody seems hellbent on simulating the smearing effect of CRT monitors.
I like a sharp pixel as much as the next guy but when I scale certain games up to fullscreen there's wide enough patches of flat color that I can see the LEDs behind my screen, CRT effects help cover that up while not being visually intrusive at TV distances.
There's a 4chan meme where it switches being crisp pixels and "CRT" but the pictures are actually altered (one has red text, one has white text, for instance). I can never tell if it's "CRT look is better" or mocking the concept.
Something I find interesting about emulators is how they fix a lot of games. Iirc, The Hulk was a well liked game at the time, but too simple to justify a full price purchase. Save states can save some games too.
Save states are a godsend especially with older games that pad out their run time with artificial difficulty or limited lives or having just plain terrible sections.
If I didn't want short run times, artificial difficulty and limited lives I probably wouldn't be playing retro games in the first place
Save states can absolutely cheese games but at the same time they work with the game by providing a necessary enhancement. Remember, games like Super Mario Bros. 3 did not have save states in their original form, and I dare say that if you're comparing SMB 3 to Super Mario World on a 1:1 basis it should be considered.
I like crt-guest-advanced. It looks nice with basically anything except maybe Game Boy/Color (surprisingly good on GBA though), and you can change the curvature depending on whether or not you want a tube TV look. Though I sometimes get issues with the screen moving up and down a few pixels for N64; there’s probably a way to fix it, but I haven’t tried.
