Needs to be played on a CRT in general. For retro games, you can't beat the low latency and fantastic glow of an electron gun. No shader emulation comes close.
...I find this hard to believe. A modern high-quality 4K HDR screen is exceedingly good at recreating all sorts of lifelike imagery. You're telling me the one thing it can't effectively recreate is a CRT television?
Input lag is probably the biggest issue, but you can get very low-latency screens nowadays! None of them are actually 0ms, but neither were CRTs unless you're measuring only the top of the screen and not the bottom.
I know.. and it was designed that way. It wasn't a bug but a feature of the game where the designer/developer knew how that would artifact on the screen, and was done intentionally. It really doesn't emulate/simulate well on a modern display.
The waterfall effect is basically just blur! The problem with adding blur is that—although it makes the waterfall effect work—it makes the image blurry.
Personally, I don't think it's that the CRT is better than the filters, I think you're just used to the imperfections of a CRT.
Also, I really do think you need a 4K HDR screen (with good HDR, there's a lot of variance) in order for filters to really emulate the look of a CRT.
It's not a blur so much as intentionally designed to use how a CRT/Composite video would artifact on a CRT. It's not a matter of better or worse, just that filters/simulation won't work well for that same effect.
Also, in a lot of ways a good CRT does look significantly better than all but OLED displays for games. The down side is they're heavy. I used to have two 22" calibrated flat screen displays that I loved, and only very recently are new displays visual quality on par. I stopped using them more because of space and size than quality. They weighed 85# each and had a permanent bow in the desk I was using back then. Moving 3x in one summer I decided to go with flat pannel. Not as good, but was doing less design work and more programming since then.
Input lag is probably the biggest issue, but you can get very low-latency screens nowadays! None of them are actually 0ms, but neither were CRTs unless you're measuring only the top of the screen and not the bottom.