While I haven't heard of any project that emulated the tape-specific effects of VHS, the video game emulation community has done a lot of work on emulating NTSC

While I haven't heard of any project that emulated the tape-specific effects of VHS, the video game emulation community has done a lot of work on emulating NTSC. For example, Blargg's NTSC libraries[1] simulate composite and s-video derived gamma curves, blur, marginal horizontal-sync, color bleeding and fringing, and more. The color "correction" really helps the look of old game systems that were designed for NTSC. I've seen GLSL post-process filters for MAME (or was it a MAME derivative?), too. Some of those even simulated stuff like the curved surface of a CRT. Also, there is xscreensaver's "xanalogtv" hack. I wonder how hard it would be to modify one of these to include bad tracking. side note: I believe MAME has (or had?) a mode that would slowly accumulate some of "brightness" from any saturated pixel that stayed the same for a large numbe4r of frames. This data was saved globally, so if you played certain old games that were very static, you would get "monitor burn" after images. [1] http://slack.net/~ant/libs/ntsc.html http://slack.net/~ant/libs/ntsc.html