Another thing that was/is very hard to replicate on common modern setups is that feeling of instant feedback you can get from quality (certainly not all) games

Another thing that was/is very hard to replicate on common modern setups is that feeling of instant feedback you can get from quality (certainly not all) games at the time. The inputs were polled, there was no room for a 3 frame output buffer even if someone had wanted one, the displays didn't add a bunch of image processing time on top of it. You press fire and things fire, you dodge right and you move right. It wasn't truly instantaneous but it tended to be a lot better than a typical console+TV setup today (even in "game mode" on the TV). Worth noting Star Fox in particular was not one of these games... it was... struggling to do the output 3D at a fast or consistent rate even with the extra chip :). Again, not that all games were like this just it can be hard to replicate the feel of the ones that were with different technologies. Run-ahead is one way to bridge the last bit of that gap on many average systems these days. And you're 100% right there is no "correct blurriness" for CRT. When I say "don't take this one CRT to be gospel of what every CRT output from all of time looked like" I mean it - some CRTs, particularly for computer style displays instead of TV style displays, were relatively sharp. And a high end barely used CRT from the late 90s is probably a lot less blurry than a low end and heavily used one from the early 80s, everything else equivalent about them. That said, Star Fox had expectations of both being output on consumer TVs as well as through the SNES video output which wasn't particularly sharp itself anyways. Another classic example of this in home game consoles is the waterfalls in the Genesis era Sonic games. If you play them on a modern display it looks more like a sharp set of blue and white door bead curtains. If you play it on a typical CRT television it looks more like shimmering water falling (not perfectly but the bright single pixel whites are not so perfectly contrasted and there is some blur between the vertical lines with the background instead of a straight alternation).