jnisbet: No, I think that it looks bad. If you think that it looks good, though, that's all that matters. You shouldn't care what I think, since what I like (the original, pixelated look) is something you evidently don't like.

ummagoomba: To answer another point that was brought up by Soniqueta. I think that the reason the game looks worse now that it did back then, is due to a couple of reasons.

1 - Low Resolution games, high resolution monitor.
2 - CRT vs LCD with fixed pixels/resolution.

CRT monitors, which you would have used back in the day were more dynamic, due to the fact that it was electrons hitting the back of the screen. Changing the resolution on a PC, changed the configuration of how those electrons struck the screen and, I think CRTs images were softer.

LCDs have a fixed resolution, because the pixels are physical components. When you try to lower the resolution, you are not lowering the amount of pixels being displayed, they need group multiple pixels together to try and behave as one, larger pixel. Multiple pixels need to try and do the job of a single pixel. Games on LCDs definitely appear more pixelated that they did back on CRT monitors. The transitions between pixels is harsher than that of CRT.

For my money, I like scalers that try to slightly blur the image. I don't think pixelated retro games are true at all to how they used to look on old CRTs.

jnisbet: If you want crisper (more pixelated) image quality, set the overlay mode (in either of the locations above) to "openglnb". That's what I prefer because I like pixels and the colors aren't washed out any.