Perhaps. One issue I foresee is the way CRTS glow. The phosphor doesn't light/dim immediately the way an LED does. So there's some amount of fade in/out that happens on a CRT as the beam moves across the screen. I imagine this could be difficult or impossible to reproduce with a traditional OLED screen. Some old games rely on this technique along with the slow refresh rates to to create a sort of dithering/aliasing effect.
Phosphor decay is not terribly difficult to simulate to an acceptable degree. Doing it at the pixel level is pretty easy, doing it at the phosphor level is computationally harder but not much more complicated.
The larger issue w.r.t. this specific quirk of CRTs is that we're running out of human beings that are familiar with what this is "supposed" to look like, and actually care.
I'm not aware of any cases where it's been emulated in any acceptable manner. I can't be bothered to do the math myself, but I imagine doing this well would be beyond the capabilities of modern displays (probably in the 1000s of hz refresh rate). Maybe some special FPGA based controller with an OLED like was suggested above could make it possible. I'm not sure.
Each individual phosphor dot on a CRT is not terribly tricky to emulate.
The brightness at any given moment is a fairly simple decay function based on how long it's been since you lit it up with the electron gun. On top of that, you would typically want to apply some level of bloom to simulate the way light is diffused by the glass. Sure, you've got a few million dots to simulate, but this is also anembarrassingly parallel problem.
Now of course, admittedly, you're only simulating that phosphor glow decay at the refresh rate of your monitor -- 60hz, 144hz, 240hz, whatever -- instead of an effectively infinite level of steps as would be the case in real life. However, I don't think that is a practical issue.
You're clearly thinking of factors I'm not and I'm genuinely interested. To my mind, the visual aspects of CRTs are pretty easy to simulate, but not the near-zero lag.
The thing you can't emulate is the phosphorus coating. It simply looks different because light isn't coming from a backlight, but the front display is actually shining. And in vector graphics you don't have pixels at all, the light shines quite beautifully in a way I don't think is possible at all with backlit displays.
> The thing you can't emulate is the phosphorus coating. It simply looks different because light isn't coming from a backlight, but the front display is actually shining.
