t3mujinpack VS ePSXe64Ubuntu

I'd also (re-)add: film is just one part of a transmission process.

Film has to be developed into something. And that's a chemical process, which is non-linear. Developer, the bath you put film in to activate the still blank but exposed reel, to turn the grains into actual "developed" photo, is a complex analog process. "Developer" is expended while developing film & becomes less effective at developing, creating a much stronger local contrast across pictures in a natural chemical way.

There's a pretty complex Shannon Information Theory system going on here, which I'm not certain how to model. There's maybe a information->transmit->medium->receive->information model between the scene and the film. Then an entirely separate information->transmit->medium->recieve->information model between the undeveloped scene and what actually shows up when you "develop" the film.

As you say, there are quite a variety of film types with different behaviors. https://github.com/t3mujin/t3mujinpack is set of Darktable presets to emulate various types of film. But the behavior of the film is still only half of the process. As I said in my previous post, developing the film is a complex chemical process, with lots of local effects for different parts of the image. There's enormous power here. https://filmulator.org/ is an epic project, that, in my view, is incredibly applicable to almost all modern digital photography, that could help us so much, to move beyond raw data & help us appreciate scenes more naturally. It's not "correct" but my personal view is the aesthetic is much better, and it somewhat represents what the human eye does anyways, with it's incredible ability to comprehend & view dynamic range.

I use a collection of color grading preset plugins for darktable called the T3 Mujin Pack which give really nice, analog-like texture to my digital shots. It doesn't add film grain (which of course you can do with other methods), but i find some ISO noise on a RAW photo and some color grading gets shockingly close to that particular underexposed 90s style

This style set for darktable is pretty great: https://github.com/t3mujin/t3mujinpack

Well, the very first thing to do whenever starting a new project is to figure out the work already done by others. There are plenty of cases of this. Have a look at the open source emulator ePSXeUbuntu or you could look at what others are doing to hack other PSX games like Final Fantasy Tactics. Good luck.