What Quake is Supposed to Look Like

A big part of playing classic Quake is getting it setup, patched and configured to look classic and great at the same time. I believe that Quake should be setup a very specific way to get the best looking picture while staying true to its original look.

These are the settings I use:
SourcePort: QuakeSpasm
Resolution: 640x480 (4:3 aspect ratio, not widescreen)
V-Sync: ON
Brightness: All the way down (this sets the black level correctly so the picture isn't washed out)
Multi Sampling: Full Screen Anti-Aliasing 8x
r_wateralpha: .4 (somethere around here, transparent water)
r_skyalpha: .4 (somewhere around here, allows first sky layer to be transparent for better effect)
Vis patch the game for transparent water
Colored light with .lit files for colored lighting, hey the consoles had it!
Original textures of course and no anisotropic filter, which I don't think QuakeSpasm supports anyway.
Quakespasm doesn't support glass reflections, but if it did I'd probably turn that on since the original GL-Quake supported that.
The great thing about QuakeSpasm is that it supports full-bright texture so the lamp textures look like they are on rather than painted on a pole. GL-Quake didn't support that, but software quake did ironically. You can see a comparison here that shows what I'm talking about.

This is how I think Quake looks the best:

But, this is how many play quake with modern graphics and it looks worse. This is not the only way, but this is from QuakeWorld, which is the worst offender. As you can see written below "Quake" texture this is using the re-texturing project too. It does not look better. It is possible it would not look as bad if the textures could be imported to QuakeSpasm with the settings I use, but I can't test that because QuakeSpasm does not. I respect all the hard work with the re-texturing though! They just recently finished the mission pack 2 textures too on Quake's 20th birthday!

I think it is unquestionable that the top picture looks better!