but NFOs are intended to be viewed, not "played with".

They were not intentionally modified. For instance these code 437 characters are not well liked in binsearch's .nfo preview. That's where i'm seeing them not showing up properly.

Thanks for the process descriptions. Would like to see the scripts, but don't have a good understanding of that at the moment. Thinking that since the Catnap source has colorbars that if a similar methodology was applied relocating the colors to match a definition colorbar sample, a better understand of what the original colors were like could be found. Or it could just end with a poor telecine transfer. But that's doubtful, since it's widescreen which wasn't done on VHS in those early days.