Comment by kelnos

I don't think anyone (including the original author) is saying that the look is inherent to software renderers. The point being made is that software renders of the day tended to do things in a particular way (because CPU speed was limited), and when some of these games gained hardware renderers, they did things in a different particular way, because more computationally-expensive (for a CPU) blending modes were more or less free on a GPU.

I do agree that the author may have missed the fact that they could have overridden texture blending modes via their GPU driver, and gotten a similar graphical look using the hardware renderer. But even that's a little uncertain; there are some other comments in other subthreads that point out that the hardware rendering modes on many of these older games also did other stuff that wasn't feasible with the software renderer, and those other things sometimes can't be tweaked/disabled. So if your goal is "exact same visual style as the software renderer", you might actually have to use the software renderer.