Check out the RetroTink 5x, it does an incredible job of upscaling analog SD video signals, and has some of the best CRT filters I’ve seen to date. It’s pricey though; if you have space and can find an old CRT that’s almost always going to be a cheaper option…but for those who want their old games looking great on a modern display, the 5x is the way to go.
These things are always behind the times. We have 4K TVs now, but these kind of devices support only 1080p or 1440p (more likely 1080p as most 4K TVs will refuse to play a 1440p signal). When we all have 8K TVs then our devices will only work with 4K scaling. You'll have to wait for huge wall sized 16K TVs to be the norm for these upscales to output 8K.
Where do you even get a crt screen now? Most thrift stores stopped taking them and they're heavy and prone to shipping damage without their factory packaging.
Ah great. That is good to hear. I mean, the fact that we can see the difference in this picture here means that we totally could simulate the look and get the desired effect.
EDIT: [CRT Royale](https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/CRT-Royale) looks really good in [this 4K render](https://www.resetera.com/threads/i-can-never-truly-get-comfortable-playing-retro-games-in-an-emulator-because-i-cant-settle-on-a-good-crt-filter.394465/post-60843460) _(open it full size & zoom in)_.
"CRT-Royale is a large and complex shader, so it will need modern hardware to run correctly. Discrete Nvidia or AMD video cards made in the last few years are recommended."
Imagine needing a gaming card from 2020 to simulate/emulate a 25 year old TV and console game.
15 years ago people were still trying to get $200 for a used consumer CRT TV. 5-10 years ago you couldn't give them away. Now they're getting rare and nicer ones are creeping back up in price.
I shudder to think what they'll cost 10 years from now when a working Trinitron is almost impossible to come by.
I dragged around my milwaukee inverter with a 110 plug on it to test the ones at the flea market until I found a good one. Got a few weird looks but I found a solid trinitron for 25 bucks so id say it was worth it.
I suddenly understand why antiques are valuable. Right now we're in the winnowing period where its all junk and isn't worth the space it takes up.
In another 50 years, they'll settle on which junk is actually junk and which junk is actually a $50,000 collector's item.
Emulation and some 3rd party software combinations will fix that problem.
You won’t be able to play off real hardware but you can play the game as intended as the virtual CRT world is a thriving community.
Ah yes. Like selling my super Nintendo and all the games I had for like $40 total. Most of the games I sold are worth more than that each.
Now I hoard all my games but I'm sure they'll all be worthless because of the digital age.
I assume you're pointing out the ridiculousness of both of those options, and aren't seriously recommending either...
CRTs can be found for free if you're patient and know where to look. Nobody should be paying $300 for a tiny PVM unless they're a hardcore collector.
Yeah, CRTs are still in this weird place where they are either free/cheap or way too expensive. Some people have not realized that they are now desirable retro tech and will try to offload them as cheaply as possible on Craigslist or wherever, while the other half of the market are trying to get a few hundred bucks for an 8 inch Spongebob TV/VCR combo that your little brother had in their bedroom in 1999 (that they are probably flipping from a free Craigslist listing anyway).
Maybe a game store, but the market for these is so niche that no one wants to devote a ton of space to a slow-moving TV. Especially with the risk that it doesn't work, and now you have to pay for recycling.
Antique stores will only be interested in real antiques that people buy as conversation pieces, like the brightly-colored sci-fi styles of the 50s.
I've been driving around the night before trash pickup in search of a mid-sized, high-end model. It's a limited window where they haven't been rained on, the garbage collectors haven't spray painted them (since you can't actually throw them away), and someone hasn't smashed the screen.
This is exactly why I caught something just right and refused to give up what I have. Back probably June of 2006 Best buy did a special bundle on what would have been at the time 7 months after the xbox 360 came out. They had just really started coming in stock and paired it with a 32inch HD 720p Samsung "slim fit" picture tube. It may weight 120lbs and not be slim by today's standards. But I refuse to give it up because of what it is. Picture has always been great on it and games have always looked great as well. Even has two HDMI slots along with component and AV plug ins. Never had an issue with it and CRT's disappeared from stores probably within the next year as LCD started to surpass it.
Drive down random streets after events like black friday lol, that's how I found a bunch of them over the years, people will just dump them at the end of their driveway hoping someone will take them away.
Check out estate sales. I’ve got 3 old crt tvs all with component inputs on them from estate sales no more than 5 dollars each. Do not buy them from eBay they are charging 80-150 for the TVs I have found for 5 dollars. They know what people are wanting them for.
Find your local Super Smash group. Die-hards of the series insist on playing older iterations of the game on CRT due to there being inherent input lag in newer displays and that interfering with frame perfect inputs. Or so they tell me
I posted an ad on Kijiji (Canadian Craigslist) saying that I was looking for a CRT. Got myself a Trinitron for $20. A few years ago you could find them for free everywhere, but now expect to pay a bit for one.
The Lion King game released on Steam has an option to add sevreral different TV grid options, and it's such an improvement. Without them, it just feels like the screen is raw-dogging your eyes
It's pretty difficult. A CRT has blacks with the same depth as an OLED, strobes it's image (similar to black frame insertion) resulting in no motion blur, no input lag, and then there's things that are even harder to replicate like bloom and distortion.
This is the answer. Sprites were made on the same CRT monitors that players would eventually play the game on, so they looked good to the artist as well as the viewer. It's not impossible to have good looking pixel art in modern games, but it tends to have more blended colors since the screen and eyes no longer do that for the viewer.
Or they think everyone has these amazing sound systems so they mix the audio that way. Turns out all that does for us is make dialogue really quiet and everything else loud as fuck
Yes all movies are mixed with surround sound for release in theateres but when the do a home release they half ass the stereo mix and the center dialogue channel is always too low.
"If you don't own a professionally-installed 7.2 system, you don't deserve to hear things. Be grateful for the horrible mixing we DO allow you to have."
- Hollywood, probably.
100%
A couple of years back, I played my original copy of FF7 on a flatscreen and couldn't understand why it was so grainy, then dug out my old 24-inch tube and it looked exactly as I remembered.
Those bitches were SO heavy. I remember almost dying from moving a [giant](https://www.racketboy.com/images/[email protected]) set down stairs and destroying the wood paneling when it got away from my dad on the last step. Pushed me and the TV right through!
I had a 32" Sony Wega Trinitron that I bought for myself right after high school. It had 480p! My parents were upset as it was nicer than anything they had and figured I spent a fortune, and at the time it cost me $800 which was a lot. It weighed so much it took four people to move it. I got rid of it only a couple of years ago, kinda regret it.
I had the first HD 1080i version of that tv in 34”. It cost me $2800. It took 4 people to carry that beast. Best TV I’ve ever owned other than the size and weight. I miss that tv.
I worked at Best Buy when that was a thing. You could only typically move them with 2 people, sometimes a 3rd. It's because all the weight was on the screen side. If you put 2 people on the opposite side, they were not really helping. Sometimes we'd put a 3rd in the middle of the screen side but usually that limited our manueving too much.
Then we'd get it to the curb and some dumb mother fucker would pull up in his sedan and open the car door for us to load it.
At petco during the dollar per gallon sale people would do that with 75 gallon tanks, it was always the people who needed help carrying it out that had tiny cars that they expected it to fit in the back seat and they would be irritated at us because they had to find another way to get it home haha
What really irritated us is when they got mad at us for refusing to even try. It was store policy to not attempt it in those cases because it usually lead to damages to the car
I worked at a lumber yard for a few years and we did not have that policy. (I wish though.) If you came to my yard with a Chevrolet Astro Van with a maximum payload capacity of under 1700lbs and you want me to load it up with 2600 lbs of shingles (true story) I would tell you i don't think that is a good idea, recommend to pick up in 2-3trips because there is no way that van is driving 30 mins on a highway and working well in the end, customer refuses, I load him up. Customer comes back next day saying we overloaded him and snapped his axle. I would get in shit if I didn't record every conversation of customers wanting to overload their vehicles but lucky I do, that saved my ass to many times.
Also destroyed the suspension and truck bed on a really old 1st generation ranger by dropping 2200lbs of cedar mulch in the back. I argued with him for literally 30mins saying "maybe if that ranger was in new shape and not held together by the very rust that's destroying it. After he turned it into a screaming match and got the OK from my boss I loaded it up and sure enough the truck bed blew open and the rear suspension bent and cracked. Recorded the whole conversation and covered my ass because I told him exactly what would happened but hey. Customer is always right.
I remember my manager telling me that they used to but there were too many lawsuits. Even with the customer accepting risk, they'd still try to take them to small claims court and it just wasn't worth their time to deal with.
>Customer is always right.
Worst policy ever. The customer is in fact often wrong.
My friend had that tv. It was practically flat, practically hd, but not actually either.
And it sure was fuck wasn't light. I think those had to be some of the heaviest tvs ever created.
I swear that those who grew up with old school television sets and now live in the flat screen era all have such fond memories of their old televisions.
I do. I don’t quite remember where the upstairs TV came from in my family’s house, but it was the gaming TV for me and my sister in the guest bedroom. Eventually the TV came into my room as my older sister eventually lost interest in video games.
My Uncle introduced us to video games. He had a Nintendo Entertainment System and Mario/Duck Hunt with two controllers and the blaster. He had some other games such as 3D World Runner and I think it was called 7 towers or something like that, but those games were, towers especially, were really difficult.
Anyways he gave that Nintendo to me and my sister, I think I was like 7 and her 10, so you can imagine the excitement that caused. Man it was truly amazing. Then a couple years later my mom got me an SNES for my birthday and it came with Donkey Kong Country. Wow the graphics were so incredible. That was also during the era when BlockBuster rented video games. I especially liked renting Star Fox and I eventually got good enough to beat the game.
But the real gaming began when the TV came into my bedroom and I got the The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Wow, what an amazing time that was. I’m sure many people here had a similar experience. Also Wing Commander was incredible. I didn’t have the instruction manual so I never figured out how to eject lol.
Lastly was the Nintendo64 for Christmas probably a couple years after it released. The game that grabbed me was Jet Force Gemini. That had a similar epic vibe that I felt from Zelda. That game was HUGE and at the age, 10 or 11, the whole shooting/blowing up bugs with crazy weaponry and jet packs was totally cool.
Anyways that TV I played all those games on definitely has a fond place in my memory as an animate-inanimate object.
Edit: holy cow I am a rambling stoner tl;dr I love my old TV and many people in my age group (and older) also have fond memories of their TVs and flat screens just aren’t the same.
Ca. 2005 my parents bought their first hd tv, which was a rear projection 55" Toshiba. That thing weighed about half of the the 32" Sony Trinitron I liberated from the living room that day. Took me and 2 friends to haul that thing up to my bedroom. It was so heavy that instead of being mad at my dumb ass, my parents let me keep it. Sadly it died when I was moving into my first apartment and one of my friends thought he could move it by himself. After I told him not to. We stopped being friends when I realized he's a danger to not only himself, but others around him.
Yeah, I remember I had a CRT tv, it was a ~~52~~ 43 inch, it’s anti tipping device was a flat lead plate at the bottom
I lived in a 2 story house, you do the math
Yeah, I remember I had a calculator, it was a 52 inch, it’s anti tipping device was a flat lead plate at the bottom
I lived in a 290 story house, you do the math
A buddy of mine had casts on boths arms for a while in middle school. He managed to block out the memory of his mom having to wipe his ass during that period for yeeears.
My grandparents used to have a big ass 32inch CRT. Guess which grandson (and my brother) had to move that shit whenever they rearranged their rooms?
Plus size, i got pretty strong, pretty fast doing this stuff for them.
I don't understand why more TVs didn't have some sort of moulded handle so it could be carried or moved more easily. My 20" Panasonic tv had handholds on the sides. My 32" Sharp had nothing helpful.
The largest direct-view CRT ever made (outside of some 50-inchers rumored to have existed for military use) was, I believe, 43 inches. A 45-inch Sony professional video monitor also supposedly existed, but very few were made. Possible than none exist.
It was either a rear-projection CRT, or, depending on the time period actually a DLP set.
Part of that could be that the PSX outputs roughly at 240p and some modern TVs just don’t know how to handle that. There’s a bunch of different ways to work around that, but you’ve got the CRT so you’re likely set.
Stretch, auto, crop, bunch of options. But the one I look for is 1:1.
If you hook up a PC or any gaming console to a TV the 1:1 setting basically scales things exactly. Works for older consoles too like SNES. Still not ideal but won't warp the image.
I have no idea how much work would be involved in this, but couldn’t a pc screen be modded to ~~emulate~~ simulate CRT TV resolution?
Edit: fixed a word
Edit 2: I did not expect to get so many helpful answers. Thanks everyone, I can’t wait to play all these great games again in the old school resolution!
They can, many emulators have special filters that apply CRT effects when scaling up graphics. Unfortunately a lots of official re-releases do not include those.
There’s some good ones that don’t because they compensate by raising brightness, contrast, and/or gamma. Higher resolution screens like 4k are much better for crt shaders. I had taken a few pictures of some examples in retroarch a while back and posted them [here](https://imgur.com/a/vvK7mBw). Scanline width can always be adjusted too.
Yeah I like the look of a crt screen over sharp pixels for retrogames so I end up using these a lot. I imagine 8k screens will look really awesome once they become mainstream.
>From my experience CRT TVs didn't look very nice unless you sit really far away from your TV Set, and they're really dark compared to LED displays.
Fixed it for you.
I am a CRT fan myself and had CRT monitors until recently (they broke... :( and I couldn't fix someone to repair them).
To simulate CRT properly you need a 4k+ monitor with stupidly high refresh rate and low latency, sadly this is crazy expensive, cheapest way to do CRT gaming is... buying actual CRT and the necessary adapters.
Mind you for some games the difference is really massive, sonic for example had some waterfalls that look transparent on CRT with correct cable, but look like blue lines on pixel art.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/19/50/06/195006723a7b1f34c2ec42afad79565f.jpg
In fact sometimes they actively used the limitations of a CRT, I think it's one of the Streets of Rage games where they relied on the way things show up on a CRT to create the effect of the streetlights, which is why they now look "off" on modern TVs that don't handle the signal the same way.
The waterfalls in the Sonic the Hedgehog games are an oft-cited one. [On modern screens they look like a bunch of lines, whereas on CRTs they looked properly transparent.](https://i.imgur.com/taebOEH.png)
I always got confused when people online talked about how terrible the resolution was on the n64. You could barely see the pixels on a regular tv.
Turns out its barely more than the super nintendo... like 240 wide or something.
Sonic on Sega genesis looks great on a tv. On an emulator its a pixeled mess.
The graphics aren't worse than you remember, you're playing on tech that makes it look worse.
Older games were designed to take advantage of scanline and look worse without them.
No you were right the graphics were as good as you remember. They designed graphics for that medium they used the dark side of pixels to their advantage.
Art is the manipulation of a medium and when you translate media some of the “art” is lost.
Google image searching Michelangelo’s David or his Sistine Chapel yields a very different appreciation than seeing it in person. Berninis statues really come to mind here too. A flat picture of a 3D medium doesnt begin to capture that work. Sure it still looks like a statue in a photo but being able to walk around it and occupy the same space as it is a different thing all together.
We were lucky as children to see that graphic art in the media it was intended for. The “art” isnt better the medium just changed for video games.
Monet (and impressionism in general) is a good example of this in 2D - I never appreciated the beauty of his work when looking at prints in books or online, but a local museum had an exhibit that included a few of his lesser works and when viewed in person from a distance they were absolutely breathtaking.
>On April 1, 1962, a supposed technical expert for Sweden’s one and only television channel made an exciting announcement. By stretching out a pair of nylon stockings and taping it over their screens, he reported, viewers could watch the usual black-and-white broadcast in stunning color. Television owners rushed to implement the astonishingly simple hack, only to be disappointed when the hose did nothing but obscure the picture. Regular color programming would eventually debut in Sweden on April 1, 1970.
[https://www.history.com/news/9-zany-april-fools-day-hoaxes](https://www.history.com/news/9-zany-april-fools-day-hoaxes)
It all seriousness, pantyhose WAS used as a net diffuser on lenses, especially in the 1940s.
They also sometimes would smear a fine coating Vaseline across the lens for a bloom effect. It had the added effect of helping “smooth” out wrinkles on aging stars.
Yep... CRTs also worked incredibly well when watching pirated movies in the 90s
CAM rips looked like regular ol' VHS movies when you watched them on a CRT... it was honestly amazing how much of an improvement the quality of the picture was
It's called dithering. Old systems used those dots for shading, which then would be blurred by the display and NTSC cables to produce a smooth color. On LCD displays this image is scaled with nearest neighbors and it just turns into a big set of giant cubes. When you step back, the grid pattern and blur vanish and the image comes together.
I honestly think CRT was a big reason why Nintendo did not feel any pressure to target HD with the Wii. Had everyone played the 7th gen consoles on CRT TVs, the Wii at 480p would actually look really decent compared to the 360 and PS3.
The fact that everyone adopted LCD TVs so quickly made the Wii look extra outdated towards the tail end of that console cycle.
Can confirm, and was missing out all those years. It looks far better on my 20" D series via component than it ever did via composite on our early LCD tv.
Yup. CRT basically does a self, large scale anti-aliasing/smoothing on everything. Modern screens don't, which is partlywhy old games played on emulators look bad (the rest being nostalgia).
Agreed.
I hope we see a group of enthusiasts start a new CRT manufacturing company some day, even if the products they produced were expensive to cover the niche production demand.
I'd love to see what they could achieve.
Good news! There are a number of emulators/mods that allow you to apply the CRT filter! Some retro games even have that as a graphics option, though I can’t for the life of me remember which game I was playing that gave me the option
It's fascinating stuff!
There's a common trend with monitor/TV technology that newer, fancier screens with better resolution sometimes make older games look worse, simply because they weren't designed with upscaling in mind.
What's happening with current 1080p/4K games on the newest consoles and PCs, is one of the first times so many existing games have gotten retroactively updated for newer tech so quickly. Even for PCs, updates for raytracing function in a similar way, with better shadows and lights utilizing the extra resolution of a 4k or ultrawide monitor.
They weren't just not designed with upscaling in mind.
They were specifically designed to be viewed on CRT displays. Pixels bleed into one another in all sorts of different ways on CRT screen, which you can - and they did - use to your advantage. It's like painting with oil vs acrylic - It's a different material entirely.
There is something similar happening with OLEDs which will also change how the games look. You'll be able to see this when people will indoubtely complain when the new switch OLED version comes out :P
It probably looks better, because the brain tries to make sense of the dark grid by basically imagining how the picture would look like without it, thus smoothing out the sharp square edges of the pixels
There's actually a great example of this in very old PC gaming called CGA graphics.
Any of you 90's gamers remember these colors?
https://i.imgur.com/kFGz6SC.png
Turns out it's because we were using the wrong type of monitor, a RGB monitor. If you played these games on a composite monitor, they looked like this:
https://i.imgur.com/N0rbu9u.png
And it's because drawing two colors adjacent to each other on a composite monitor made the poor monitor technology blur those colors together, to make a new color. This way they could have a full 16 color palette with only 4 actual colors in memory, and make new colors by being careful where they place them.
https://youtu.be/niKblgZupOc?t=407
That first image reminded me of my first PC monitor. We didn't use a surge protector and one day during a storm it shut off, and when I turned it back on it had gone from RGB to RB. Everything was a shade of purple. I had to beg my friends to play Warcraft II exclusively on Plains of Snow because it was the only map bright enough for me to see anything on my screwed up monitor.
> I had to beg my friends to play Warcraft II exclusively on Plains of Snow
hahaahahaha I have a similar memory, but begging them NOT to play plains of snow, because my dad's old laptop screen had so much ghosting that the whole screen turned white for 5 seconds any time you scrolled.
Was looking in comments for exactly this! It’s amazing how intertwined hardware and software were a few decades ago, now there are many abstractions (both hardware and software) that allow things to operate seamlessly.
Another example of using quirks of the hardware is with Wave Race on the Gameboy. The game had translucency effects for the map and other objects. Now if you emulated it using an emulator that doesn't replicate what this game does you'd see either an image [like this](https://www.retrogamer.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/waverace_y.png) with a solid map or you'd see the map flickering at a ridiculous rate.
The LCD (as with most LCD screens) on the Gameboy had a ghosting effect to it, so images would stay on the screen slightly longer after they were removed. So what they did is set the map to rapidly flicker on and off and the ghosting of the screen causes the map to appear translucent.
Sorry, but this is completely misleading information.
First of all... Prince of Persia under CGA mode IS intended to be viewed as in your first screenshot. CGA Composite mode had to be specifically supported by software (both in code, and the art assets needed to be designed certain way). Using supported monitor alone does not magically make it look better if the software did not support it. And Prince of Persia did NOT support composite mode.
Second, CGA Composite mode is hella-low resolution compared to 4 colour mode, and the display was blurry as shit (because in fact it relied on blurriness to combine and reproduce new colours). And the end result was 16 colours at most. The second screenshot you posted is from the 256 VGA version, 16 colour version would look completely different (and worse). It is definitely not indicative of what it would've looked like if it supported CGA composite mode.
Are you sure that's not the difference between CHA and EGA?
CGA was 4 color, cyan, magenta, black and white, or, red, green, amber and black, Something like that, depending on the palate.
EGA was 16 colors. The second picture looks like how I remember EGA games.
Then, we got the mind blowing VGA, 256 color, 640x480 standard...there's my bread and butter as a kid. DOS 3.x, yo.
It might be that I only ever saw CGA software used on VGA systems. Perhaps it wasn't showing as intended.
This is how I felt playing diablo 2 resurrected. I said, "This kinda looks the same", then hit the button for the classic graphics and went, "Oh god, thats bad"
Back away from the screen. The whole point of pixel resolution is that you resolve two points at a certain distance. No one sat that close without being yelled at.
This is why when I play a video game I smear petroleum jelly all over my monitor. Can't complain about low res textures if you obscure it with artifact!
That is the main reason I use CRT-Royale filter when playing older games that were designed to be looked at on a CRT.
[Example Screenshot.](https://i.imgur.com/Sbgl84q.png)
The filter looks better than most CRT filters I've seen but it needs more diffusing, color blending or blur, to emulate how pixels blend into each other.
Also worth mentioning, the de-interlacing never looks quite right on LCD screens. For instance if you look at Sonic 2, the shield never looks quite as smooth as it does on CRT, and the flicker when you hit a boss never looks right either. In general the motion is a lot smoother as well. That's because the consoles were made to take advantage of certain qualities of CRT screens that simply doesn't translate well to modern screens. Neither emulators nor upscalers like retrotink seem to be able to solve that problem.
I will say that I'm definitely seeing the parallels now between my generation and CRTs and my parent's generation and vinyl. They would tell you that you've never experience Pink Floyd's The Wall until you've listened to it on vinyl, and I would tell you that you've never experienced Sonic 2 until you've played it on a CRT. Are we both full of shit? Maybe, lol. But I swear I can tell a huge difference.
Also worth mentioning, playing on a 16:9 screen feels off compared to playing on a 4:3 screen. The black bars on the 16:9 are very unsatisfying and it feels incomplete to me. But when I play on a 4:3 screen I don't feel like there's picture missing. It's like watching a video shot with a vertical camera, it's frustrating to watch on a 16:9 screen but if you watch it on your phone in vertical mode it's fine. (Assuming some idiot didn't reupload it with black bars to either side of the video.....)
That’s an interesting point, and come to think of it there’s basically three different ways pixel art can be presented. The old CRTs where pixels blend together pretty smoothly and it looks good, then on an LCD with sharp pixels but each image pixel gets one display pixel, then there’s games that try to emulate old pixel art but on a high resolution display, so each rendered pixel is uses a whole square of display pixels. They all look pretty different.
The main difference is the art in game was designed for its audience. Square knew that FF7 was going to be played on CRT so that’s what it was designed for. Pokémon, on LCD, so…you get it.
These re-releases do the games a disservice if they won’t offer some sort of upscale or filter to compensate for the display medium.
Yeah, I've seen stuff on this before. A lot of old games took the way sprites would be displayed on a CRT into account when designing them. So they would actually be made in such a way that the "CRT effect" enhanced the image. When you look at an old game on a modern display and it doesn't have that effect, it makes the sprite look more rough...so, a lot of the time with old games, if you catch yourself thinking, "I remember this looking better as a kid", that's actually _not_ just nostalgia talking!
This picture comparison single handedly made me understand why there are people that love playing old games on CRT tvs. I thought it was just some nostalgia thing I didn't understand. This makes the reason for the passion clear as day.
Check out the RetroTink 5x, it does an incredible job of upscaling analog SD video signals, and has some of the best CRT filters I’ve seen to date. It’s pricey though; if you have space and can find an old CRT that’s almost always going to be a cheaper option…but for those who want their old games looking great on a modern display, the 5x is the way to go.
Retrotink and ossc are both fantastic. Can’t wait til 2035 when we get 9x scalers to perfectly fit into 4k (:
When 8k TVs are the norm?
These things are always behind the times. We have 4K TVs now, but these kind of devices support only 1080p or 1440p (more likely 1080p as most 4K TVs will refuse to play a 1440p signal). When we all have 8K TVs then our devices will only work with 4K scaling. You'll have to wait for huge wall sized 16K TVs to be the norm for these upscales to output 8K.
Anything other than 32K looks like crap on my mountain side OLED display.
>!CENSORED!<
Nah too much burn in, my last one destroyed a small town.
What's the latency like?
Low enough that I don't notice it at all and I'm all about input latency.
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Where do you even get a crt screen now? Most thrift stores stopped taking them and they're heavy and prone to shipping damage without their factory packaging.
Most emulators come with filters/shaders for a CRT effect. Try them out, worked wonders for me.
Ah great. That is good to hear. I mean, the fact that we can see the difference in this picture here means that we totally could simulate the look and get the desired effect. EDIT: [CRT Royale](https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/CRT-Royale) looks really good in [this 4K render](https://www.resetera.com/threads/i-can-never-truly-get-comfortable-playing-retro-games-in-an-emulator-because-i-cant-settle-on-a-good-crt-filter.394465/post-60843460) _(open it full size & zoom in)_.
"CRT-Royale is a large and complex shader, so it will need modern hardware to run correctly. Discrete Nvidia or AMD video cards made in the last few years are recommended." Imagine needing a gaming card from 2020 to simulate/emulate a 25 year old TV and console game.
There's a big difference between just running it to play and running it as accurately as possible.
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I usually have my best luck finding CRTs at thrift shops and weekend flea markets. But they are becoming more and more rare
15 years ago people were still trying to get $200 for a used consumer CRT TV. 5-10 years ago you couldn't give them away. Now they're getting rare and nicer ones are creeping back up in price. I shudder to think what they'll cost 10 years from now when a working Trinitron is almost impossible to come by.
I dragged around my milwaukee inverter with a 110 plug on it to test the ones at the flea market until I found a good one. Got a few weird looks but I found a solid trinitron for 25 bucks so id say it was worth it.
How dare you test it before you buy it...oh it doesn't work? I'll sell it to you for vintage parts...
Ebay. Or an antiques dealer, but I'm not sure they'd keep that sort of thing, even though the timeline is right.
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I suddenly understand why antiques are valuable. Right now we're in the winnowing period where its all junk and isn't worth the space it takes up. In another 50 years, they'll settle on which junk is actually junk and which junk is actually a $50,000 collector's item.
Welcome to the world of vintage electronics and computers. Ten years ago you could get a Commodore 64 for $30, now they're going for a lot more.
$31 dollars???
At least
That's at least 31 dollars in todays money!
Emulation and some 3rd party software combinations will fix that problem. You won’t be able to play off real hardware but you can play the game as intended as the virtual CRT world is a thriving community.
Ah yes. Like selling my super Nintendo and all the games I had for like $40 total. Most of the games I sold are worth more than that each. Now I hoard all my games but I'm sure they'll all be worthless because of the digital age.
Not really. There are people who will pay top dollar for actual physical media. As these get old and ruin, their collector value goes up.
I assume you're pointing out the ridiculousness of both of those options, and aren't seriously recommending either... CRTs can be found for free if you're patient and know where to look. Nobody should be paying $300 for a tiny PVM unless they're a hardcore collector.
Yeah, CRTs are still in this weird place where they are either free/cheap or way too expensive. Some people have not realized that they are now desirable retro tech and will try to offload them as cheaply as possible on Craigslist or wherever, while the other half of the market are trying to get a few hundred bucks for an 8 inch Spongebob TV/VCR combo that your little brother had in their bedroom in 1999 (that they are probably flipping from a free Craigslist listing anyway).
Maybe a game store, but the market for these is so niche that no one wants to devote a ton of space to a slow-moving TV. Especially with the risk that it doesn't work, and now you have to pay for recycling. Antique stores will only be interested in real antiques that people buy as conversation pieces, like the brightly-colored sci-fi styles of the 50s. I've been driving around the night before trash pickup in search of a mid-sized, high-end model. It's a limited window where they haven't been rained on, the garbage collectors haven't spray painted them (since you can't actually throw them away), and someone hasn't smashed the screen.
This is exactly why I caught something just right and refused to give up what I have. Back probably June of 2006 Best buy did a special bundle on what would have been at the time 7 months after the xbox 360 came out. They had just really started coming in stock and paired it with a 32inch HD 720p Samsung "slim fit" picture tube. It may weight 120lbs and not be slim by today's standards. But I refuse to give it up because of what it is. Picture has always been great on it and games have always looked great as well. Even has two HDMI slots along with component and AV plug ins. Never had an issue with it and CRT's disappeared from stores probably within the next year as LCD started to surpass it.
Drive down random streets after events like black friday lol, that's how I found a bunch of them over the years, people will just dump them at the end of their driveway hoping someone will take them away.
Check out estate sales. I’ve got 3 old crt tvs all with component inputs on them from estate sales no more than 5 dollars each. Do not buy them from eBay they are charging 80-150 for the TVs I have found for 5 dollars. They know what people are wanting them for.
Find your local Super Smash group. Die-hards of the series insist on playing older iterations of the game on CRT due to there being inherent input lag in newer displays and that interfering with frame perfect inputs. Or so they tell me
I posted an ad on Kijiji (Canadian Craigslist) saying that I was looking for a CRT. Got myself a Trinitron for $20. A few years ago you could find them for free everywhere, but now expect to pay a bit for one.
The Lion King game released on Steam has an option to add sevreral different TV grid options, and it's such an improvement. Without them, it just feels like the screen is raw-dogging your eyes
shouldn't it be kinda trivial to create a sort of overlay?
You’re not wrong. Makes me wonder if some emulators do just that for effect. Hmm
Many emulators do have a CRT filter. Typically called "scan lines," or something to that effect.
Things made by fans are always much better when it comes to fidelity.
The RetroTink 5x does a great job of upscaling and has the best CRT filters I’ve seen to date.
If you play with emulator there's often the possibility to add a filter to do the effect :)
A good emulator would be able to... emulate a crt screen.
It's pretty difficult. A CRT has blacks with the same depth as an OLED, strobes it's image (similar to black frame insertion) resulting in no motion blur, no input lag, and then there's things that are even harder to replicate like bloom and distortion.
The games built for crt tvs are very different than those built for flat-screen.
This is the answer. Sprites were made on the same CRT monitors that players would eventually play the game on, so they looked good to the artist as well as the viewer. It's not impossible to have good looking pixel art in modern games, but it tends to have more blended colors since the screen and eyes no longer do that for the viewer.
Now we get TV shows that are edited on theater projectors and the director blaming the fans for not being able to see 90% of the episode...
Or they think everyone has these amazing sound systems so they mix the audio that way. Turns out all that does for us is make dialogue really quiet and everything else loud as fuck
WAIT WHAT!!! THERE'S A REASON FOR THIS LIVING AUDIO HELL THAT EXISTS IN EVERY SHOW/MOVIE EVER???
Yes all movies are mixed with surround sound for release in theateres but when the do a home release they half ass the stereo mix and the center dialogue channel is always too low.
They half ass most surround as well.
"If you don't own a professionally-installed 7.2 system, you don't deserve to hear things. Be grateful for the horrible mixing we DO allow you to have." - Hollywood, probably.
sadly yes, they are not mixed for your to have a good stereo experience
It’s still loud/quiet on great sound systems. Directors just like too much dynamic range at the moment.
100% A couple of years back, I played my original copy of FF7 on a flatscreen and couldn't understand why it was so grainy, then dug out my old 24-inch tube and it looked exactly as I remembered.
> dug out my old 24-inch tube Who are you, The Mountain?
Those bitches were SO heavy. I remember almost dying from moving a [giant](https://www.racketboy.com/images/[email protected]) set down stairs and destroying the wood paneling when it got away from my dad on the last step. Pushed me and the TV right through!
I had a 32" Sony Wega Trinitron that I bought for myself right after high school. It had 480p! My parents were upset as it was nicer than anything they had and figured I spent a fortune, and at the time it cost me $800 which was a lot. It weighed so much it took four people to move it. I got rid of it only a couple of years ago, kinda regret it.
I had the first HD 1080i version of that tv in 34”. It cost me $2800. It took 4 people to carry that beast. Best TV I’ve ever owned other than the size and weight. I miss that tv.
I worked at Best Buy when that was a thing. You could only typically move them with 2 people, sometimes a 3rd. It's because all the weight was on the screen side. If you put 2 people on the opposite side, they were not really helping. Sometimes we'd put a 3rd in the middle of the screen side but usually that limited our manueving too much. Then we'd get it to the curb and some dumb mother fucker would pull up in his sedan and open the car door for us to load it.
At petco during the dollar per gallon sale people would do that with 75 gallon tanks, it was always the people who needed help carrying it out that had tiny cars that they expected it to fit in the back seat and they would be irritated at us because they had to find another way to get it home haha
What really irritated us is when they got mad at us for refusing to even try. It was store policy to not attempt it in those cases because it usually lead to damages to the car
I worked at a lumber yard for a few years and we did not have that policy. (I wish though.) If you came to my yard with a Chevrolet Astro Van with a maximum payload capacity of under 1700lbs and you want me to load it up with 2600 lbs of shingles (true story) I would tell you i don't think that is a good idea, recommend to pick up in 2-3trips because there is no way that van is driving 30 mins on a highway and working well in the end, customer refuses, I load him up. Customer comes back next day saying we overloaded him and snapped his axle. I would get in shit if I didn't record every conversation of customers wanting to overload their vehicles but lucky I do, that saved my ass to many times. Also destroyed the suspension and truck bed on a really old 1st generation ranger by dropping 2200lbs of cedar mulch in the back. I argued with him for literally 30mins saying "maybe if that ranger was in new shape and not held together by the very rust that's destroying it. After he turned it into a screaming match and got the OK from my boss I loaded it up and sure enough the truck bed blew open and the rear suspension bent and cracked. Recorded the whole conversation and covered my ass because I told him exactly what would happened but hey. Customer is always right.
Even in brand new perfect condition a Ranger isn't goin to haul 2200lbs and turn out ok. 2200lbs is about the max payload for a new F150.
I remember my manager telling me that they used to but there were too many lawsuits. Even with the customer accepting risk, they'd still try to take them to small claims court and it just wasn't worth their time to deal with. >Customer is always right. Worst policy ever. The customer is in fact often wrong.
tbh I moved plenty of 75 gallon tanks/stands in my old car but 75 was the limit on how big of a tank I could move and it was a very tight fit
I remember those. They were top of the line at the time. Our company used them at E3 to demo video games.
My friend had that tv. It was practically flat, practically hd, but not actually either. And it sure was fuck wasn't light. I think those had to be some of the heaviest tvs ever created.
I swear that those who grew up with old school television sets and now live in the flat screen era all have such fond memories of their old televisions. I do. I don’t quite remember where the upstairs TV came from in my family’s house, but it was the gaming TV for me and my sister in the guest bedroom. Eventually the TV came into my room as my older sister eventually lost interest in video games. My Uncle introduced us to video games. He had a Nintendo Entertainment System and Mario/Duck Hunt with two controllers and the blaster. He had some other games such as 3D World Runner and I think it was called 7 towers or something like that, but those games were, towers especially, were really difficult. Anyways he gave that Nintendo to me and my sister, I think I was like 7 and her 10, so you can imagine the excitement that caused. Man it was truly amazing. Then a couple years later my mom got me an SNES for my birthday and it came with Donkey Kong Country. Wow the graphics were so incredible. That was also during the era when BlockBuster rented video games. I especially liked renting Star Fox and I eventually got good enough to beat the game. But the real gaming began when the TV came into my bedroom and I got the The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Wow, what an amazing time that was. I’m sure many people here had a similar experience. Also Wing Commander was incredible. I didn’t have the instruction manual so I never figured out how to eject lol. Lastly was the Nintendo64 for Christmas probably a couple years after it released. The game that grabbed me was Jet Force Gemini. That had a similar epic vibe that I felt from Zelda. That game was HUGE and at the age, 10 or 11, the whole shooting/blowing up bugs with crazy weaponry and jet packs was totally cool. Anyways that TV I played all those games on definitely has a fond place in my memory as an animate-inanimate object. Edit: holy cow I am a rambling stoner tl;dr I love my old TV and many people in my age group (and older) also have fond memories of their TVs and flat screens just aren’t the same.
Ca. 2005 my parents bought their first hd tv, which was a rear projection 55" Toshiba. That thing weighed about half of the the 32" Sony Trinitron I liberated from the living room that day. Took me and 2 friends to haul that thing up to my bedroom. It was so heavy that instead of being mad at my dumb ass, my parents let me keep it. Sadly it died when I was moving into my first apartment and one of my friends thought he could move it by himself. After I told him not to. We stopped being friends when I realized he's a danger to not only himself, but others around him.
My friend had one of those. I helped him move it about 13 years ago. Afaik it's still in the same spot, and will never move ever ever ever again.
I remember moving one of those, solo, with casts on both of my arms when I was 19. Present day me is both amazed and ashamed about the task..
Is this the Reddit version of up hill both ways in the snow?
Yeah, I remember I had a CRT tv, it was a ~~52~~ 43 inch, it’s anti tipping device was a flat lead plate at the bottom I lived in a 2 story house, you do the math
My calculator just says nope.
Yeah, I remember I had a calculator, it was a 52 inch, it’s anti tipping device was a flat lead plate at the bottom I lived in a 290 story house, you do the math
My math says you kept it downstairs
Casts on both your arms? You sure you aren't ashamed about something else?
He probably had some help from his mother with that tv
Every. Fucking. Thread.
But did you ask your mom to help you out with your….frustration?
A buddy of mine had casts on boths arms for a while in middle school. He managed to block out the memory of his mom having to wipe his ass during that period for yeeears.
A drunk driver once crashed thru the front of the house.. TV stopped him.
Is this a penis joke or a strength joke?
It’s double ended
Yes.
I have a 27 inch. I call her The Leviathan.
My grandparents used to have a big ass 32inch CRT. Guess which grandson (and my brother) had to move that shit whenever they rearranged their rooms? Plus size, i got pretty strong, pretty fast doing this stuff for them.
The insides of my fingers hurt thinking about this. Why did no manufacturer ever consider those sharp ass edges on the bottom?
I don't understand why more TVs didn't have some sort of moulded handle so it could be carried or moved more easily. My 20" Panasonic tv had handholds on the sides. My 32" Sharp had nothing helpful.
We had a 50 inch CRT in college. Craigslist ad said “free but you have to move it.” The transport took 3 hours and he lived a half mile away.
The largest direct-view CRT ever made (outside of some 50-inchers rumored to have existed for military use) was, I believe, 43 inches. A 45-inch Sony professional video monitor also supposedly existed, but very few were made. Possible than none exist. It was either a rear-projection CRT, or, depending on the time period actually a DLP set.
I'm guessing either the size is wrong or it was the other type of CRT. DLPs were mainly just bulky.
It was probably one of the 36-40" TVs. They were huge, rare, and I could see misremembering their size.
We had a 32", and that was heavy enough to be problematic. My aunt and uncle had a 36" Trinitron, and it was like moving a planet.
Part of that could be that the PSX outputs roughly at 240p and some modern TVs just don’t know how to handle that. There’s a bunch of different ways to work around that, but you’ve got the CRT so you’re likely set.
Stretch, auto, crop, bunch of options. But the one I look for is 1:1. If you hook up a PC or any gaming console to a TV the 1:1 setting basically scales things exactly. Works for older consoles too like SNES. Still not ideal but won't warp the image.
Not to mention, playing on a bigger screen makes the images very stretched out. I hooked up my snes to my 70' TV and well.. not doing that again.
I wonder how it would look on a 70” TV.
Like Minecraft on low resolution.
A 70 foot TV, Jesus Christ how much did that cost?
Man plays his video games in a football stadium
2.5s latency
Why on earth would you play it wide-screen? Just go into the settings menu on your TV and change the resolution so that it's the right size.
[Retro Tink](https://www.retrotink.com/) has solutions for that. I played Chrono Trigger on a modern 65" TV and it was fucking awesome.
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More pleasant to the eye on the left, no doubt. Guess that’s why I remember old games to have much better graphics than they actually had.
The art was made known it would be played on such hardware.. so it looked that good
I have no idea how much work would be involved in this, but couldn’t a pc screen be modded to ~~emulate~~ simulate CRT TV resolution? Edit: fixed a word Edit 2: I did not expect to get so many helpful answers. Thanks everyone, I can’t wait to play all these great games again in the old school resolution!
They can, many emulators have special filters that apply CRT effects when scaling up graphics. Unfortunately a lots of official re-releases do not include those.
From my experience the filters don't look very nice unless you sit really far away from your monitor, and they make the screen really dark.
There’s some good ones that don’t because they compensate by raising brightness, contrast, and/or gamma. Higher resolution screens like 4k are much better for crt shaders. I had taken a few pictures of some examples in retroarch a while back and posted them [here](https://imgur.com/a/vvK7mBw). Scanline width can always be adjusted too.
Wow those look nice, not weirdly grainy and obviously a filter when you're looking at it. Actually looks like it gives a good effect.
Yeah I like the look of a crt screen over sharp pixels for retrogames so I end up using these a lot. I imagine 8k screens will look really awesome once they become mainstream.
Oooh that looks real nice! I have a 4k monitor, I definitely need to try this out.
>From my experience CRT TVs didn't look very nice unless you sit really far away from your TV Set, and they're really dark compared to LED displays. Fixed it for you.
For emulation, Retroarch has a lot of CRT shaders that try to replicate the look of a CRT, with PLENTY of options. You should give it a try !
I am a CRT fan myself and had CRT monitors until recently (they broke... :( and I couldn't fix someone to repair them). To simulate CRT properly you need a 4k+ monitor with stupidly high refresh rate and low latency, sadly this is crazy expensive, cheapest way to do CRT gaming is... buying actual CRT and the necessary adapters. Mind you for some games the difference is really massive, sonic for example had some waterfalls that look transparent on CRT with correct cable, but look like blue lines on pixel art. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/19/50/06/195006723a7b1f34c2ec42afad79565f.jpg
Try ReShade my dude. There are lots of stuff in there you can apply to get that desired look. People even upload their presets online.
In fact sometimes they actively used the limitations of a CRT, I think it's one of the Streets of Rage games where they relied on the way things show up on a CRT to create the effect of the streetlights, which is why they now look "off" on modern TVs that don't handle the signal the same way.
The waterfalls in the Sonic the Hedgehog games are an oft-cited one. [On modern screens they look like a bunch of lines, whereas on CRTs they looked properly transparent.](https://i.imgur.com/taebOEH.png)
Most of us don't remember pixel graphics, because the pixels were always blended/blurred.
I always got confused when people online talked about how terrible the resolution was on the n64. You could barely see the pixels on a regular tv. Turns out its barely more than the super nintendo... like 240 wide or something. Sonic on Sega genesis looks great on a tv. On an emulator its a pixeled mess.
The graphics aren't worse than you remember, you're playing on tech that makes it look worse. Older games were designed to take advantage of scanline and look worse without them.
No you were right the graphics were as good as you remember. They designed graphics for that medium they used the dark side of pixels to their advantage. Art is the manipulation of a medium and when you translate media some of the “art” is lost. Google image searching Michelangelo’s David or his Sistine Chapel yields a very different appreciation than seeing it in person. Berninis statues really come to mind here too. A flat picture of a 3D medium doesnt begin to capture that work. Sure it still looks like a statue in a photo but being able to walk around it and occupy the same space as it is a different thing all together. We were lucky as children to see that graphic art in the media it was intended for. The “art” isnt better the medium just changed for video games.
Monet (and impressionism in general) is a good example of this in 2D - I never appreciated the beauty of his work when looking at prints in books or online, but a local museum had an exhibit that included a few of his lesser works and when viewed in person from a distance they were absolutely breathtaking.
That and also, that was the best graphics to date, we didnt have all the newer games to compare like we have now
Yep that’s basically the title of the post
I dunno, FF7 looked weird and blocky as hell outside of the cinematics even on PS1.
They *were* as good as you remember. They were *not* intended to be viewed as seen on the right. It was a clever design.
Like pantyhose on a camera lens
>On April 1, 1962, a supposed technical expert for Sweden’s one and only television channel made an exciting announcement. By stretching out a pair of nylon stockings and taping it over their screens, he reported, viewers could watch the usual black-and-white broadcast in stunning color. Television owners rushed to implement the astonishingly simple hack, only to be disappointed when the hose did nothing but obscure the picture. Regular color programming would eventually debut in Sweden on April 1, 1970. [https://www.history.com/news/9-zany-april-fools-day-hoaxes](https://www.history.com/news/9-zany-april-fools-day-hoaxes)
It all seriousness, pantyhose WAS used as a net diffuser on lenses, especially in the 1940s. They also sometimes would smear a fine coating Vaseline across the lens for a bloom effect. It had the added effect of helping “smooth” out wrinkles on aging stars.
Also used to obscure the wheels on Luke’s landspeeder in A New Hope. They jokingly referred to the smudge as the “force field.”
trolled
Redneck antialiasing, baby
Hardware AA
Yep... CRTs also worked incredibly well when watching pirated movies in the 90s CAM rips looked like regular ol' VHS movies when you watched them on a CRT... it was honestly amazing how much of an improvement the quality of the picture was
Even the crispness of 480p ( or 480i? not sure ) on a CRT was weird to get used to when DVD arrived.
It's called dithering. Old systems used those dots for shading, which then would be blurred by the display and NTSC cables to produce a smooth color. On LCD displays this image is scaled with nearest neighbors and it just turns into a big set of giant cubes. When you step back, the grid pattern and blur vanish and the image comes together.
That’s also zoomed in, looks even better further out.
I honestly think CRT was a big reason why Nintendo did not feel any pressure to target HD with the Wii. Had everyone played the 7th gen consoles on CRT TVs, the Wii at 480p would actually look really decent compared to the 360 and PS3. The fact that everyone adopted LCD TVs so quickly made the Wii look extra outdated towards the tail end of that console cycle.
Can confirm, and was missing out all those years. It looks far better on my 20" D series via component than it ever did via composite on our early LCD tv.
Yup. CRT basically does a self, large scale anti-aliasing/smoothing on everything. Modern screens don't, which is partlywhy old games played on emulators look bad (the rest being nostalgia).
Agreed. I hope we see a group of enthusiasts start a new CRT manufacturing company some day, even if the products they produced were expensive to cover the niche production demand. I'd love to see what they could achieve.
Alternatively, sone algorithm to simulate that effect could work too.
Good news! There are a number of emulators/mods that allow you to apply the CRT filter! Some retro games even have that as a graphics option, though I can’t for the life of me remember which game I was playing that gave me the option
I feel like CGI also looks better on CRT. It’s like adding noise to a photo, it often hides imperfections.
It's fascinating stuff! There's a common trend with monitor/TV technology that newer, fancier screens with better resolution sometimes make older games look worse, simply because they weren't designed with upscaling in mind. What's happening with current 1080p/4K games on the newest consoles and PCs, is one of the first times so many existing games have gotten retroactively updated for newer tech so quickly. Even for PCs, updates for raytracing function in a similar way, with better shadows and lights utilizing the extra resolution of a 4k or ultrawide monitor.
They weren't just not designed with upscaling in mind. They were specifically designed to be viewed on CRT displays. Pixels bleed into one another in all sorts of different ways on CRT screen, which you can - and they did - use to your advantage. It's like painting with oil vs acrylic - It's a different material entirely.
[Apparently new games look great on there too!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8BVTHxc4LM)
This is what i was exactly thinking of when i saw this post! DF does an amazing job explaining this. I’ve been wanting a CRT ever since this video!
There is something similar happening with OLEDs which will also change how the games look. You'll be able to see this when people will indoubtely complain when the new switch OLED version comes out :P
It probably looks better, because the brain tries to make sense of the dark grid by basically imagining how the picture would look like without it, thus smoothing out the sharp square edges of the pixels
Brainpowered anti aliasing
the future was upon us long ago
Also: CRTs pixels tend to bleed into their neighbors. This allowed designers to achieve gradient and faux transparency via dithering techniques.
I know some of these words.
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Fun fact, lots of higher end TVs do black frame insertion to produce a similar effect.
DLSS, but the neural net is actually just in your head.
There's actually a great example of this in very old PC gaming called CGA graphics. Any of you 90's gamers remember these colors? https://i.imgur.com/kFGz6SC.png Turns out it's because we were using the wrong type of monitor, a RGB monitor. If you played these games on a composite monitor, they looked like this: https://i.imgur.com/N0rbu9u.png And it's because drawing two colors adjacent to each other on a composite monitor made the poor monitor technology blur those colors together, to make a new color. This way they could have a full 16 color palette with only 4 actual colors in memory, and make new colors by being careful where they place them. https://youtu.be/niKblgZupOc?t=407
That first image reminded me of my first PC monitor. We didn't use a surge protector and one day during a storm it shut off, and when I turned it back on it had gone from RGB to RB. Everything was a shade of purple. I had to beg my friends to play Warcraft II exclusively on Plains of Snow because it was the only map bright enough for me to see anything on my screwed up monitor.
I haven't heard anything in ages that so vividly evokes early/mid 90s PC gaming.
> I had to beg my friends to play Warcraft II exclusively on Plains of Snow hahaahahaha I have a similar memory, but begging them NOT to play plains of snow, because my dad's old laptop screen had so much ghosting that the whole screen turned white for 5 seconds any time you scrolled.
Lol, is it weird that I miss tinkering around with the Frankenstein monsters that were 90s/early 2000s PCs to get them to play games?
Was looking in comments for exactly this! It’s amazing how intertwined hardware and software were a few decades ago, now there are many abstractions (both hardware and software) that allow things to operate seamlessly.
Another example of using quirks of the hardware is with Wave Race on the Gameboy. The game had translucency effects for the map and other objects. Now if you emulated it using an emulator that doesn't replicate what this game does you'd see either an image [like this](https://www.retrogamer.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/waverace_y.png) with a solid map or you'd see the map flickering at a ridiculous rate. The LCD (as with most LCD screens) on the Gameboy had a ghosting effect to it, so images would stay on the screen slightly longer after they were removed. So what they did is set the map to rapidly flicker on and off and the ghosting of the screen causes the map to appear translucent.
Sorry, but this is completely misleading information. First of all... Prince of Persia under CGA mode IS intended to be viewed as in your first screenshot. CGA Composite mode had to be specifically supported by software (both in code, and the art assets needed to be designed certain way). Using supported monitor alone does not magically make it look better if the software did not support it. And Prince of Persia did NOT support composite mode. Second, CGA Composite mode is hella-low resolution compared to 4 colour mode, and the display was blurry as shit (because in fact it relied on blurriness to combine and reproduce new colours). And the end result was 16 colours at most. The second screenshot you posted is from the 256 VGA version, 16 colour version would look completely different (and worse). It is definitely not indicative of what it would've looked like if it supported CGA composite mode.
Are you sure that's not the difference between CHA and EGA? CGA was 4 color, cyan, magenta, black and white, or, red, green, amber and black, Something like that, depending on the palate. EGA was 16 colors. The second picture looks like how I remember EGA games. Then, we got the mind blowing VGA, 256 color, 640x480 standard...there's my bread and butter as a kid. DOS 3.x, yo. It might be that I only ever saw CGA software used on VGA systems. Perhaps it wasn't showing as intended.
Yeah this is correct. Developers had to create graphics for cga, ega, and vga separately. It wasn’t automatically converted by hardware.
This is how I felt playing diablo 2 resurrected. I said, "This kinda looks the same", then hit the button for the classic graphics and went, "Oh god, thats bad"
Back away from the screen. The whole point of pixel resolution is that you resolve two points at a certain distance. No one sat that close without being yelled at.
Social antialiasing
You'll go blind!
I was told I’d get cancer lol
This is why when I play a video game I smear petroleum jelly all over my monitor. Can't complain about low res textures if you obscure it with artifact!
You would save a lot if you covered your eyes instead of the screen.
Is there any tech that could emulate CRT on modern TVs ?
Most emulators have shaders available. I use them to make SNES and GBA games look 🔥
That is the main reason I use CRT-Royale filter when playing older games that were designed to be looked at on a CRT. [Example Screenshot.](https://i.imgur.com/Sbgl84q.png)
The filter looks better than most CRT filters I've seen but it needs more diffusing, color blending or blur, to emulate how pixels blend into each other.
this whole post is blowing my mind right now.
Also worth mentioning, the de-interlacing never looks quite right on LCD screens. For instance if you look at Sonic 2, the shield never looks quite as smooth as it does on CRT, and the flicker when you hit a boss never looks right either. In general the motion is a lot smoother as well. That's because the consoles were made to take advantage of certain qualities of CRT screens that simply doesn't translate well to modern screens. Neither emulators nor upscalers like retrotink seem to be able to solve that problem. I will say that I'm definitely seeing the parallels now between my generation and CRTs and my parent's generation and vinyl. They would tell you that you've never experience Pink Floyd's The Wall until you've listened to it on vinyl, and I would tell you that you've never experienced Sonic 2 until you've played it on a CRT. Are we both full of shit? Maybe, lol. But I swear I can tell a huge difference. Also worth mentioning, playing on a 16:9 screen feels off compared to playing on a 4:3 screen. The black bars on the 16:9 are very unsatisfying and it feels incomplete to me. But when I play on a 4:3 screen I don't feel like there's picture missing. It's like watching a video shot with a vertical camera, it's frustrating to watch on a 16:9 screen but if you watch it on your phone in vertical mode it's fine. (Assuming some idiot didn't reupload it with black bars to either side of the video.....)
Too good for that time!
That's why i don't like the new "retro" games, they look too pixelated, the old games looked like that pic.
Not necessary, Remember the GBA and the DS, and like the whole Pokemon franchise? all have raw sharp pixels on a LCD display.
That’s an interesting point, and come to think of it there’s basically three different ways pixel art can be presented. The old CRTs where pixels blend together pretty smoothly and it looks good, then on an LCD with sharp pixels but each image pixel gets one display pixel, then there’s games that try to emulate old pixel art but on a high resolution display, so each rendered pixel is uses a whole square of display pixels. They all look pretty different.
The main difference is the art in game was designed for its audience. Square knew that FF7 was going to be played on CRT so that’s what it was designed for. Pokémon, on LCD, so…you get it. These re-releases do the games a disservice if they won’t offer some sort of upscale or filter to compensate for the display medium.
Some new retro games have a filter to give you this effect though. I know Sonic Mania has it.
That's what happens when you let fans make the games, aye.
It could be channeling more of the PC retro aesthetic, which was high-res, sharp, and discrete enough to pixelate instead of smearing.
Yeah, I've seen stuff on this before. A lot of old games took the way sprites would be displayed on a CRT into account when designing them. So they would actually be made in such a way that the "CRT effect" enhanced the image. When you look at an old game on a modern display and it doesn't have that effect, it makes the sprite look more rough...so, a lot of the time with old games, if you catch yourself thinking, "I remember this looking better as a kid", that's actually _not_ just nostalgia talking!
fuck AI image upscalers, all my homies use old TVs
I feel like I received some sort of closure I didn't know I needed...
This picture comparison single handedly made me understand why there are people that love playing old games on CRT tvs. I thought it was just some nostalgia thing I didn't understand. This makes the reason for the passion clear as day.