RetroGaming

To be fair, that probably is a REALLY nice broadcast-grade CRT like a SONY BVM-20F1U or something… which most people did NOT have access to back in the day.

Hell, my wealthy buddy’s family had a “flat screen” (meaning the CRT didn’t have a curved face) SONY WEGA CRT in the mid-90s and I know it had S-Video, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t even have a component connection, let alone the quality aperture grille/shadow masking, or the contrast ratio that the BVMs did (because those things were at local TV news stations running 24/7).

In reality, there’s a bunch of differences with connection types providing various levels of quality and CRT display technology , but the accessibility that new TVs give us all to astoundingly good picture quality at a pretty reasonable price means we are living in a golden era for retro gaming if you know what you’re doing.

I’ll take my gigantic 4K OLED hooked up to a MiSTer with some great shaders rendering the sub-pixel effects a real CRT has to emulate this visual effect with run-ahead to minimize the latency + input lag over anything except a BVM-20F1U in near mint condition almost any other day of the week.

TL;DR - you can emulate those sub-pixel CRT era display technology display artifacts with a decent shader on a good 4K OLED, and probably spend less than you’d need to get almost the exact same visual effect with pretty much none of the pitfalls you get with old CRTs like massive electricity use, having to carry a 150-250lb CRT, hope it has no burn-in, decent remaining bulb life, etc.

It just looks soooo much better.

Yeah, there's a crazy amount of tricks they employed to bring the sprites to life in a way that just isn't possible on modern displays. The sharp pixel look is actually an unfortunate byproduct of the transition to newer tech.

Emulation made everyone forget that old school pixel art was made to blend in the really shitty consumer crts of the 90s using composit video. I don't like how crispy modern pixel art looks.

The raw pallette Nintendo video with NTSC filters looks amazing in RetroArch on a modern screen. It looks like how I remember. I'll see if I can find a screenshot of mine later.

Eh, I'll just show some from search results. Notice how the color bleeds between pixels, and edges have color artifacts.

Also, check out this amazing Game Boy filter!

In Linux you can try gamescope with fsr upscaling. It's a must-have for playing old games.

This is reminiscent of watching TOS Star Trek restored for modern HD TVs. You can see all the make-up really clearly because they had to make everyone pop for old CRT screens. They look awful now.

@LastoftheDinosaurs There are filters for emulators called "Shaders" which can make games look close to a CRT look and feel. I use RetroArch to emulate games, which has first class support for such Shaders for use with any supported emulator core. If you want, have a look at what is possible with an article I wrote a while back, which has sliders to see a before and after effect: https://thingsiplay.game.blog/2022/03/08/crt-shader-showcase-for-retroarch/

Here a screenshot without and with my favorite Shader called "Royale" and a variant of the Shader that simulates even more characteristics, "Royale NTSC SVideo" :

I have mixed feelings about this. If you zoom in, it looks especially bad. If you are talking about consoles that had like 320x240 pixel resolutions, it is especially bad, but a high resolution LCD display can use filters/shaders (whatever you want to call them) to mitigate the blockiness to a large degree. Early LCDs were simply no match for a good CRT. I would argue with people all the time and they simply couldn't believe it and thought I was crazy. But now that we have LCDs with more than 4K resolution it is game over for CRTs and my back hurts just thinking about moving another 100 lb vacuum tube monitor.

One of the best things you can get on some emulators are the CRT filters you can apply to give it that authentic look.

More about size. We play shit on screens WAY bigger than we used to back then. That image is just an icon. not meant to be that large or on a computer monitor that close to your face. CRT can help it look less bad when that big and that close, but can also remove detail when small and far.

A lot of games depend on a CRT for color blending / smoothing / transparency effects. I actually don’t really like how nearly all 8 / 16bit games look on modern displays, filters generally don’t do a good enough job emulating the look.

There's this profile on pixelfed that posts very nice pixel pics with and without CRT emulation - lashman

It's not only 2D games. Super Mario 64 looks terrible on a modern panel imo, and it still looks great on a CRT, as if the CRT has some kind of texture filtering lol. Not only the jagged edges are gone, but the textures look smoother too. You don't want to see low res textures in perfect contrast, brightness and sharpness lol.

I agree if we are talking about being this zoomed in. However, at standard viewing distances the difference becomes negligible. As well as on small retro devices with 3-4 inch screens.

Eh, I -like- the clear, chunky pixels. No filters, integer scaling.

I remember not knowing what, like, 40% of the shit on a given screen in a video game was meant to be because it was all a blurry mass of pixels. Important shit looked better than background stuff (in a decent game, anyway) and the characters were always the most detailed thing.

Now I can play the 17th iteration of a game series that went from the above, to being able to count the individual fibers of a berber carpet.

Did they? Considering, you know, we can make them look like this on an LCD.

They didn't all benefit from this and many CRTs looked like shit regardless (I recall having multiple CRTs where certain colors looked off or bled too much). Specifically, the numbers on most games (Specifically Zelda:A Link to the Past) had a tendency to bleed if the device brightness was set to anything near visible in a room during the day.

There was a device to let you play gameboy games (native LCD) on like a super nintendo or something, and they actually looked better there because of the native filtering. I'd argue the filters you can apply to gameboy games look even better now, even on LCDs.

My take is this is because they were made with dithering in mind. Modern pixel art games like Iconoclasts, Eastward, Owlboy, Hyper Light Drifter, Moonlighter look pretty without dithering.

This might be a hot take but I actually prefer the version on the right.

A really great hack for retro gamers who dont want to have a CRT tv hanging around the house is buy a cheap 1080p projector and project it onto an unprepped painted wall. The slight blur and bleed really smooths everything out.

I bought all those rerelease retro consoles and Metal Slug on a 3 meter screen is pretty badass.

One thing I love to collect are tiny CRTs. I actually grew up watching Star Trek on a boom box with a television built in (what the hell happened to it, I dont know).

They are awesome! All the fun of a CRT without the pain of it being heavy and taking up a lot of space.

I may be the only person in the planet that doesn’t agree. The left image just looks darker and blurrier to me. And I understand a lot of people think the blurring as makes it look better because it hides the pixels, but I suppose it just doesn’t work for me, since I can still see all the pixels just fine.

I've personally been replaying Chrono Trigger recently on PC using Reshade with the CRT-Royale settings for exactly this reason.

Of course there's also a setting in most emulators to do the same thing.

Better is subjective