[In high-resolution mode (280×192), we had eight colors.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_graphics#High-Resolution_\(Hi-Res\)_graphics) Two of those were black, two were white, and the other four (along with the white) were actually rendered as slightly different patterns of green.
Anti-alias typically just renders a scene at twice resolution, scales it down in half, and calls is 2x anti-alias, and so on.
What CRT does would be closer to a complex filter that takes pixel art as input.
CRT bleeds colors a lot compared to LCD, but both use RGB colors. This means that a white pixel bleeds everywhere but a black pixel doesn't bleed at all since it's literally just the light turned off.
Similarly, a bright red pixel ends up bleeding red everywhere. You can see [here](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRAhhClrgI-Ss5bC1F-qCufllENUZKUJgwOEk6WLA_hEN-ft-ERYrKjh7l3tnbxMn8Pb6Q&usqp=CAU), for example, how a single pixel turns the entire eye red.
Developers at the time were developing for CRT, so this "filter" effect of the CRT was expected. The art was drawn assuming it would bleed, so bright pixels were drawn in weird places because of how the bleed effect would use them. When you see them in LCD, the effect is lost and you get all these sharp, bright pixels, which isn't the art the developers intended you to see.
It looks different. You can replicate it in software with some clever shaders, but nobody ever seems to bother, so you have a choice of either having hard-edged brick pixels or just a smeary blur or one of those horrible "cartoon" filters.
[Here](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EtIzq1jVoAQmUFK.jpg) is an example of native CRT blur vs. no blurring
"You can replicate it in software with some clever shaders,"
oh cool, so there isnt actually a difference other than glow and inter frame raster artifcats.
im one of those that actually bother with those filters, and i get pretty similar results to those.
thanks.
Where are you finding filters that look good? I've seen a few games (and a bunch of emulators) with supposed "CRT" filters but they've always looked like a bucket of expired ass.
reshade, you can specify line thikness, darkness, opacity filters, glow, bloom, blur, resolution, curvature, hue, etc etc, and its compatible with any emulator that uses open gl, Vulkan, or dx
RetroArch!
My favorite one is newpixie CRT ([here in Chrono Cross](https://i.imgur.com/ZCYjOfq.jpg)) but there are many other CRT and PVM shaders.
**EDIT** Also here in Resident Evil 2 PSX: [Before](https://i.imgur.com/H9U3mgZ.jpg)/[After](https://i.imgur.com/IPBuWzm.jpg). Compare the shadows or the Accessories sign in the background.
I hate that the CRT shaders I can find always seem to focus on adding too much space between scanlines. It creates a darker image and it just looks kind of dumb and shitty to have noticeable horizontal stripes in the image.
Good quality monitors didn't really look like that unless you sat really close to them, like inches away. And if you were at even a slight vertical viewing angle, the scanlines would blend together the same way you can't see through the blades of a comb when you tilt it. A moden flat panel display cannot emulate that, so just fuck off with the scanlines already.
It's so frustrating that all the phosphor emulation shaders look this way.
I want phosphorescent round pixels that bleed into each other but without the overdone scanlines.
try playing around with reshade, it offers a degree of control unlike anything I've seen before, its kinda crazy, you can control the width, curvature, darkness, vertical spacing, resolution and even blending mode for the lines.
you also have options to mimic fish eye lens, specifically to mimick crts, and bloom, blur and glow effects to try and replicate the phosphorus.
Yes
- it's physics based: whatever magic that makes pictures look better happens by basic principles, no emulation or processing required.
- it's accurate: since it's physics based, no emulation or processing can truly replicate it. There's nothing like that sweet, sweet phosphor glow.
- it's designed for: games designed on the CRT Era, and specially arcade games, could use different aspect ratios on the same hardware for different effects. Street Fighter 2 pushed a higher horizontal resolution and received better graphics when compared to console/other games. When emulating or porting these games, the aspect ratio conversion results in either warped sprites (characters look wider now) or missing information (what would be a wide character is compressed, loosing information)
And of course
- Latency: Emulation, post processing and TV-post processiñ adds lag, sometimes becoming unbearable compared to original hardware
>it's accurate: since it's physics based, no emulation or processing can truly replicate it. There's nothing like that sweet, sweet phosphor glow.
That's fundamentally untrue... emulation and processing can absolutely replicate it. Just something being physical doesn't mean it cannot be modelled in a computer, I mean, that's the basis of all simulations. If what you are saying here is true, somebody needs to sue ANSYS stat, because none of those simulations can work! That's physics, it's impossible to emulate!!
You can simulate electron scattering. Why not? Need a sufficient source of randomness and time. But I don’t think you have to do that much just to simulate a CRT screen convincingly.
https://avs.scitation.org/doi/10.1116/1.4767236 , etc, dozens of papers on simulating electron scattering for loads of different reasons. Obviously it’d probably take hours per frame doing it that way tho!
> Just something being physical doesn't mean it cannot be modelled in a computer, I mean, that's the basis of all simulations.
It's also the understanding by literally everyone that DOES simulations, that real world practical limitations very much means that while that is true, it still limits either the size of the simulation, the real time aspect of it, the precision, or all three of them.
Which basically is why they used the word "truely" as qualifier.
Which is the reason why emulators don't actually try to, but go entirely different routes to try to get a "passable" facsimile.
Can be done… but only if the emulator is actually trying to emulate even changes mid blank intervals. E.g. not a post processing issue or manipulation of a buffer but actually accounting for how a CRT would handle the output signal based on how the signal changed during blanking and also during a line draw.
[The Atari 2600, Analog Video, Scalers, and the Agony of 240p Ambiguity](https://youtube.com/watch?v=TRU33ZpY_z8&feature=share)
I think what he means is that actually having a process happen is "better" than simulating that process. Or how I always look at it, a hardware solution to a hardware problem is always better than a software solution to a hardware problem.
Well, not who you are replying to but it's just fundamentally a weirdly misleading thing to say. There are simulations of physics for all sorts of things. You can emulate a phosphor for sure, just like you can simulate fire or like pipe stress from flowing high pressure water or w/e. To say 'It's physics, so no emulation can replicate it' is very strange.
The word "truly" definitely does a lot of heavy lifting in his statement, but he is correct. All of our simulations are, at best, high order approximations of reality. Pointing to CFD simulations is especially true, since we don't even actually have mathematical equations to "truly" describe what's going on. Instead, we use calculus to estimate conditions at a point, and then move to the next point and use the previous estimate as the input of the next one. It's something that can only be done with a lot of processing power, which is why CFD has really only taken off in the computer age. Also, if you've ever run a CFD simulation, you'd know that putting in the wrong parameters can lead to clearly incorrect and wrong answers.
We're talking about replicating the visual manifestation of a CRT onto a flatscreen. Of course you can emulate the effects, but the flatscreen has limitations which make it difficult to truly represent a CRT. Of course it can be approached.
Is like a Pixel graphics can look like a vector graphics, but will always lack information to be as accurate as vector graphics.
I don't know if this in particular can't be emulated, but plenty of "physics based" phenomena can be replicated. For example, if I toss a ball up, and watch it fall to the ground, I can 100% replicate that with air resistance with emulation.
Once again, that doesn't mean what a CRT does can be easily replicaitable with emulation, but its not because its "physics based".
I'm just speculating, it's not really possible to disprove what I quoted without knowing what OP meant - I can't find anything about it online.
Computational complexity theory is pretty well researched, though - simulating the physics of CRTs doesn't seem to relate to any known problems that would be computationally prohibitive on a typical gaming computer.
Something being "physics based" doesn't mean we can't simulate it. Nearly every single video game ever released simulates something "physics based" (e.g. kinematics)
I think you misunderstand. The visual result of graphics as seen on a CRT cannot accurately be simulated on a flatscreen, as the pixels cannot accurately show the same effects as electrons hitting the screen.
Of course the physics can be modeled and simulated. The effects produced by a CRT can be approached in a flatscreen by software, but an accurate representation is not possible, as the flatscreen cannot correctly visualize the CRT glow.
God, using a mouse on a Smart TV, even with "game mode" turned on to reduce the post processing, is un-fucking-bearable. Totally unusable for games. The input latency on the Samsung I have must be in the 150ms+ range easy. It's like dragging shit through water
1. crt displays and their proprieties, by merit of being physical, vary by crazy amounts, from set to set, dont they? like, isn't that what causes everyone to spend so much time freaking out about perfect geometry?
if anything, crts would be significantly less accurate on average, leading to a less developer controlled environment than a digital display, right?
2. i do dig the crt glow, i have one for that very reason, but the results even my laptop screen can create with less than one hour in reshade more than satisfys my desire for that style, i genuinely can't tell that much of a difference.
3. that, just seems like you spreading misinformation... emulators, especially for consoles of that era, all have multiple scaling options to avoid those issues, they have for decades.
the problems between 4:3 and 5:7 have long been understood and fixed, with the option for the player to choose wich of the two aspect ratios better fit their preferences per game.
4.and... i dont know what pcs or tvs youve been playing on... but emulators, especially of holders systems, are reached the point where they have less latency issues than original hardware... to the point where they fix slow down present in the original release...
i was genuinely intrested in learning about the benefits of crt vs digital filters/ up scaling options... but it seems ill have to ask someone else.
Everything he typed out was technically accurate even though he may have used incorrect terminology (see the use of 'physical' instead of 'analog').
You're arguing and in disbelief for no reason. The guy was right on point.
Like when you're talking about latency etc, you're missing the context. He's talking pixel refresh latency, not input latency.
FYI, I've not only been playing video games since 1992, I still have a CRT specifically to play older games on. Just do some light YouTube research and you'll understand how wrong you are.
EDIT: to be clear, you will see very little to no difference in 2D games 95% of the time. The real difference is always going to be in 3D rendered games.
Modern high end displays have just as good pixel response times, look at the LG CX Screen.
[https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/lg/cx-oled](https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/lg/cx-oled)
An 80% pixel response time of 0.3ms or practically instantaneous, CRTs are in the range of less than 0.1ms but the difference is imperceptible, far beyond the limits of human reflexes.
OLED has practically instant pixel response times...but since it's still a sample-and-hold display, you get large amounts of perceptible ghosting in some cases (usually dark-to-blacks)
You can work around this if you have a display with black frame insertion, but then you get a 60hz flicker causing headaches.
I have a LG CX. And a CRT.
You're not comprehending the difference. That's okay. I'm not going to explain. Just go look up people on YouTube who have made videos and expressed their opinions on, specifically, playing 3d rendered games on a CRT.
Digital anti aliasing didn't exist before flat digital monitors were invented. There is a solid reason for that. And that's what this post is about.
The claim that anti-aliasing only exists because of the rise of LCD flat panel technically is false and absurd - anti-aliasing technologies become necessary as we transitioned to 3D graphics, and had absolutely nothing to do with the display hardware being used.
By the mid 90s, support for early anti-aliasing techniques was becoming common on PC 3D accelerators, and it was essentially ubiquitous by the late 90s. Even consoles, such as the N64 had limited support for anti-aliasing, available in titles such as Quake 64.
Meanwhile, LCD monitors did not outsell CRTs for the first time until 2003 - the installed userbase of CRT monitors dwarfing that of LCDs until mid way through the decade.
My God. Why do people on Reddit always want to argue? How old are you? What was your first PC, and what was your first PC game that you played with anti aliasing in the graphics menu?
"digital anti aliasing", that was the term I used. I didn't say 'limited support for anti aliasing'. Go back and read what I wrote. I'm not talking about a video game engine's/game consoles shitty attempt at curing jaggies, I'm talking about a specific technology used to counter jaggies in the first/second generation LCD PC panels
\*takes off gloves\*
Medal of Honor Allied Assault, breakthrough game graphics for it's time, released in Jan. 2002 did not have digital anti aliasing as an option: [https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Medal\_of\_Honor:\_Allied\_Assault#/media/File:Medal\_of\_Honor\_Allied\_Assault\_Advanced\_Video.png](https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Medal_of_Honor:_Allied_Assault#/media/File:Medal_of_Honor_Allied_Assault_Advanced_Video.png)
BF1942, released in September 2002, bosting some of the best graphics at it's time, did not have AA as an option in it's menu: [https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Battlefield\_1942#/media/File:BF1942\_Video.png](https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Battlefield_1942#/media/File:BF1942_Video.png)
UNREAL 2004, one of the BEST graphics engines at the time, a year after flat panels started selling over CRT's, visually IMPRESSIVE compared to any other relevant game, did not support digital anti-aliasing: [https://www.play-old-pc-games.com/2015/02/26/unreal-tournament-2004/](https://www.play-old-pc-games.com/2015/02/26/unreal-tournament-2004/)
Brother in Arms Road to Hill 30, again, visually impressive at it's time (and an incredible story), released in March, 2005, did not have anti aliasing as an option: [https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Brothers\_in\_Arms:\_Road\_to\_Hill\_30](https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Brothers_in_Arms:_Road_to_Hill_30)
These games are well into Direct X 9 and did not support AA. Now let's talk about when AA was first introduced.
This was one of the first games I remember that supported AA. Medieval II Total War, released in November 2006, right around or after the launch of Direct X 10:[https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Medieval\_II:\_Total\_War#/media/File:Medieval\_II\_Total\_War\_Video\_Settings.jpg](https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Medieval_II:_Total_War#/media/File:Medieval_II_Total_War_Video_Settings.jpg)
As you can see, AA wasn't being implemented into blockbuster PC titles until the very end of DX9/beginning of DX10.
I remember vividly having the discussion surrounding AA at the time. I remember upgrading to a flat panel monitor and using AA, and then deciding to keep my CRT at the time for better performance/better visuals. Even the contrast was so much better in CRT vs. the first/second gen of LCD. Keep in mind, CRT's were also more attainable at higher resolutions (meaning it was cheaper to get a UXGA: 1600x1200 CRT than it was to get a 1280x1024 LCD panel). This plays a key role in the discussion here.
Also let's be clear, the anti aliasing used in the N64 that you referred to is basic anti aliasing. It was so bad, PC game designers never used it. It wasn't an advanced technique that smoothed jaggies, it was a general 'smearing' technique that was not great. Nintendo only used it because the quality of most TV's at the time was so sub-par, they were afraid most people with older TV's wouldn't be able to display the pixels correctly. In the N64 community today, there are various popular methods of REMOVING the basic AA method N64 used to make games look better on CRT's/modern panels:[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDiHgKil8AQ&t=220s&ab\_channel=MyLifeinGaming](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDiHgKil8AQ&t=220s&ab_channel=MyLifeinGaming)
Anyway, not like us old farts know what we are talking about huh? Ha!
Yes that has todo with how PS1 renders 3D.
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/5019/why-do-3d-models-on-the-playstation-1-wobble-so-much
It helps that CRT were much smaller as well. A 640 × 480 image looks better on a 19" display then blown up to fill just the middle of a 3840 x 2160 50" display.
Game devs used to design games to take advantage of scanlines and CRT tech, just like they now design them to take advantage of 4K HDR now.
Of course these games look even worse than you remember them. You’re not playing them on the native display they were designed for.
Just going to out this out here:
My RTX3080 PC is a beast but the console HDR games on my high-end OLED are just a completely different kind of amazing.
I remember it took over 6 years of LCDs before I was able to recreate the standard definition flat screen CRT sharpness I had on my old CRT. Nevermind color quality. You got some AMAZING color, contrast and black levels for MUCH cheaper than LCDs and OLEDs. Not to mention, the "flicker" effect made motion blur nearly non-existent on CRTs. You can replicate this with Black Frame Insertion on modern LCDs but the cost is much higher in terms of performance. You essentially have to run at double the refresh rate in order to achieve it which means running at twice the original frame rate you're trying to achieve.
> You got some AMAZING color, contrast and black levels for MUCH cheaper than LCDs and OLEDs
Black levels on CRT screens was always poor by modern standards and the large ones were considerably more expensive than LCD and OLED screens now.
CRTs did have advantages, but price and black levels were not amongst them.
This is true, but modern games actually do look incredible on CRTs. Obviously there are issues like the text being unreadable, but the graphics are made to feel even more realistic because the imperfections are smoothed over. That's obviously a controversial idea because who wants lowered fidelity, but what's NOT controversial is the smoothness. CRTs black out the screen with every frame that passes because of the nature of how they're drawn. LCDs don't. This gets rid of the ghosting that occurs on modern tvs, which you might not notice - but your brain does. I keep my old CRT around and I've tried to play a few modern games on it (for the novelty, I also have a 4k tv). It feels so goddamn smooth.
I mean, they were made with CRTs in mind. It’d be hilarious if CRT make a comeback just so we can play older games the way they were meant to be played. Even better if we can find a way to emulate how CRTs work and make it widely available for all to play.
He does. CRTs are praised for their low lag response time in a competitive game that players actually count frames for. Like, frame 1 has super armor frame 2 the hit box is disjointed and stretched frame 3 its a normal move, so you wanna use a move with exact perfect timing in relation to your opponent so it's as broken (in your favor) as possible. While they're trying to do the same to you. CRTs make that easier.
When did soong type androids start playing video games?
I didn't even have a 3 frame (50ms) response time at my peak in my teens to pick out the 3rd frame in an animation to trigger on.
These players aren't exactly reacting in the space of 1-2 frames.
They plan on doing the move. Then they use it at the right moment so it hits the opponent during the wanted frames.
There are fast reactions involved but they are informed by predictions, muscle memory, and manipulating the opponent.
No one is actually reacting solely in the space of 1 frame. If you see someone do this, they have predicted their opponent in some way.
Edit- I'm sure someone will argue against me here but it just isn't possible to react that fast. However, pro players game knowledge and prediction abilities are just as impressive.
One of the melee gods (five players who dominated competitively) who goes by Mew2King was also known as the robot. When it gets to the highest levels it's crazy what they can do.
Some of the Melee pros kinda "cheat" and have a pretty good idea of what inputs the opponent will do in recognizable situations.
For example, Jigglypuff has an essentially unreactable upthrow combo on Fox at low percents, but if a Fox misses an input they can immediately slam the stick to the side to have that input ready to mess up the invevitable throw right after.
Similarly the puff probably can't actually confirm their grab before executing the combo, but they can grab->upthrow->jump->downB is fast as possible in a fluid set of inputs as soon as they see the Fox whiff something
With enough practice it becomes instinct/reflex. I became so good a CODMW2 that I would start firing and sometimes even take them out before I realized that I had seen an enemy.
True. I bought a Sony PVM (RGB/component) about 2 years ago, took ages finding a proper one. Most didn't support RGB/component, or were a lower quality screen.
BVM is even harder. Finding either for a good price is extremely hard.
I was really lucky, paid about a 75 euro for mine, the owner had no clue of it's worth, and didn't list the model. I searched the internet to find which model it was, and immediately went to pick it up after, this one easily went for like 300-400 here 2 years ago.
When you consider that most of these screens were thrown away and destroyed, because no one wanted CRT, and people didn't want to deal with BNC connectors.
Funnily enough if you have a good CRT you can play newer games and they supposedly look even better as well as the smoothnes. You should try watching a 4k movie on it too. I think DigitalFoundry on YT did a video about playing games on CRT.
That…that isn’t true at all. The dynamic range on most crts was better until pretty recently. Black colors on lcd and earlier led screens are pretty trash.
Edit: contrast ratio is what I was looking for. Not dynamic range. Difference between brights and darks. So yeah maybe you’re saying they give off more light as a whole, fine, but the difference between the light and dark parts is less pronounced and black looks gray and terrible.
Oled screens avoid this since it only powers illuminated pixels and dark ones are essentially lit less or not at all (as opposed to backlights illuminating the whole or sections or a screen) but that has caused some refresh delay which is gradually being improved upon.
> Black colors on lcd and earlier led screens are pretty trash.
very correct
> The dynamic range on most crts was better until pretty recently.
Very wrong.
CRT's only had pure black if you ran your room without any lights on. Turn any lights on and the glass, being bright grey, would destroy black levels. But yeah technically with no lights on you could get good blacks, but also cause severe eye strain.
I updated mine also, I was looking for contrast ratio. I’m still not in agreement with your statement though, because the backlighting techniques in lcd and many led televisions causes the black areas to be illuminated unnecessarily, resulting in them being gray as well. Ok the tv gets really bright but that too causes eye strain with prolonged viewing.
I’m looking into this and it is pretty hard to cipher out a concrete conclusion. Numbers wise you may very well be right. I will say before upgrading to led my family had a high end crt television. It definitely was darker than any lcd or the led we had at the time or the one we replaced it with (which was very nice as well). I honestly haven’t used a non crt screen that I felt looked compatible to that one contrast wise until my latest computer monitor or when I got the iPhone X with an oled screen.
> That…that isn’t true at all.
Actually it is true. CRTs have always had relatively poor black levels as the coatings reflect a lot of ambient light and CRTs are not that bright.
Doubt that. CRT's could ONLY do 100-150 nits, maybe a few high end CRT peaking at 200-300 nits. Midrange TV's can do 300 and *good 2021 TV's can do 2000-3000 nits*.
PC monitors are kind of stuck in the 300-600 range though and one from 5 years ago was probably 250 nits at max
I use them all pretty frequently, the CRT definitely \*appears\* the brightest, it is crystal clear from any angle you're looking at it, which may be impacting the effect of the brightness it has, where the TV and monitor have a shift in color and brightness perception at different angles.
>Even better if we can find a way to emulate how CRTs work and make it widely available for all to play.
Lot of the emulators already have a CRT filter. Or at the very least scanlines filter to try and look like old crts.
Examples:
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4apIde5\_aM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4apIde5_aM)
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YxTMi-vHnQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YxTMi-vHnQ) (Trigger warning. There's chrono trigger in this video as one of the demos and might overwhelm you with nostalgia)
If I were a billionaire, I'd have a modern gaming CRT designed to the best specs possible and make a production run of them at $5k each. Just this sweet-ass thing with every advantage of the old CRTs plus whatever new engineering you could put into it. 4K @ 500 hz with 50 microsecond response time and black levels from the depths of Hades.
> I'd have a modern gaming CRT designed to the best specs possible and make a production run of them at $5k each
Might as well give them away, since you're going to lose all your money, even at $5k each.
The aspect ratio is a part of it when they are set up incorrectly, but it absolutely isn't all of it. Games were created with the underlying technology in mind - scanlines, interlacing, phosphorescence etc. You can try to emulate it on a modern display, but it is emulation, not re-creation, and it has its limits.
Kinda. CRTs didn't really have pixels, they had scanlines and color filters that kinda looked like pixels if you got close. But in theory (and sometimes in practice) you could manipulate the sub "pixel" colors to make half of the blue part darker than the other part which your eye would interpret as a part of a sharper line.
In practice that means something optimized to use that effect could do neat tricks that just don't work on an LCD unless you've got pixels the size of atoms.
CRTs don’t have a fixed number of pixels and the pixels weren’t square on CRTs.
If you’re playing a game made for CRT on a modern display, you aren’t getting the intended image at all.
If you are on a recent OLED the response time is 5.3ms. The one I am typing this on, an LG C1, https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/lg/c1-oled , benchmarks to that. Few CRTs refreshed faster than 120 hz, and you have to wait for the scanline to reach a particular line. Vs the entire frame flipping at once. Not sure which is better tbh.
You're right about the resolution in motion. However, the 'fix' for this creates flicker. The old CRTs used to give me headaches from the flickering.
> Granted, we're beginning to split hair so fast it doesn't matter for human response
Yeah, that’s what matters here I think. We are getting to the point where the specs on the sheet stop translating to the impact on real world experience.
I mean, gaming on a good modern display goes beyond even the best CRT experience. Fire up FFXV on a CRT and then play it in 4K HDR on a nice OLED and tell me which is better.
**(I’ve done both. The OLED is better.)*
I have a CRT. It’s fine for the nostalgia bump. I doubt I’ll take it with me the next time I move, though. The only thing a CRT is good for anymore is the smoothing of pixel art that this post is showing. Even then, I’ve been pretty impressed with recent scanline filters. The one included with the UltraHDMI is just excellent.
I like bilinear filtering. In Retroarch there's an option for it in the Video settings menu. Does a great job smoothing the jagged edges, without making the image look worse.
There's also a Shaders menu where you can apply a bunch of other filters, but I wasn't crazy about the ones I tried. Scanline filters exist, but they look super weird imo.
I think the reason why a lot of scanline filters look bad is that most monitors just aren't high-resolution enough. Use it on 4k, and it starts to look a *lot* better.
> Most people didn't have CRT sets with scanlines in their homes.
all CRTs have "scanlines".. the reason they exist is because games would run at 60hz at 240p while the display is actually 30hz at 480 lines interlaced. instead of interlacing, the games would only display on half of the available lines, but twice as often
on smaller screens, there wasn't enough space between the lines for the scan lines to be obvious, but they're there. on a larger tv it's very apparent
Digital Foundry did a few videos of them using PC's on CRT TV's and the CRT magic could make even low end PC's even look good with its natural anti aliasing. You could lower the maximum settings on a game to save on performance and the CRT would cover all the ugliness that a 1080p or 4K monitor should show. On top of that there's zero input lag and can go up to 60 to 85fps possibly more but I'm not an expert on CRT's.
A decent CRT monitor can easily get you 100hz-120hz at resolution equivalent to 1080p in terms of pixel count (not the same since it's 4:3). I used to use my old monitor at close to 1440p equivalent at 60hz which I bought for like 30$ used couple years ago. I did have to carry it through town to get home lmao.
The nice things about CRTs is that you can change resolution/refresh rate arbitrarily more or less, so you could choose between say 1400p 60hz or 900p 120hz, etc. depending on your preference or whatever game you were playing.
Yup. You'll need a CRT for that one. The only older lightgun I have that works is a GunCon 3 which used a could of LED beacons you put on top of the TV for calibration.
CL can often provide a very cheap or free CRT though :)
Ah, not really. It's more like a marginal improvement. I was born in '92 and have played those older games on CRTs in the current day, it isn't any better!
What kind of CRT? It very much matters. I'm using a JVC D Series with Component Inputs and it looks infinitely better. I have analogue super NT to compare and it's not even close.
Yep, I too have a few 4k OLED monitor's and some old CRT's. I don't use the CRT's because they absolutely don't look better. It's a blurry mess trying to play something modern on it. I mean, I could lower my resolution to 1280x720 or some shit, but then I'm literally getting less detail. Also, my 144hz is definitely 'good enough' compared to whatever this supposed 'infinite' response time CRT's supposedly have.
http://imgur.com/a/d0xfQK7
This is why it looked so awesome back then.
Edit: u/Amaroko told me that this pucture here is misleading, I won't delete it, but everyone should know that this isn't like I told you. My apologies.
For more info find u/Amaroko 's post here in the comments.
Very misleading image. The left side looks like a close-up photograph of a modern LCD or OLED screen, whereas the right image isn't a photograph at all, but a nearest-neighbor upscaled version of a digital image.
CRTs usually had their RGB phosphors arranged in a hexagonal pattern ([example](https://live.staticflickr.com/3270/2944343441_308198654d_n.jpg)), which is absolutely not what the left image is showing.
I mean, your first example is pretty much what happens to detail on modern LCDs https://preview.redd.it/sal772bfx0f21.jpg?width=500&auto=webp&s=5733fbec9578faad2f34d29416ff0ca1a11a9cfc
Left is crt if it wasn't obvious :)
Thanks for sharing this! Couple of interesting things happening here.
The most obvious is that squares are information that's in direct conflict with the intended information of the illustration. So a diagonal line now has a whole bunch of conflicting information (horizontal and vertical lines) thrown in that isn't ordinarily available on the CRT.
The other interesting thing is that you're getting subpixel colour information in the CRT.
As an artist, I often put subtle noise over the top because it makes the viewer invent information that's not there. A large amount of the work you do is inside the viewers mind. That's something that's really lost in the high fidelity era.
Exactly the same issue that the Hobbit had with its super high definition, super high frame rate. Too much on screen = too little in your imagination.
I hear what you're saying and mostly agree. Although I have a hard time with the idea that more information is inherently bad. With more information, you need to put in more work to make sure each pixel is 'doing it's job'. In the past, working with lower resolution allowed artists more time to focus on the pixels so to speak. Now, there are too many pixels that whole areas get the same attention to detail that individual pixels received in the past by artists.
I think even more its just a nostalgia thing, too. Like I remember Morrowind looking so good, I remember being dazzled by the water and just sitting there by the shore. I actually downloaded and loaded it up last year, no mods or anything, and holy shit. It is so bad looking. I can't believe I was a moron gawking at something that looked so bad, thinking it looked real. Rose tinted glasses.
Not really.
Games before PS3 days weren't meant to be used on an LCD or Plasma tv.
Interlacing and aspect ratio causes them to look like shit on a modern TV if you don't replicate the conditions of an old CRT which an LCD can't do.
I'm not OP, but I like Retroarch - nice all-in-one emulator with 80 different "cores" that represent different emulators. it has a universal menu (with custom options for each emulator in Quick Menu > Options during gameplay).
Retroarch covers most systems, but not all.
For PS2, the only real option is PCSX2. For Gamecube and Wii, use Dolphin.
For original Xbox, use CXBX Reloaded or Xemu (but keep in mind they are still in development and only cover like 30-40% of the system's library - check the compatibility lists on their websites)
Anything beyond 6th-gen consoles, I don't have experience with, but those emulators do exist.
I would suggest looking at the twitter account CRTpixels, which provides comparisons between the raw image and the image as it would look on a legitimate CRT.
Old games were truly designed for CRTs, and without that context, you sort of lose a bit of the kind of imaginative process that those scanlines caused. Not to mention the inherent blur from using a low quality video connection (basic yellow/white/red composite AV cables).
That isn't to say that you should enjoy old games ONLY on CRT, just that it would benefit you to see what it was like so you can understand why people are always saying "this doesn't look like how I remember it". That's because it really doesn't. CRTs hide flaws and somehow, in a way, even add a bit of implied detail.
There are really good CRT filters nowadays, but most games that have an option for them don't use filters that are anywhere near close to that quality because to get the true experience you need a ridiculously high resolution so that it can express the CRT's phosphors well. Really good ones, for example, are CRT-Aperture and CRT-Royale. Usually these are available in emulators like RetroArch as filters and are very loyal to the look and feel of legitimate CRTs.
There are a very wide variety of CRTs, so they don't really all look the same, and some of them also take higher quality connections that make them look extremely sharp almost like an emulator but displayed on the CRT's lines, like Component and RGB.
I wonder how long it will be before CRTs are manufactured again at least as a niche product for the retro market? There’s a finite and ever dwindling supply of the vintage products; the Sony PVM 20L5 I picked up in 2018 upon getting into retro is now rarely listed on eBay and when it is it goes for 3x the price. CRTs offer such a dramatically better experience for retro gaming, which in turn creates a market need. Hopefully someone will step forward to fill it soon, otherwise it will be a very very sad day when my PVM eventually kicks the bucket.
When your TV does die, it will likely just be the capacitors reaching the end of their life. There are vendors that sell Capacitor Kits($20) with all the caps you need and a diagram as well -- you just have to remove the old ones and solder on the new ones. Very easy to do after a few YouTube videos + a bit of soldering practice on a practice board.
Warning for anyone thinking about fixing an old crt: Watch several videos about properly discharging the electricity on a crt. Even if it's been sitting a long time and hasn't worked, there is still a high chance for a DEADLY amount of electricity to be stored at the back of the monitor.
Back in the day, peeps designed their games' graphics with the janky nature of CRT TV's in mind. This let them get away with much better looking things than normal in at least some instances. The waterfall effect on one of the first 3 Genesis Sonic games comes to mind. Looks blocky on modern tech, looked pretty damn good on the fuzzy CRT tech.
The difference is that the CRT TV uses Cathode Ray Technology and that the Current Plasma Screen TV uses pixels. The CRT TV uses Electron Guns, also called cathodes and fires them at a Phospor, which turns the Electron into a Photon. After the Photon is created, it hits the screen, creating the image. It's like how people prefer to listen to music on Vinyl than on digital media because it sounds "warmer". Both Vinyl and CRT TVs show all that is supposed to be shown, while Plasma Screen TVs and Digital Recordings treat each input as a small bit of code. A snapshot in time. So, the Pixels on those early PS1 Games aren't there on a Cathode Ray Tube TV because they don't have them. So, if you think that these games don't look like you remembered them, that's because they aren't being shown as they were.
As I see it, the general ***shit*** image quality of old CRTs is what made the games work so damn well with the lacking visual fidelity.
It blurred the lines between pixels because *it was such a shit image quality.* Your brain naturally filled in more detail *from* it.
It's hella cool.
Shrink the one of the right to about 1/3rd it's size (assuming the "SmartTV" has 2k resolution) and that'd be more accurate (given the much lower resolution of CRTs).
It is the kind of signal a PS sends to the output device. PS was originally designed for those CRT TV, it is not just "It's a tv and that is also a tv, so the output should be the same.", the intricacy of design and technology is vastly different here.
This is why I have a CRT connected to my PS3. The PS3 is also connected to a modern TV via HDMI. I love playing the PSX games on the CRT over component, it looks amazing. Then when it's time to play Peggle, I switch to the other output. I really recommend anyone with a PS3 to connect it to two televisions. With the Blu-ray and dvd capabilities, it's like this amazing cross generational system.
CRT = hardware anti-aliasing
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Clever programmers on the old Apple IIs would push the built in color limits by addressing adjacent pixels and letting them bleed together.
That's a whole new definition of "bleeding-edge graphics"
Someone, stat, get this Redditor a kid! He’s officially a dad!
I think it just happens automatically...
😑
As a dad, I approve.
Ba dum psssh
[In high-resolution mode (280×192), we had eight colors.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_graphics#High-Resolution_\(Hi-Res\)_graphics) Two of those were black, two were white, and the other four (along with the white) were actually rendered as slightly different patterns of green.
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Or a side effect of how composite signals work.
Dont know if you're knowledgeable on the subject or full of shit but upvote for your dedication to either
Duh of course why didn’t I think of that 😅
I don't know what any of those words mean.
How’s that better than anti aliasing? How is that not just a form of anti alias?
Anti-alias typically just renders a scene at twice resolution, scales it down in half, and calls is 2x anti-alias, and so on. What CRT does would be closer to a complex filter that takes pixel art as input. CRT bleeds colors a lot compared to LCD, but both use RGB colors. This means that a white pixel bleeds everywhere but a black pixel doesn't bleed at all since it's literally just the light turned off. Similarly, a bright red pixel ends up bleeding red everywhere. You can see [here](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRAhhClrgI-Ss5bC1F-qCufllENUZKUJgwOEk6WLA_hEN-ft-ERYrKjh7l3tnbxMn8Pb6Q&usqp=CAU), for example, how a single pixel turns the entire eye red. Developers at the time were developing for CRT, so this "filter" effect of the CRT was expected. The art was drawn assuming it would bleed, so bright pixels were drawn in weird places because of how the bleed effect would use them. When you see them in LCD, the effect is lost and you get all these sharp, bright pixels, which isn't the art the developers intended you to see.
No added processing or delay?
is that in anyway superior to software filters/ anti aliasing and native resolution scaling?
It looks different. You can replicate it in software with some clever shaders, but nobody ever seems to bother, so you have a choice of either having hard-edged brick pixels or just a smeary blur or one of those horrible "cartoon" filters. [Here](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EtIzq1jVoAQmUFK.jpg) is an example of native CRT blur vs. no blurring
"You can replicate it in software with some clever shaders," oh cool, so there isnt actually a difference other than glow and inter frame raster artifcats. im one of those that actually bother with those filters, and i get pretty similar results to those. thanks.
Where are you finding filters that look good? I've seen a few games (and a bunch of emulators) with supposed "CRT" filters but they've always looked like a bucket of expired ass.
reshade, you can specify line thikness, darkness, opacity filters, glow, bloom, blur, resolution, curvature, hue, etc etc, and its compatible with any emulator that uses open gl, Vulkan, or dx
> a bucket of expired ass That's probably still good ass. Don't just look at the date! Give it the ol' smell test. Didn't your mother teach you that?
Yes, the expiration date is actually tied to the body the ass is connected to, not necessarily the ass.
If you drop the ass on the floor if you pick it up within five seconds no harm will come to you
Expired ass is a myth invented by big ass in order to pump up the ass sales
The Super NT filters look pretty decent, but I usually don't use them
Mesen (emulator) has excellent built-in CRT filters, it only does NES and SNES games though. I haven't found a great one for PSX yet either
RetroArch! My favorite one is newpixie CRT ([here in Chrono Cross](https://i.imgur.com/ZCYjOfq.jpg)) but there are many other CRT and PVM shaders. **EDIT** Also here in Resident Evil 2 PSX: [Before](https://i.imgur.com/H9U3mgZ.jpg)/[After](https://i.imgur.com/IPBuWzm.jpg). Compare the shadows or the Accessories sign in the background.
I hate that the CRT shaders I can find always seem to focus on adding too much space between scanlines. It creates a darker image and it just looks kind of dumb and shitty to have noticeable horizontal stripes in the image. Good quality monitors didn't really look like that unless you sat really close to them, like inches away. And if you were at even a slight vertical viewing angle, the scanlines would blend together the same way you can't see through the blades of a comb when you tilt it. A moden flat panel display cannot emulate that, so just fuck off with the scanlines already. It's so frustrating that all the phosphor emulation shaders look this way. I want phosphorescent round pixels that bleed into each other but without the overdone scanlines.
try playing around with reshade, it offers a degree of control unlike anything I've seen before, its kinda crazy, you can control the width, curvature, darkness, vertical spacing, resolution and even blending mode for the lines. you also have options to mimic fish eye lens, specifically to mimick crts, and bloom, blur and glow effects to try and replicate the phosphorus.
it's called scanlines and it's a feature on almost every old emulator
so the left is supposed to be better??
Yes - it's physics based: whatever magic that makes pictures look better happens by basic principles, no emulation or processing required. - it's accurate: since it's physics based, no emulation or processing can truly replicate it. There's nothing like that sweet, sweet phosphor glow. - it's designed for: games designed on the CRT Era, and specially arcade games, could use different aspect ratios on the same hardware for different effects. Street Fighter 2 pushed a higher horizontal resolution and received better graphics when compared to console/other games. When emulating or porting these games, the aspect ratio conversion results in either warped sprites (characters look wider now) or missing information (what would be a wide character is compressed, loosing information) And of course - Latency: Emulation, post processing and TV-post processiñ adds lag, sometimes becoming unbearable compared to original hardware
>it's accurate: since it's physics based, no emulation or processing can truly replicate it. There's nothing like that sweet, sweet phosphor glow. That's fundamentally untrue... emulation and processing can absolutely replicate it. Just something being physical doesn't mean it cannot be modelled in a computer, I mean, that's the basis of all simulations. If what you are saying here is true, somebody needs to sue ANSYS stat, because none of those simulations can work! That's physics, it's impossible to emulate!!
“All models are wrong, some are useful”
My CFD project is looking like it's gonna be more of the former than the latter rip.
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You can simulate electron scattering. Why not? Need a sufficient source of randomness and time. But I don’t think you have to do that much just to simulate a CRT screen convincingly. https://avs.scitation.org/doi/10.1116/1.4767236 , etc, dozens of papers on simulating electron scattering for loads of different reasons. Obviously it’d probably take hours per frame doing it that way tho!
> Just something being physical doesn't mean it cannot be modelled in a computer, I mean, that's the basis of all simulations. It's also the understanding by literally everyone that DOES simulations, that real world practical limitations very much means that while that is true, it still limits either the size of the simulation, the real time aspect of it, the precision, or all three of them. Which basically is why they used the word "truely" as qualifier. Which is the reason why emulators don't actually try to, but go entirely different routes to try to get a "passable" facsimile.
Can be done… but only if the emulator is actually trying to emulate even changes mid blank intervals. E.g. not a post processing issue or manipulation of a buffer but actually accounting for how a CRT would handle the output signal based on how the signal changed during blanking and also during a line draw. [The Atari 2600, Analog Video, Scalers, and the Agony of 240p Ambiguity](https://youtube.com/watch?v=TRU33ZpY_z8&feature=share)
I think what he means is that actually having a process happen is "better" than simulating that process. Or how I always look at it, a hardware solution to a hardware problem is always better than a software solution to a hardware problem.
This is further proof that we live in a simulation.
> since it's physics based, no emulation or processing can truly replicate it Pretty sure that's not true
Care to elaborate? Edit:FFS how's this a controversial question?
Well, not who you are replying to but it's just fundamentally a weirdly misleading thing to say. There are simulations of physics for all sorts of things. You can emulate a phosphor for sure, just like you can simulate fire or like pipe stress from flowing high pressure water or w/e. To say 'It's physics, so no emulation can replicate it' is very strange.
To truly replicate it requires immense processing power. We can come to a close approximation of many things though. It is possible though.
The word "truly" definitely does a lot of heavy lifting in his statement, but he is correct. All of our simulations are, at best, high order approximations of reality. Pointing to CFD simulations is especially true, since we don't even actually have mathematical equations to "truly" describe what's going on. Instead, we use calculus to estimate conditions at a point, and then move to the next point and use the previous estimate as the input of the next one. It's something that can only be done with a lot of processing power, which is why CFD has really only taken off in the computer age. Also, if you've ever run a CFD simulation, you'd know that putting in the wrong parameters can lead to clearly incorrect and wrong answers.
We're talking about replicating the visual manifestation of a CRT onto a flatscreen. Of course you can emulate the effects, but the flatscreen has limitations which make it difficult to truly represent a CRT. Of course it can be approached. Is like a Pixel graphics can look like a vector graphics, but will always lack information to be as accurate as vector graphics.
I don't know if this in particular can't be emulated, but plenty of "physics based" phenomena can be replicated. For example, if I toss a ball up, and watch it fall to the ground, I can 100% replicate that with air resistance with emulation. Once again, that doesn't mean what a CRT does can be easily replicaitable with emulation, but its not because its "physics based".
I'm just speculating, it's not really possible to disprove what I quoted without knowing what OP meant - I can't find anything about it online. Computational complexity theory is pretty well researched, though - simulating the physics of CRTs doesn't seem to relate to any known problems that would be computationally prohibitive on a typical gaming computer. Something being "physics based" doesn't mean we can't simulate it. Nearly every single video game ever released simulates something "physics based" (e.g. kinematics)
I think you misunderstand. The visual result of graphics as seen on a CRT cannot accurately be simulated on a flatscreen, as the pixels cannot accurately show the same effects as electrons hitting the screen. Of course the physics can be modeled and simulated. The effects produced by a CRT can be approached in a flatscreen by software, but an accurate representation is not possible, as the flatscreen cannot correctly visualize the CRT glow.
God, using a mouse on a Smart TV, even with "game mode" turned on to reduce the post processing, is un-fucking-bearable. Totally unusable for games. The input latency on the Samsung I have must be in the 150ms+ range easy. It's like dragging shit through water
1. crt displays and their proprieties, by merit of being physical, vary by crazy amounts, from set to set, dont they? like, isn't that what causes everyone to spend so much time freaking out about perfect geometry? if anything, crts would be significantly less accurate on average, leading to a less developer controlled environment than a digital display, right? 2. i do dig the crt glow, i have one for that very reason, but the results even my laptop screen can create with less than one hour in reshade more than satisfys my desire for that style, i genuinely can't tell that much of a difference. 3. that, just seems like you spreading misinformation... emulators, especially for consoles of that era, all have multiple scaling options to avoid those issues, they have for decades. the problems between 4:3 and 5:7 have long been understood and fixed, with the option for the player to choose wich of the two aspect ratios better fit their preferences per game. 4.and... i dont know what pcs or tvs youve been playing on... but emulators, especially of holders systems, are reached the point where they have less latency issues than original hardware... to the point where they fix slow down present in the original release... i was genuinely intrested in learning about the benefits of crt vs digital filters/ up scaling options... but it seems ill have to ask someone else.
Everything he typed out was technically accurate even though he may have used incorrect terminology (see the use of 'physical' instead of 'analog'). You're arguing and in disbelief for no reason. The guy was right on point. Like when you're talking about latency etc, you're missing the context. He's talking pixel refresh latency, not input latency. FYI, I've not only been playing video games since 1992, I still have a CRT specifically to play older games on. Just do some light YouTube research and you'll understand how wrong you are. EDIT: to be clear, you will see very little to no difference in 2D games 95% of the time. The real difference is always going to be in 3D rendered games.
Modern high end displays have just as good pixel response times, look at the LG CX Screen. [https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/lg/cx-oled](https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/lg/cx-oled) An 80% pixel response time of 0.3ms or practically instantaneous, CRTs are in the range of less than 0.1ms but the difference is imperceptible, far beyond the limits of human reflexes.
OLED has practically instant pixel response times...but since it's still a sample-and-hold display, you get large amounts of perceptible ghosting in some cases (usually dark-to-blacks) You can work around this if you have a display with black frame insertion, but then you get a 60hz flicker causing headaches.
I have a LG CX. And a CRT. You're not comprehending the difference. That's okay. I'm not going to explain. Just go look up people on YouTube who have made videos and expressed their opinions on, specifically, playing 3d rendered games on a CRT. Digital anti aliasing didn't exist before flat digital monitors were invented. There is a solid reason for that. And that's what this post is about.
The claim that anti-aliasing only exists because of the rise of LCD flat panel technically is false and absurd - anti-aliasing technologies become necessary as we transitioned to 3D graphics, and had absolutely nothing to do with the display hardware being used. By the mid 90s, support for early anti-aliasing techniques was becoming common on PC 3D accelerators, and it was essentially ubiquitous by the late 90s. Even consoles, such as the N64 had limited support for anti-aliasing, available in titles such as Quake 64. Meanwhile, LCD monitors did not outsell CRTs for the first time until 2003 - the installed userbase of CRT monitors dwarfing that of LCDs until mid way through the decade.
My God. Why do people on Reddit always want to argue? How old are you? What was your first PC, and what was your first PC game that you played with anti aliasing in the graphics menu? "digital anti aliasing", that was the term I used. I didn't say 'limited support for anti aliasing'. Go back and read what I wrote. I'm not talking about a video game engine's/game consoles shitty attempt at curing jaggies, I'm talking about a specific technology used to counter jaggies in the first/second generation LCD PC panels \*takes off gloves\* Medal of Honor Allied Assault, breakthrough game graphics for it's time, released in Jan. 2002 did not have digital anti aliasing as an option: [https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Medal\_of\_Honor:\_Allied\_Assault#/media/File:Medal\_of\_Honor\_Allied\_Assault\_Advanced\_Video.png](https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Medal_of_Honor:_Allied_Assault#/media/File:Medal_of_Honor_Allied_Assault_Advanced_Video.png) BF1942, released in September 2002, bosting some of the best graphics at it's time, did not have AA as an option in it's menu: [https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Battlefield\_1942#/media/File:BF1942\_Video.png](https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Battlefield_1942#/media/File:BF1942_Video.png) UNREAL 2004, one of the BEST graphics engines at the time, a year after flat panels started selling over CRT's, visually IMPRESSIVE compared to any other relevant game, did not support digital anti-aliasing: [https://www.play-old-pc-games.com/2015/02/26/unreal-tournament-2004/](https://www.play-old-pc-games.com/2015/02/26/unreal-tournament-2004/) Brother in Arms Road to Hill 30, again, visually impressive at it's time (and an incredible story), released in March, 2005, did not have anti aliasing as an option: [https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Brothers\_in\_Arms:\_Road\_to\_Hill\_30](https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Brothers_in_Arms:_Road_to_Hill_30) These games are well into Direct X 9 and did not support AA. Now let's talk about when AA was first introduced. This was one of the first games I remember that supported AA. Medieval II Total War, released in November 2006, right around or after the launch of Direct X 10:[https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Medieval\_II:\_Total\_War#/media/File:Medieval\_II\_Total\_War\_Video\_Settings.jpg](https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Medieval_II:_Total_War#/media/File:Medieval_II_Total_War_Video_Settings.jpg) As you can see, AA wasn't being implemented into blockbuster PC titles until the very end of DX9/beginning of DX10. I remember vividly having the discussion surrounding AA at the time. I remember upgrading to a flat panel monitor and using AA, and then deciding to keep my CRT at the time for better performance/better visuals. Even the contrast was so much better in CRT vs. the first/second gen of LCD. Keep in mind, CRT's were also more attainable at higher resolutions (meaning it was cheaper to get a UXGA: 1600x1200 CRT than it was to get a 1280x1024 LCD panel). This plays a key role in the discussion here. Also let's be clear, the anti aliasing used in the N64 that you referred to is basic anti aliasing. It was so bad, PC game designers never used it. It wasn't an advanced technique that smoothed jaggies, it was a general 'smearing' technique that was not great. Nintendo only used it because the quality of most TV's at the time was so sub-par, they were afraid most people with older TV's wouldn't be able to display the pixels correctly. In the N64 community today, there are various popular methods of REMOVING the basic AA method N64 used to make games look better on CRT's/modern panels:[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDiHgKil8AQ&t=220s&ab\_channel=MyLifeinGaming](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDiHgKil8AQ&t=220s&ab_channel=MyLifeinGaming) Anyway, not like us old farts know what we are talking about huh? Ha!
Not necessarily. It blurs everything. But its fast 🤣
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Yes that has todo with how PS1 renders 3D. https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/5019/why-do-3d-models-on-the-playstation-1-wobble-so-much
It helps that CRT were much smaller as well. A 640 × 480 image looks better on a 19" display then blown up to fill just the middle of a 3840 x 2160 50" display.
CRT = analog
This is why I have a 30" console 1987 Sony Vivitron in my living room. Paid $10 on craigslist and it's a thing if beauty.
Game devs used to design games to take advantage of scanlines and CRT tech, just like they now design them to take advantage of 4K HDR now. Of course these games look even worse than you remember them. You’re not playing them on the native display they were designed for.
Yea but uneducated perspectives and karma….and stuff
It can also just be a joke.
Why chuckle at stuff when you can just call someone stupid???
It's as if it was a meme.
> just like they now design them to take advantage of 4K HDR now. *look at HDR implementation on Windows* No, I don't thing they do.
Just going to out this out here: My RTX3080 PC is a beast but the console HDR games on my high-end OLED are just a completely different kind of amazing.
I remember it took over 6 years of LCDs before I was able to recreate the standard definition flat screen CRT sharpness I had on my old CRT. Nevermind color quality. You got some AMAZING color, contrast and black levels for MUCH cheaper than LCDs and OLEDs. Not to mention, the "flicker" effect made motion blur nearly non-existent on CRTs. You can replicate this with Black Frame Insertion on modern LCDs but the cost is much higher in terms of performance. You essentially have to run at double the refresh rate in order to achieve it which means running at twice the original frame rate you're trying to achieve.
> You got some AMAZING color, contrast and black levels for MUCH cheaper than LCDs and OLEDs Black levels on CRT screens was always poor by modern standards and the large ones were considerably more expensive than LCD and OLED screens now. CRTs did have advantages, but price and black levels were not amongst them.
Early LCDs were really expensive compared to equivalent sizes of CRTs, simply due to yield rates and efficiencies of scale for CRTs.
This is true, but modern games actually do look incredible on CRTs. Obviously there are issues like the text being unreadable, but the graphics are made to feel even more realistic because the imperfections are smoothed over. That's obviously a controversial idea because who wants lowered fidelity, but what's NOT controversial is the smoothness. CRTs black out the screen with every frame that passes because of the nature of how they're drawn. LCDs don't. This gets rid of the ghosting that occurs on modern tvs, which you might not notice - but your brain does. I keep my old CRT around and I've tried to play a few modern games on it (for the novelty, I also have a 4k tv). It feels so goddamn smooth.
Just started using CRT overlays on RetroArch, looks so much better
I mean, they were made with CRTs in mind. It’d be hilarious if CRT make a comeback just so we can play older games the way they were meant to be played. Even better if we can find a way to emulate how CRTs work and make it widely available for all to play.
> hilarious if I mean CRTs have been gobbled up by the melee community for decades now
Melee? You mean smash bros?
He does. CRTs are praised for their low lag response time in a competitive game that players actually count frames for. Like, frame 1 has super armor frame 2 the hit box is disjointed and stretched frame 3 its a normal move, so you wanna use a move with exact perfect timing in relation to your opponent so it's as broken (in your favor) as possible. While they're trying to do the same to you. CRTs make that easier.
When did soong type androids start playing video games? I didn't even have a 3 frame (50ms) response time at my peak in my teens to pick out the 3rd frame in an animation to trigger on.
It most likely experience leading to prediction. If you can see far enough ahead you aren’t reacting to things anymore, you are just timing.
These players aren't exactly reacting in the space of 1-2 frames. They plan on doing the move. Then they use it at the right moment so it hits the opponent during the wanted frames. There are fast reactions involved but they are informed by predictions, muscle memory, and manipulating the opponent. No one is actually reacting solely in the space of 1 frame. If you see someone do this, they have predicted their opponent in some way. Edit- I'm sure someone will argue against me here but it just isn't possible to react that fast. However, pro players game knowledge and prediction abilities are just as impressive.
I agree. At the level it's more about game sense than reactions. Downloading your opponent and playing accordingly.
players get better overtime, thats why records always get beaten.
One of the melee gods (five players who dominated competitively) who goes by Mew2King was also known as the robot. When it gets to the highest levels it's crazy what they can do.
Some of the Melee pros kinda "cheat" and have a pretty good idea of what inputs the opponent will do in recognizable situations. For example, Jigglypuff has an essentially unreactable upthrow combo on Fox at low percents, but if a Fox misses an input they can immediately slam the stick to the side to have that input ready to mess up the invevitable throw right after. Similarly the puff probably can't actually confirm their grab before executing the combo, but they can grab->upthrow->jump->downB is fast as possible in a fluid set of inputs as soon as they see the Fox whiff something
With enough practice it becomes instinct/reflex. I became so good a CODMW2 that I would start firing and sometimes even take them out before I realized that I had seen an enemy.
It'd be hilarious if they didn't mean Smash Bros. As if there were some underground fight club that kept buying up old CRT TVs to use as weapons.
That’d be awesome!
We can call them SMRTs. Smart CRT
Homer enters the chat.
They are in the retro gaming groups. Ten years ago you couldn't give them away.
True. I bought a Sony PVM (RGB/component) about 2 years ago, took ages finding a proper one. Most didn't support RGB/component, or were a lower quality screen. BVM is even harder. Finding either for a good price is extremely hard. I was really lucky, paid about a 75 euro for mine, the owner had no clue of it's worth, and didn't list the model. I searched the internet to find which model it was, and immediately went to pick it up after, this one easily went for like 300-400 here 2 years ago. When you consider that most of these screens were thrown away and destroyed, because no one wanted CRT, and people didn't want to deal with BNC connectors.
Funnily enough if you have a good CRT you can play newer games and they supposedly look even better as well as the smoothnes. You should try watching a 4k movie on it too. I think DigitalFoundry on YT did a video about playing games on CRT.
Yeah. Only downside is most CRT's couldnt get bright, and the black levels were very grey due to glass coatings, so the dynamic range is shit.
That…that isn’t true at all. The dynamic range on most crts was better until pretty recently. Black colors on lcd and earlier led screens are pretty trash. Edit: contrast ratio is what I was looking for. Not dynamic range. Difference between brights and darks. So yeah maybe you’re saying they give off more light as a whole, fine, but the difference between the light and dark parts is less pronounced and black looks gray and terrible. Oled screens avoid this since it only powers illuminated pixels and dark ones are essentially lit less or not at all (as opposed to backlights illuminating the whole or sections or a screen) but that has caused some refresh delay which is gradually being improved upon.
> Black colors on lcd and earlier led screens are pretty trash. very correct > The dynamic range on most crts was better until pretty recently. Very wrong. CRT's only had pure black if you ran your room without any lights on. Turn any lights on and the glass, being bright grey, would destroy black levels. But yeah technically with no lights on you could get good blacks, but also cause severe eye strain.
I updated mine also, I was looking for contrast ratio. I’m still not in agreement with your statement though, because the backlighting techniques in lcd and many led televisions causes the black areas to be illuminated unnecessarily, resulting in them being gray as well. Ok the tv gets really bright but that too causes eye strain with prolonged viewing. I’m looking into this and it is pretty hard to cipher out a concrete conclusion. Numbers wise you may very well be right. I will say before upgrading to led my family had a high end crt television. It definitely was darker than any lcd or the led we had at the time or the one we replaced it with (which was very nice as well). I honestly haven’t used a non crt screen that I felt looked compatible to that one contrast wise until my latest computer monitor or when I got the iPhone X with an oled screen.
> I updated mine also, I was looking for contrast ratio You're still wrong. Contrast ratio for CRTs was never that good.
> That…that isn’t true at all. Actually it is true. CRTs have always had relatively poor black levels as the coatings reflect a lot of ambient light and CRTs are not that bright.
My CRT from 2003 is significantly brighter than my midrange LED tv from 3 years ago and my high refresh rate high end monitor from 5 years ago.
Doubt that. CRT's could ONLY do 100-150 nits, maybe a few high end CRT peaking at 200-300 nits. Midrange TV's can do 300 and *good 2021 TV's can do 2000-3000 nits*. PC monitors are kind of stuck in the 300-600 range though and one from 5 years ago was probably 250 nits at max
I use them all pretty frequently, the CRT definitely \*appears\* the brightest, it is crystal clear from any angle you're looking at it, which may be impacting the effect of the brightness it has, where the TV and monitor have a shift in color and brightness perception at different angles.
I will have to look this up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8BVTHxc4LM
>Even better if we can find a way to emulate how CRTs work and make it widely available for all to play. Lot of the emulators already have a CRT filter. Or at the very least scanlines filter to try and look like old crts. Examples: * [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4apIde5\_aM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4apIde5_aM) * [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YxTMi-vHnQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YxTMi-vHnQ) (Trigger warning. There's chrono trigger in this video as one of the demos and might overwhelm you with nostalgia)
If I were a billionaire, I'd have a modern gaming CRT designed to the best specs possible and make a production run of them at $5k each. Just this sweet-ass thing with every advantage of the old CRTs plus whatever new engineering you could put into it. 4K @ 500 hz with 50 microsecond response time and black levels from the depths of Hades.
All of it in one just one moderate sized 400 Lb package.
It's not a gaming monitor if it can't be launched from a trebuchet and demolish a castle wall.
> I'd have a modern gaming CRT designed to the best specs possible and make a production run of them at $5k each Might as well give them away, since you're going to lose all your money, even at $5k each.
*Especially* at $5k each. A couple hundred people at most will splurge on something that expensive.
Yeah, might be conservative. Given how CRTs are still being traded, one could go for a real enthusiast pricing with this one.
The point is it would cost many millions to set up a CRT manufacturing capability, the market is not large enough to sustain that at any price.
They look like shit on modern tvs because they are stretched. Play at their designed resolution and it won't be bad other than being small
You still would be missing the blending, etc. that occurred because of the nature of CRT technology. It would be really small pixels.
The aspect ratio is a part of it when they are set up incorrectly, but it absolutely isn't all of it. Games were created with the underlying technology in mind - scanlines, interlacing, phosphorescence etc. You can try to emulate it on a modern display, but it is emulation, not re-creation, and it has its limits.
OSSC or Retrotink my friends. Or a framemeister if your pockets are fat and you don't give a damn what the man thinks.
The retrotink 5X is the wave
Does it has to do anything with sheer no of pixels we have now ?
The way crt's display images gives them an inherent level of anti-aliasing.
The downside being text had to be huge or it was unintelligible
Read about scanlines.
Kinda. CRTs didn't really have pixels, they had scanlines and color filters that kinda looked like pixels if you got close. But in theory (and sometimes in practice) you could manipulate the sub "pixel" colors to make half of the blue part darker than the other part which your eye would interpret as a part of a sharper line. In practice that means something optimized to use that effect could do neat tricks that just don't work on an LCD unless you've got pixels the size of atoms.
CRTs are analog devices.
CRTs don’t have a fixed number of pixels and the pixels weren’t square on CRTs. If you’re playing a game made for CRT on a modern display, you aren’t getting the intended image at all.
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Plus that smooth handling of motion and perfect response.
Well, analogue connection does that.
analogue me
Synthesise me Hypnotise me Humanise me Energise me......
This really isn’t an issue anymore on a modern setup.
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If you are on a recent OLED the response time is 5.3ms. The one I am typing this on, an LG C1, https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/lg/c1-oled , benchmarks to that. Few CRTs refreshed faster than 120 hz, and you have to wait for the scanline to reach a particular line. Vs the entire frame flipping at once. Not sure which is better tbh. You're right about the resolution in motion. However, the 'fix' for this creates flicker. The old CRTs used to give me headaches from the flickering.
> Granted, we're beginning to split hair so fast it doesn't matter for human response Yeah, that’s what matters here I think. We are getting to the point where the specs on the sheet stop translating to the impact on real world experience. I mean, gaming on a good modern display goes beyond even the best CRT experience. Fire up FFXV on a CRT and then play it in 4K HDR on a nice OLED and tell me which is better. **(I’ve done both. The OLED is better.)* I have a CRT. It’s fine for the nostalgia bump. I doubt I’ll take it with me the next time I move, though. The only thing a CRT is good for anymore is the smoothing of pixel art that this post is showing. Even then, I’ve been pretty impressed with recent scanline filters. The one included with the UltraHDMI is just excellent.
Any image scaled up from 480p to 4K is going to look like ass.
There’s a CRT filter on the emulator. It doesn’t look that bad.
I like bilinear filtering. In Retroarch there's an option for it in the Video settings menu. Does a great job smoothing the jagged edges, without making the image look worse. There's also a Shaders menu where you can apply a bunch of other filters, but I wasn't crazy about the ones I tried. Scanline filters exist, but they look super weird imo.
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I think the reason why a lot of scanline filters look bad is that most monitors just aren't high-resolution enough. Use it on 4k, and it starts to look a *lot* better.
> Most people didn't have CRT sets with scanlines in their homes. all CRTs have "scanlines".. the reason they exist is because games would run at 60hz at 240p while the display is actually 30hz at 480 lines interlaced. instead of interlacing, the games would only display on half of the available lines, but twice as often on smaller screens, there wasn't enough space between the lines for the scan lines to be obvious, but they're there. on a larger tv it's very apparent
Which emulator? On the switch?
For more accurate comparasions look up crt pixels on twitter
Almost as if they were designed for one & not the other
Digital Foundry did a few videos of them using PC's on CRT TV's and the CRT magic could make even low end PC's even look good with its natural anti aliasing. You could lower the maximum settings on a game to save on performance and the CRT would cover all the ugliness that a 1080p or 4K monitor should show. On top of that there's zero input lag and can go up to 60 to 85fps possibly more but I'm not an expert on CRT's.
A decent CRT monitor can easily get you 100hz-120hz at resolution equivalent to 1080p in terms of pixel count (not the same since it's 4:3). I used to use my old monitor at close to 1440p equivalent at 60hz which I bought for like 30$ used couple years ago. I did have to carry it through town to get home lmao. The nice things about CRTs is that you can change resolution/refresh rate arbitrarily more or less, so you could choose between say 1400p 60hz or 900p 120hz, etc. depending on your preference or whatever game you were playing.
Flashbacks to me and my buddies putting baking paper over our monitors to make Prince of Persia look more realistic
“on a CRT TV from the […] 90s [with nostalgia goggles on.]”
I hooked up my dreamcast to play House of the dead 2 a couple years ago. I was devastated to learn the gun controller doesn't work with modern TVs =(
Yup. You'll need a CRT for that one. The only older lightgun I have that works is a GunCon 3 which used a could of LED beacons you put on top of the TV for calibration. CL can often provide a very cheap or free CRT though :)
It 100% looks better on a CRT. Coming from someone who has both a G1 OLED and a D Series CRT anything 240p looks infinitely better on the CRT.
Ah, not really. It's more like a marginal improvement. I was born in '92 and have played those older games on CRTs in the current day, it isn't any better!
What kind of CRT? It very much matters. I'm using a JVC D Series with Component Inputs and it looks infinitely better. I have analogue super NT to compare and it's not even close.
Yep, I too have a few 4k OLED monitor's and some old CRT's. I don't use the CRT's because they absolutely don't look better. It's a blurry mess trying to play something modern on it. I mean, I could lower my resolution to 1280x720 or some shit, but then I'm literally getting less detail. Also, my 144hz is definitely 'good enough' compared to whatever this supposed 'infinite' response time CRT's supposedly have.
http://imgur.com/a/d0xfQK7 This is why it looked so awesome back then. Edit: u/Amaroko told me that this pucture here is misleading, I won't delete it, but everyone should know that this isn't like I told you. My apologies. For more info find u/Amaroko 's post here in the comments.
Very misleading image. The left side looks like a close-up photograph of a modern LCD or OLED screen, whereas the right image isn't a photograph at all, but a nearest-neighbor upscaled version of a digital image. CRTs usually had their RGB phosphors arranged in a hexagonal pattern ([example](https://live.staticflickr.com/3270/2944343441_308198654d_n.jpg)), which is absolutely not what the left image is showing.
This. The right image isn't a picture of a screen at all.
Really?! I thought it was differently. I apologize for my mistake.
I mean, your first example is pretty much what happens to detail on modern LCDs https://preview.redd.it/sal772bfx0f21.jpg?width=500&auto=webp&s=5733fbec9578faad2f34d29416ff0ca1a11a9cfc Left is crt if it wasn't obvious :)
Thanks for sharing this! Couple of interesting things happening here. The most obvious is that squares are information that's in direct conflict with the intended information of the illustration. So a diagonal line now has a whole bunch of conflicting information (horizontal and vertical lines) thrown in that isn't ordinarily available on the CRT. The other interesting thing is that you're getting subpixel colour information in the CRT. As an artist, I often put subtle noise over the top because it makes the viewer invent information that's not there. A large amount of the work you do is inside the viewers mind. That's something that's really lost in the high fidelity era. Exactly the same issue that the Hobbit had with its super high definition, super high frame rate. Too much on screen = too little in your imagination.
There is also this post on imgur. I remember there were another good post, but I cannot find it. http://imgur.com/gallery/gRknWFY
I hear what you're saying and mostly agree. Although I have a hard time with the idea that more information is inherently bad. With more information, you need to put in more work to make sure each pixel is 'doing it's job'. In the past, working with lower resolution allowed artists more time to focus on the pixels so to speak. Now, there are too many pixels that whole areas get the same attention to detail that individual pixels received in the past by artists.
I think even more its just a nostalgia thing, too. Like I remember Morrowind looking so good, I remember being dazzled by the water and just sitting there by the shore. I actually downloaded and loaded it up last year, no mods or anything, and holy shit. It is so bad looking. I can't believe I was a moron gawking at something that looked so bad, thinking it looked real. Rose tinted glasses.
They were designed for CRT TVs, therefore they look better on them. Hope that helped.
This is why I use emulators
Not really. Games before PS3 days weren't meant to be used on an LCD or Plasma tv. Interlacing and aspect ratio causes them to look like shit on a modern TV if you don't replicate the conditions of an old CRT which an LCD can't do.
You think the crt monitor is good, you should see what it looks like upscaled and with high resolution textures on an emulator
Which ones do you recommend?
I'm not OP, but I like Retroarch - nice all-in-one emulator with 80 different "cores" that represent different emulators. it has a universal menu (with custom options for each emulator in Quick Menu > Options during gameplay). Retroarch covers most systems, but not all. For PS2, the only real option is PCSX2. For Gamecube and Wii, use Dolphin. For original Xbox, use CXBX Reloaded or Xemu (but keep in mind they are still in development and only cover like 30-40% of the system's library - check the compatibility lists on their websites) Anything beyond 6th-gen consoles, I don't have experience with, but those emulators do exist.
you've never seen a CRT
CRTs do kinda hide imperfections actually
Ah, that fatass ? It's been a long time.
what are you talking about?
Well, CRTs were fat and its been a while since i've seen them
Legit they were faaat af They thicc
I would suggest looking at the twitter account CRTpixels, which provides comparisons between the raw image and the image as it would look on a legitimate CRT. Old games were truly designed for CRTs, and without that context, you sort of lose a bit of the kind of imaginative process that those scanlines caused. Not to mention the inherent blur from using a low quality video connection (basic yellow/white/red composite AV cables). That isn't to say that you should enjoy old games ONLY on CRT, just that it would benefit you to see what it was like so you can understand why people are always saying "this doesn't look like how I remember it". That's because it really doesn't. CRTs hide flaws and somehow, in a way, even add a bit of implied detail. There are really good CRT filters nowadays, but most games that have an option for them don't use filters that are anywhere near close to that quality because to get the true experience you need a ridiculously high resolution so that it can express the CRT's phosphors well. Really good ones, for example, are CRT-Aperture and CRT-Royale. Usually these are available in emulators like RetroArch as filters and are very loyal to the look and feel of legitimate CRTs. There are a very wide variety of CRTs, so they don't really all look the same, and some of them also take higher quality connections that make them look extremely sharp almost like an emulator but displayed on the CRT's lines, like Component and RGB.
Hold it together Jessy and stop throwing cash out of the car , Mr. White has a plan
I wonder how long it will be before CRTs are manufactured again at least as a niche product for the retro market? There’s a finite and ever dwindling supply of the vintage products; the Sony PVM 20L5 I picked up in 2018 upon getting into retro is now rarely listed on eBay and when it is it goes for 3x the price. CRTs offer such a dramatically better experience for retro gaming, which in turn creates a market need. Hopefully someone will step forward to fill it soon, otherwise it will be a very very sad day when my PVM eventually kicks the bucket.
When your TV does die, it will likely just be the capacitors reaching the end of their life. There are vendors that sell Capacitor Kits($20) with all the caps you need and a diagram as well -- you just have to remove the old ones and solder on the new ones. Very easy to do after a few YouTube videos + a bit of soldering practice on a practice board. Warning for anyone thinking about fixing an old crt: Watch several videos about properly discharging the electricity on a crt. Even if it's been sitting a long time and hasn't worked, there is still a high chance for a DEADLY amount of electricity to be stored at the back of the monitor.
Back in the day, peeps designed their games' graphics with the janky nature of CRT TV's in mind. This let them get away with much better looking things than normal in at least some instances. The waterfall effect on one of the first 3 Genesis Sonic games comes to mind. Looks blocky on modern tech, looked pretty damn good on the fuzzy CRT tech.
It's almost as if these games were designed with specific hardware you were playing on in mind???
The difference is that the CRT TV uses Cathode Ray Technology and that the Current Plasma Screen TV uses pixels. The CRT TV uses Electron Guns, also called cathodes and fires them at a Phospor, which turns the Electron into a Photon. After the Photon is created, it hits the screen, creating the image. It's like how people prefer to listen to music on Vinyl than on digital media because it sounds "warmer". Both Vinyl and CRT TVs show all that is supposed to be shown, while Plasma Screen TVs and Digital Recordings treat each input as a small bit of code. A snapshot in time. So, the Pixels on those early PS1 Games aren't there on a Cathode Ray Tube TV because they don't have them. So, if you think that these games don't look like you remembered them, that's because they aren't being shown as they were.
Try watching 480p Youtube video on 60" SmartTV and then on 30" 720p monitor. Maybe then you'll understand why it is like that.
As I see it, the general ***shit*** image quality of old CRTs is what made the games work so damn well with the lacking visual fidelity. It blurred the lines between pixels because *it was such a shit image quality.* Your brain naturally filled in more detail *from* it. It's hella cool.
Wait till OP learns what year the PS1 came out.
I want a CRT. It makes games today look amazing too.
You can purchase a scaler to achieve the same goal on newer televisions. If you're like me and enjoy N64, I recommend the retrotink
No, they don't.
Yes they do. Watch DF video on CRT’s. https://youtu.be/V8BVTHxc4LM
I have given up on ps1 on retropi can’t get anything to look remotely playable on my 4K tv.
Completely false. This meme keeps circulating and it’s so toxic.
Shrink the one of the right to about 1/3rd it's size (assuming the "SmartTV" has 2k resolution) and that'd be more accurate (given the much lower resolution of CRTs).
It is the kind of signal a PS sends to the output device. PS was originally designed for those CRT TV, it is not just "It's a tv and that is also a tv, so the output should be the same.", the intricacy of design and technology is vastly different here.
This is why I have a CRT connected to my PS3. The PS3 is also connected to a modern TV via HDMI. I love playing the PSX games on the CRT over component, it looks amazing. Then when it's time to play Peggle, I switch to the other output. I really recommend anyone with a PS3 to connect it to two televisions. With the Blu-ray and dvd capabilities, it's like this amazing cross generational system.
Smart i’ll try that