19 ms·
DOSbox-CRT
- kbenson 8y agoIt's odd to me that someone would want this filter that much on DOSBox. I understand why it's generally included in game emulators - they were generally played on displays that looked somewhat like this. But DOSBox is for DOS games, and to my knowledge, most weren't played on displays that looked like this. At least, I don't think so, unless I'm completely misremembering my childhood, since almost all of the images shown are for games I actually played on a DOS computer using a SVGA display when young.
- shdon 8y agoThe 1980s with its CGA, EGA and early VGA displays must be from before your time then? I definitely played games looking like that. I prefer not to use such filters, but some people might be nostalgic for it. One interesting application might also be for games that make use of the overscan border, which is not normally visible in DOSBox (and people have been trying to work around this), causing problems in games that need it such as Crystal Caves.
- tsm 8y agoI played Crystal Caves when I was (very) young and wasn't actively aware of the overscan border being relevant—what was it used for?
- acheron 8y agoOverscan border was set to red in each level, and would switch to green when you collected all the crystals.
- kbenson 8y agoI'm referring less to the curve, and more to the scanlines[3]. The bleed in CRTs means that's not what it actually looked like when displayed on era accurate hardware, so it's always confused me why people would opt for a filter that claims to be "authentic" that does this, especially when emulating the visual experience enough to show screen rounding. For example, here's a picture of an actual DOS ANSI output, from a CRT monitor[1], and here's the equivalent display from this filter[2]. In what way is emulating the scanlines making this more authentic? Edit: clarified a bit 1: https://steemit-production-imageproxy-thumbnail.s3.amazonaws.com/U5dtcYTKdwcTiwv2tRKds1SGGK2Fxcm_1680x8400 https://steemit-production-imageproxy-thumbnail.s3.amazonaws... 2: https://img.itch.zone/aW1hZ2UvMjU1NzcwLzEyMjU1NTQucG5n/original/yx1c62.png https://img.itch.zone/aW1hZ2UvMjU1NzcwLzEyMjU1NTQucG5n/origi... 3: The correct terminology is escaping me. The interlacing? Whatever is responsible for the skipping of lines in the output.
- pvg 8y agoIt's tricky to make a comparison of 'authenticity': for one thing, some displays had more visible scanlines and for another, it's the sort of detail that's easily lost in photos because you're taking a picture of a small, very-high contrast area and the artifacts often bleed together.
- kbenson 8y agoWell, it can be tricky once you start getting accurate, but I'm not sure any display ever looked like these screenshots, or even very close to it. There was always some visual bleed to eyes as well, not just pictures. I'm pretty sure even LCD panels just repeated lines and didn't leave them blank, so some portion of people actually used an LCD to play these originally might have close to perfect accuracy if they repeated lines. The only times I can particularly remember scanlines being really bad and noticeable were on the old CGA displays in the 80's. And those didn't look like this representation by a long shot, there was a lot of bleed in those as well, the lines were just big enough the bleed didn't obfustate it quite as much. I can't comment on EGA/VGA, we went straight from a CGA monitor to a SVGA one in the late 80's or early 90's, I don't recall exactly when. It's possible there was a display type in there that I didn't use much which actually makes this representation more accurate.
- pvg 8y agoI think the effect tends to be exaggerated in most of these implementations my points are just 1. visible scanlines were totally a thing. 2. it's really hard to take a representative photo of a CRT.
- WorldMaker 8y agoAlso, human memory is a funny thing, and these sorts of things are easy to forget from your remembered experience, too. So to some it is exaggerated because they only remember it at its best and others it is spot-on because they only remember it at its worst. Because we notice problems more than things working, there may be more people in that second camp than in the first.
- reaperducer 8y agoIt would be great to get a filter that replicated the days when I'd play Sim City on the IBM PC Convertible's 640x200 monochrome un-lit LCD screen. Oh, wait. No it wouldn't. That was terrible! Yet, somehow I'm nostalgic for it.
- lbenes 8y agoBack on my first computer a 486, I had a flat Trinitron monitor. So at least in my case, the curvature would actually make the experience less authentic if I felt like reliving the Doom and Duke3d gaming of my youth.
- codezero 8y agoMy CRTs up into the late 90s had some amount of curve/distortion, it definitely got better in the late 90s, but by then I was on Windows 95+. When doing mostly games in DOS, I had a pretty curvy 14 inch CRT.
- xienze 8y ago> But DOSBox is for DOS games, and to my knowledge, most weren't played on displays that looked like this. DOS games most certainly were played on CRT monitors, it wasn't until, IIRC, 2000 that LCDs really became mainstream for desktop use. > since almost all of the images shown are for games I actually played on a DOS computer using a SVGA display when young. Being an SVGA display isn't relevant -- there were plenty of CRTs running that resolution and beyond. Perhaps you're thinking of something else when you say "displays that looked like this"? Otherwise I'm not really sure how to interpret your comment, because if you were playing DOS games at the time of their release, you were almost assuredly playing on a CRT -- unless you're talking about a 90s era laptop; those were LCD.
- kbenson 8y agoI'm referring less to the rounding and more to the way it's representing scanlines/interleaving of output, which while "signal accurate" isn't really "experience accurate", and if you're going as far as to emulate the rounding of the monitor, you really don't care what the signal was, you care what the person saw, and because of CRT bleed, that's far worse than some other display options (even repeating lines looks more accurate in some circumstances, I think).
- xienze 8y agoOh. Well I agree, CRT emulation does a pretty poor job of actually being representative of the CRT experience -- the scanlines are just so ridiculously exaggerated.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoThey are appropriate for a late 80's EGA monitor. It looks a bit weird with VGA.
- badsectoracula 8y agoNot really, check this image of an original IBM CGA: https://i.imgur.com/M3gKlfA.jpg https://i.imgur.com/M3gKlfA.jpg The scanlines aren't visible. The most important "mistake" those filters do is that they apply a uniform shade for each scanline, but in all CRTs i have around here, the scanlines do kinda merge together when the colors are bright.
- lowtolerance 8y agoThe vast majority of CRT monitors have a curved glass screen. Flat monitors were still pretty common, but they came at a premium.
- codazoda 8y agoI played on CGA and EGA monitors in the late 80's and early 90's. This filter does feel a little exaggerated to me but maybe I simply forget how bad they were.
- rasz 8y agoThose scanlines were bread and butter of low budget 15KHz systems displaying non interlaced signal. That means all home computers/consoles using TV, and CGA/EGA in low res mode displaying 200 lines on cheaper monitors. VGA cards scan double when emulating CGA/EGA modes and always display at least 350 lines, no visible scanlines. You are absolutely right, example images are pure nonsense, because they represent late nineties VGA era of DOS gaming. UFO, Warcraft, Rayman, Dungeon Hack, not a single one of those supports CGA/EGA.
- ZFH 8y agoYou're right, with a caveat. While it's true that 320x200 VGA DOS resolutions didn't have scanlines, arcade games and home computers did, and generally looked much better. A MS-DOS arcade port for example would look very blocky, while the Amiga counterpart would be fine in comparison. Scanlines are integral to that correct old-school look IMO, so it's very cool to have the option of replaying old classics like the Lucasgames stuff with that vibe.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoIndeed, scanlines are definitely more of a "TV" thing - e.g. the old 8-bit / 16-bit home machines and games consoles. PC monitors were always a lot sharper. Then again, my earliest PC experiences were in the 486 era when SVGA was already a thing.
- jug 8y agoI don't really recall the memory of scanlines. It's not my memory of how CRT's looked. The reason I think LCD's are jaggier and feel overpixelated today with old games is because I think CRT's were part much smaller (a 24" CRT was an absolute monster in size and weight, many sat with 15" ones!) and part much less sharp. You didn't exactly have a physical pixel per... pixel. But yeah, it's hard to simulate a smaller size... And if it's still larger, simulated softness will just look awkward, at least as far as I have seen with such filters. Like rounded but still big pixellated blocks. It can even look worse than without filters... My solution? Sit a little farther away from the monitor than usual or play windowed. Unbeatable compared to filters.
- slazaro 8y agoI was just thinking, something like this could be pretty cool in VR; the curvature of the screen could be 3D instead of a 2D warp. Having modern higher dpi monitors inside VR is not great because of the resolution of the headsets, but this low resolution would work I think.
- sebular 8y agoYou might be interested in this: http://www.emuvr.net/ http://www.emuvr.net/
- smrtinsert 8y agoThe audio production world which goes to great lengths to reproduce audio equipment, I would love to see shaders faithfully replicate classic monitors.
- ddingus 8y agoSeconded.
- WorldMaker 8y agoI think it would be interesting to mix the two ideas and have a (Dolby Atmos/Windows Spatial) spatial sound map model for some of these games that includes the hum and fuzzing noises of the CRT scanner and the terrible locations of old Harmon-Kardon PC speakers right beside that CRT and a tiny bit of random electromagnetic interference. Really go for that 90s PC gaming experience.
- lainga 8y agoAnd a special key binding to make the screen briefly distort with an audible "THUNK! bzzzz...."
- WorldMaker 8y ago"Hold on, the monitor is acting up again, let me open up its menu three levels deep to force it to degauss."
- King-Aaron 8y agoI used to like pointing the back of the monitor at another monitor in the lab, and hitting degauss - just to watch the other monitor get influenced by it
- genius384 8y agoAnd a turbo button for my PC
- 8y ago
- Mizza 8y agoYou can also use DOSBox as a LibRetro core [https://docs.libretro.com/library/dosbox/ https://docs.libretro.com/library/dosbox/] - this enables to use any of the filters the LibRetro provides on the frontend, including CRT. This pattern should be the future of emulation development, where possible.
- core-questions 8y agoRetroArch is a pretty terrible UI, though - it takes everything bad about that Sony UI and it's not particularly performant, either. Lots of stability and performance issues. Had difficulty getting a 3ghz Core 2 Duo to emulate SNES effectively with it... might've chosen the wrong engine out of the thousand alternatives, though.
- deelowe 8y ago> Had difficulty getting a 3ghz Core 2 Duo to emulate SNES effectively with it That's very odd considering retropie runs snes perfectly.
- ascagnel_ 8y agoYes and no. RetroPie can run SNES games using comparatively inaccurate emulators (SNES 9x, ZSNES; mostly sound bugs), but can’t run more accurate emulators like Higan acceptably.
- abritinthebay 8y agoTrue but that sort of is the issue with things like Higan - proper CPU architecture emulation is REALLY slow in software.
- einr 8y agoRetroPie (or libretro) does not have a ZSNES core; ZSNES, apart from being wildly inaccurate, is largely written in x86 assembly and so there is no ARM version. Additionally, the more modern snes9x cores have essentially the same sound emulation as higan (blargg's SNES_SPC library). I believe higan has done some modification of that code since importing it but regardless, the sound emulation in snes9x is very, very accurate. Higan is indeed unparalleled for those who truly care about extreme accuracy, but snes9x is 99% there for the vast majority of users who just want to play games.
- thijsvandien 8y agoThis strongly reminds me of Cathode (http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/ http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/).
- shmerl 8y agoSee also crt: https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term
- stasm 8y agohttp://gamasutra.com/blogs/KylePittman/20150420/241442/CRT_Simulation_in_Super_Win_the_Game.php http://gamasutra.com/blogs/KylePittman/20150420/241442/CRT_S... is a well-explained and and a copiously illustrated write-up about why CRT emulation is essential to many pixel-art retro games.
- rasz 8y agoYour link talks about CRT TV emulation (NES over composite etc), totally not applicable to DOS gaming using VGA monitor.
- thedaemon 8y agoWhy is this all over every news outlet that I've visited today? Twitter, OSNews and now Hacker News. I admit, it's something I'm interested in, but very curious as to why it is so prevalent. Does anyone have any idea?
- always_good 8y ago> Twitter, OSNews and now Hacker News Not a very strong case for "prevalent."
- thedaemon 8y agoShould I have said Facebook...? These are the only news outlets I visit, so it's pretty prevalent. I also really like how I got down-voted for asking a question. Cool, I'll not ask any more questions.
- loudandskittish 8y agoAnyone know of an easy way to get games purchased off GOG to use this version by default?
- MGustavsson 8y agoYeah, you if you search the installation folder of the GOG game for the dosbox.exe and replace it with the dosbox-crt.exe (renaming it), and then edit the dosbox.conf of the GOG game to use output=opengl, then it should run by default.
- loudandskittish 8y agoThank you!
- sevensor 8y agoI love that there are so many screenshots from TFTD. Oh the hours I've spent playing that game under Dosbox. No victories, though. I put up a good fight, but the aliens always win in the end. Started playing it on a CRT, under actual DOS, deep in the mists of time, but I can't say I noticed a difference when I switched over.
- MGustavsson 8y agoWell, it is probably my favourite game of all time, so it was an obvious choice :)
- sevensor 8y agoThe aliens are just so smart and pitiless! The game does a great job of making you feel weak and vulnerable -- one sonic pulser can wipe out half your squad if you get bottled up. And just when you think you're getting the upper hand, lobstermen show up and cut you to bits, or you discover that your star aquanaut is susceptible to mind control. Guess it's time for another play-through and inevitable defeat :)
- Gravityloss 8y agoThe only way to get rid of lobstermen is the drill.
- sevensor 8y agoWhich is unfortunate because they have a strong melee attack and if you can walk up to them, they can walk up to you. You have to either sneak up on them or rely on them being too aggressive for their own good and overextending themselves. The thermal shock bomb stuns them pretty effectively, if you manage to develop it before they show up.