11 ms·

Sadly, no. I use CRT on my main computer, in my country all flat panels I seen so far are too expensive OR useless for my purposes. 1. CRT can use arbitrary r

Sadly, no. I use CRT on my main computer, in my country all flat panels I seen so far are too expensive OR useless for my purposes. 1. CRT can use arbitrary resolutions, I love that, not only for retro gaming, but some modern games can reach "ultra" settings when lowering resolution a little, on a "mid-range" GPU (I own a Radeon 380X, sadly the last GPU to have analog video, I dunno what I will do when purchasing my next one) 2. My CRT contrast never bothered me, differently from the flat panels I owned, for example trying to play "superhot" and then "dark souls" same day required lots and lots of fiddling with flat panels, the settings that let me see anything at all on dark souls, made the screen flat white on superhot, fixing the settings for superhot made the screen flat black on dark souls... CRT I never felt the need to readjust contrast and brigthness after I found the setting I wanted. 3. Input lag... for most games this is not obvious, specially since lots of recent games have input lag anyway (for example I noticed a couple games check the controller status in a certain order that make all input always 1 frame late, sometimes 2 frames late if there is vsync and whatnot in the mix) but for example playing "Necrodancer" on CRT is much, MUCH easier for me. 4. This one is more theoretical, since the CRTs I own are cheap, but for a long time some CRTs could reach crazy high refresh rates. 5. "HDR", well, to be honest I never seen this either in person, but I know that some manufacturers did made some cool CRTs that supported HDR, most notably for SGI workstations that could create images with some ridiculous amounts of bits per pixel. 6. Retro gaming without expensive hardware: many, MANY games relied on CRT pixel "bleed" and fuzzyness of analog systems to create special effects, a notorious one is the waterfalls in sonic, on a system that has the intended hardware instead of seeing alternating columns of pixels, you would see a transparent waterfall, there are lots of emulators with plugins to simulate those, but to make the art work REALLY right on a modern screen you need a 4k screen, expensive powerful GPU and whatnot... as weird it sounds... it is cheaper to buy an actual CRT and even an actual old console to play some games.

mrob 7y ago
>MANY games relied on CRT pixel "bleed" and fuzzyness of analog systems to create special effects, a notorious one is the waterfalls in sonic But handheld systems with sharp pixels used the same art techniques, and many pieces of official artwork showed game art drawn with sharp pixels (think early NES game cover art). The Sonic waterfalls even use distinct vertical lines to represent falling water, instead of a checkerboard dither pattern, which would be the natural choice if you assumed it would be blurred. Arcade games used the same art techniques too, and they used high quality monitors and RGB connections, so pixels were clearly visible.
- 0815test 7y ago
  The thing about CRT pixel "bleed" is that it is a pure Gaussian blur, which is practically the best way of upscaling a raster image within a purely analog system. Strictly speaking, you can of course do much better with a digital-upscaling step, using e.g. Lanczos filtering (which is far better at preserving sharpness while smoothing out "blocky" appearances), or even with special "pixel-art scaling" algorithms that work strictly within the original palette. But still, even a CRT is much better than what can be shown on a fixed-resolution handheld screen!
  - mrob 7y ago
    That's assuming that the pixels are point samples, which isn't true of pixel art. Consider the typewriter on Crono's desk at the start of Chrono Trigger, where a single pixel checkerboard pattern is used to represent the keys. The best way to scale this is nearest-neighbor. The same technique is used in many games to represent chainmail armor.
    - 0815test 7y ago
      It's assuming that "a pixel is a point sample" is a better model, even of pixel art, than "a pixel is literally a small square". Checkerboard patterns are also used quite often for simple dithering (in pixel art with smaller-palettes) which is perhaps the polar opposite of your example! (And if you really don't want blurring, most pixel-art-specific scaling algorithms will nicely match nearest neighbor on that particular pattern, while still doing their best to smooth out "jaggies" elsewhere.)
      - mrob 7y ago
        How can the scaling algorithm distinguish between "checkerboard representing high spatial frequency detail" and "checkerboard representing intermediate color"? There are games that use both. The only scaling technique I know that can do this with acceptable accuracy (in real time!) is "human brain scaling".
astrange 7y ago
> My CRT contrast never bothered me, differently from the flat panels I owned, for example trying to play "superhot" and then "dark souls" same day required lots and lots of fiddling with flat panels, the settings that let me see anything at all on dark souls, made the screen flat white on superhot, fixing the settings for superhot made the screen flat black on dark souls... Your software isn't doing color management correctly for your display then. It probably thinks the gamma/native contrast are much higher than they really are. That said, most customer displays have shitty filtering code they never actually document. You should turn everything off except the backlight control and then never touch it again.

mrob 7y ago

>MANY games relied on CRT pixel "bleed" and fuzzyness of analog systems to create special effects, a notorious one is the waterfalls in sonic But handheld systems with sharp pixels used the same art techniques, and many pieces of official artwork showed game art drawn with sharp pixels (think early NES game cover art). The Sonic waterfalls even use distinct vertical lines to represent falling water, instead of a checkerboard dither pattern, which would be the natural choice if you assumed it would be blurred. Arcade games used the same art techniques too, and they used high quality monitors and RGB connections, so pixels were clearly visible.

0815test 7y ago
The thing about CRT pixel "bleed" is that it is a pure Gaussian blur, which is practically the best way of upscaling a raster image within a purely analog system. Strictly speaking, you can of course do much better with a digital-upscaling step, using e.g. Lanczos filtering (which is far better at preserving sharpness while smoothing out "blocky" appearances), or even with special "pixel-art scaling" algorithms that work strictly within the original palette. But still, even a CRT is much better than what can be shown on a fixed-resolution handheld screen!
- mrob 7y ago
  That's assuming that the pixels are point samples, which isn't true of pixel art. Consider the typewriter on Crono's desk at the start of Chrono Trigger, where a single pixel checkerboard pattern is used to represent the keys. The best way to scale this is nearest-neighbor. The same technique is used in many games to represent chainmail armor.
  - 0815test 7y ago
    It's assuming that "a pixel is a point sample" is a better model, even of pixel art, than "a pixel is literally a small square". Checkerboard patterns are also used quite often for simple dithering (in pixel art with smaller-palettes) which is perhaps the polar opposite of your example! (And if you really don't want blurring, most pixel-art-specific scaling algorithms will nicely match nearest neighbor on that particular pattern, while still doing their best to smooth out "jaggies" elsewhere.)
    - mrob 7y ago
      How can the scaling algorithm distinguish between "checkerboard representing high spatial frequency detail" and "checkerboard representing intermediate color"? There are games that use both. The only scaling technique I know that can do this with acceptable accuracy (in real time!) is "human brain scaling".

astrange 7y ago

> My CRT contrast never bothered me, differently from the flat panels I owned, for example trying to play "superhot" and then "dark souls" same day required lots and lots of fiddling with flat panels, the settings that let me see anything at all on dark souls, made the screen flat white on superhot, fixing the settings for superhot made the screen flat black on dark souls... Your software isn't doing color management correctly for your display then. It probably thinks the gamma/native contrast are much higher than they really are. That said, most customer displays have shitty filtering code they never actually document. You should turn everything off except the backlight control and then never touch it again.