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>> "For a game like Super Metroid, the "CRT experience" essentially boils down to "a greater sense of atmosphere and an enhanced sense of depth in some of the s

>> "For a game like Super Metroid, the "CRT experience" essentially boils down to "a greater sense of atmosphere and an enhanced sense of depth in some of the sprites". Does this arguably improve the experience? Yes. But the core experience of Super Metroid is not lost if you can't experience it this way" In all honesty I really have trouble buying the idea that a CRT is necessary to enjoy super metroid(or these old games in general). That's my favourite game, I grew up playing it on a snes, when we put the snes away after we got an n64, I kept playing it on emulators, the last time I played it I used an 8bitdo sn30 over Bluetooth on retroarch on my android phone, the game is the same. The atmosphere is the same, playing it felt the same, there was nothing 'missing' by not playing it on my snes on the old crappy TV in the hallway while my family walks back and forth in front of me. Eight year old me would have been amazed and exctatic if he could have carried around and played the entire catalogue of 8,16 and 64 bit console games on a small computer that fits in my pocket using a wireless controller. I've always thought of consoles as simply a means to play games. I love that there's hardware accurate emulators or even inaccurate emulators, that I have the ability to play these games on nearly any popular device that exists with graphical enhancements or using one of the many hacks or fan patches available. Being freed from the original hardware these games were developed for has allowed them to live on and be enjoyed in ways nobody back then even considered and for me that's far more awesome and exciting than trying desperately to recapture the exact look and feel of all these games.

wtallis 7y ago
CRT emulation of some kind is sometimes necessary to accurately render effects that were intended by the original artists. For example, this waterfall transparency: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4QOHe4bOZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4QOHe4bOZc Then there's the fact that a lot of early console artwork was designed to be output on a composite video cable instead of as separate RGB channels, so the crosstalk may need to be emulated to get the right color blending: http://www.chrismcovell.com/gotRGB/rgb_compare.html http://www.chrismcovell.com/gotRGB/rgb_compare.html (The reduced effective spatial resolution is often more of a detriment, so plenty of games do look much better in pure crisp RGB from an emulator.)
masswerk 7y ago
As indicated, this last section was meant to be read with a grain of salt. It's fair to debate the sensorical context of such a game and to assign varying degrees of importance to this, depending on individual perspective. But I'd also argue that a point like this may be made. E.g., early LCD games are generally not valued highly, while their bigger VFD cousins, which are probably not more complex, tend to be welcomed as charming devices, accordingly enjoying much better chances of preservation. Super Mario Brothers on a cheap NES-on-chip with a tiny built-in display (and several hundreds of games at the tip of your finger to switch to anytime, as well) makes it certainly harder to understand, why this could have been the fascination of an entire generation of kids. Now we could argue that, for example, Alexandre Dumas' novels were for the most originally published as a series of episodes, which doesn't affect us, who know them only as books. However, it does matter to understand what this meant for some of the text strategy in those novels. And, since we still understand what this kind of publication is, we have indeed a chance to understand what this means. On the other hand, if a medium is entirely gone, it may be real hard to reconstruct this kind of context and it's meaning. (E.g., speaking of the C64, if you never have seen RF output on a customary consumer color cRT TV set, it may be hard to understand why Commodore switched from the rather elegant font of the PET to those blocky characters. Was it just for fancy? Right, it must have been so, since the 1980s loved bold fonts, weren't they?) Surely, these are minor details, but they may built up to an extent, were it becomes hard to understand the worth of abstract code. In some cases, like Spacewar!, the threshold may be lower, in other cases it may be more robust, but I wouldn't dare to bet future history on this. I think, we still may require constant awareness and constant involvement in adapting resources like emulators. ("Who cares, it will probably still run in 20 layers of emulation" may be not enough.) But then, it may be just me with my interest into those kinds of media types. However, for a beginning, we should come up with a format of ROM or media images, which includes the original instructions/documentation in a standard format. This may actually help quite a bit. (Compare the notion of ET on the VCS as the "worst game of all times", which only came to being in the 2000s, quite a while after the fact, and was based mostly on the fact that the game was now played without the instructions that would have been included with every cartridge. As I recall it, the most disappointing game on the system was the rushed Atari Pac-Man.)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

wtallis 7y ago

CRT emulation of some kind is sometimes necessary to accurately render effects that were intended by the original artists. For example, this waterfall transparency: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4QOHe4bOZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4QOHe4bOZc Then there's the fact that a lot of early console artwork was designed to be output on a composite video cable instead of as separate RGB channels, so the crosstalk may need to be emulated to get the right color blending: http://www.chrismcovell.com/gotRGB/rgb_compare.html http://www.chrismcovell.com/gotRGB/rgb_compare.html (The reduced effective spatial resolution is often more of a detriment, so plenty of games do look much better in pure crisp RGB from an emulator.)

masswerk 7y ago

As indicated, this last section was meant to be read with a grain of salt. It's fair to debate the sensorical context of such a game and to assign varying degrees of importance to this, depending on individual perspective. But I'd also argue that a point like this may be made. E.g., early LCD games are generally not valued highly, while their bigger VFD cousins, which are probably not more complex, tend to be welcomed as charming devices, accordingly enjoying much better chances of preservation. Super Mario Brothers on a cheap NES-on-chip with a tiny built-in display (and several hundreds of games at the tip of your finger to switch to anytime, as well) makes it certainly harder to understand, why this could have been the fascination of an entire generation of kids. Now we could argue that, for example, Alexandre Dumas' novels were for the most originally published as a series of episodes, which doesn't affect us, who know them only as books. However, it does matter to understand what this meant for some of the text strategy in those novels. And, since we still understand what this kind of publication is, we have indeed a chance to understand what this means. On the other hand, if a medium is entirely gone, it may be real hard to reconstruct this kind of context and it's meaning. (E.g., speaking of the C64, if you never have seen RF output on a customary consumer color cRT TV set, it may be hard to understand why Commodore switched from the rather elegant font of the PET to those blocky characters. Was it just for fancy? Right, it must have been so, since the 1980s loved bold fonts, weren't they?) Surely, these are minor details, but they may built up to an extent, were it becomes hard to understand the worth of abstract code. In some cases, like Spacewar!, the threshold may be lower, in other cases it may be more robust, but I wouldn't dare to bet future history on this. I think, we still may require constant awareness and constant involvement in adapting resources like emulators. ("Who cares, it will probably still run in 20 layers of emulation" may be not enough.) But then, it may be just me with my interest into those kinds of media types. However, for a beginning, we should come up with a format of ROM or media images, which includes the original instructions/documentation in a standard format. This may actually help quite a bit. (Compare the notion of ET on the VCS as the "worst game of all times", which only came to being in the 2000s, quite a while after the fact, and was based mostly on the fact that the game was now played without the instructions that would have been included with every cartridge. As I recall it, the most disappointing game on the system was the rushed Atari Pac-Man.)

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]