4 ms·

CRTs are very different, absolutely. I also observe this sort of thing on the original Game Boy. Spaceship shooters frequently used white space with black stars

CRTs are very different, absolutely. I also observe this sort of thing on the original Game Boy. Spaceship shooters frequently used white space with black stars since the obvious opposite would be an indecipherable mess on the DMG's display. They also use flickering content to add more shades due the low-pass nature of the slow display response. Game developers and artists have always been great at getting the most out of the hardware and I strongly believe that part of preservation has to be preserving the input & output devices.

trzy 5y ago
Are any emulators set up to properly simulate these persistence effects? Seems to me that it would properly involve passing in the last N frames to a shader to allow for time integration. I don’t think that’s how RetroArch works but I could be wrong.
- SirRockALot 5y ago
  I'm not sure if you have access to previous frames in RA shaders, you get a frame index at least, maybe there's some option / way to feed old framebuffers, the docs are a bit lacking. But yes, RetroArch emulation cores, the Analogue FPGA systems and IIRC even replacement IPS screens for GameBoys address this particular issue. I can't really tell you how good of a job they do, I mostly play GB(C) on my unmodded GBC. But I also run GB games on my CRT emulation setup through RA and I definitively played some of the problematic games that use the slow display response for additional shades or fake transparency and I can't say I noticed anything wrong. There are options to control frameblending etc. in the emulator specific options, but I haven't spend any time tweaking them.
- andai 5y ago
  I've gotten really cool results in my graphics experiments by not-quite clearing the screen on each frame, ie. very slightly lowering the opacity of the rectangle with which the screen is cleared. It does however leave a subtle "stain" in places where the color doesn't fade all the way out, perhaps it would work better in combination with subtracting 1 from all RGB values.

trzy 5y ago

Are any emulators set up to properly simulate these persistence effects? Seems to me that it would properly involve passing in the last N frames to a shader to allow for time integration. I don’t think that’s how RetroArch works but I could be wrong.

SirRockALot 5y ago
I'm not sure if you have access to previous frames in RA shaders, you get a frame index at least, maybe there's some option / way to feed old framebuffers, the docs are a bit lacking. But yes, RetroArch emulation cores, the Analogue FPGA systems and IIRC even replacement IPS screens for GameBoys address this particular issue. I can't really tell you how good of a job they do, I mostly play GB(C) on my unmodded GBC. But I also run GB games on my CRT emulation setup through RA and I definitively played some of the problematic games that use the slow display response for additional shades or fake transparency and I can't say I noticed anything wrong. There are options to control frameblending etc. in the emulator specific options, but I haven't spend any time tweaking them.
andai 5y ago
I've gotten really cool results in my graphics experiments by not-quite clearing the screen on each frame, ie. very slightly lowering the opacity of the rectangle with which the screen is cleared. It does however leave a subtle "stain" in places where the color doesn't fade all the way out, perhaps it would work better in combination with subtracting 1 from all RGB values.