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How Games Used to Look: Why Retro Gaming on a CRT Looks Different [video]

171 points by MrJagil 3y ago

Dwedit 3y ago
This video is making so many mistakes. From claiming that LCDs use "a separate light bulb for each pixel" to claiming that retro games "run at 30FPS".
jcrites 3y ago
Are there any emulators that try to account for this? (I did a brief search and came across graphics libraries and discussions about shaders, but didn't find anything easily downloadable...)
- zokier 3y ago
  Oh yes, for example https://docs.libretro.com/shader/crt/ https://docs.libretro.com/shader/crt/ and https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/CRT_shaders https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/CRT_shaders
- undersuit 3y ago
  A bunch, I knew of some of these filters from using SNES9x over a decade ago: https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/NTSC_filters https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/NTSC_filters
  - metaphor 3y ago
    s/a decade/two decades/
    - undersuit 3y ago
      Yeah, it's getting there.
- washadjeffmad 3y ago
  Yes, quite a few! This topic tends to draw in resident experts, but what I can offer is that the complexity you experienced is because CRT shaders are designed around the qualities and features of modern display hardware with the intent to accurately reproduce the effects of a CRT. Your display matters. These aren't generic visual imitations like early Super Eagle or scanline filters. The ones I've been using require a 4K 120HZ OLED for contrast and latency, and to be able to accurately represent how the frames would be rendered over a CRT's pixels. It's pretty wild how good it is.
  - Sakos 3y ago
    Which ones do you use?
    - washadjeffmad 3y ago
      Well, that's the complicated part. For NTSC content, you might use an NTSC shader with a color hack or shadow mask, integer scaling, and either RBG, composite, RF, or S-Video depending on the generation of console or cabinet you're going for. Some people just want to recreate the experience of their childhood TV, others want to model a quirk of a specific tube or board rev. Lots of options! If you haven't, check the libretro forums for "new-sonkun-crt-guest-advanced-presets-thread". I've only tried with RetroArch for management, but it's not limited to that.
- DvdGiessen 3y ago
  One I remember is [0], mostly because of the excellent accompanying blogpost about how it works [1]. [0]: https://piratehearts.itch.io/supercrt https://piratehearts.itch.io/supercrt [1]: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/crt-simulation-in-super-win-the-game https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/crt-simulation-in-...
zokier 3y ago
Of course this is well-known in retrogaming/emulation community, which is why there is a wealth of really good CRT shaders out there
- ekianjo 3y ago
  Crt shaders cant really replicate what CRTs actually look like.
  - bni 3y ago
    With HDR and OLED I think its very close
  - musha68k 3y ago
    They fundamentally don’t but a high quality / high refresh OLED display can come very close and if implementation done right IMHO can even surpass experience in some cases. I still play old games on my old beloved tubes but to be frank often just for purity / nostalgic reasons and because I like the original 4:3 format without (“perfect black” even) overhead on the sides. I hope Apple will finally Switch to OLED for their iPads as the aftermarket / replace displays for those usually are well affordable and usable for e.g. a wall mounted “cabinet”.
  - PostOnce 3y ago
    Why not, specifically?
  - giantrobot 3y ago
    They most certainly can but the requirements are steep. Being able to run at 4K/120Hz is where you start to get very accurate simulation of a CRT. You need a high resolution to draw the phosphors, mask, and bloom. You need the high refresh rate to be able to have realistic phosphor draw and decay.
  - Tade0 3y ago
    To me this is sounds like the tube vs solid state amplifier in guitars debate again. I think the question should really be: can they do a good enough job? My take is that with the right display they can. CRTs didn't have an impossible refresh rate, colour gamut, contrast or resolution - arguably they kind of suck in each of these areas compared to modern displays. I mean, we didn't see screens show deep teals until OLED arrived.
loveparade 3y ago
Very cool! But what's even more interesting to me is the effect of our brain filling in the missing details that are now explicitly rendered in modern games. I think I felt more immersed in retro games because my brain knew that it's supposed to fill in all these details. With modern games it's close to realistic, but not quite, and my brain doesn't even try to fill in what's missing. It's also more difficult to concentrate on the gameplay when all details are rendered on screen. I'm also constantly surprised how little graphics matter for an enjoyable experience. A game with amazing graphics blows my mind for 15 minutes. But then I'm used it and I stop caring about visuals altogether, unless they get in my way.
- somedude895 3y ago
  > It's also more difficult to concentrate on the gameplay when all details are rendered on screen. I‘ve noticed that as well. I much prefer say Tomb Raider 2 with its clear edges and flat surfaces to the modern ones with all the foliage and clutter and lighting effects. But I put that down to getting old.
  - semi 3y ago
    this is why I never could get into counterstrike after 1.6 it's not just the visual noise, it's also the inconsistent behavior introduced by those details. Yes everything being flat boxes was boring looking but I knew exactly what would happen when I tried to shoot through it or bounce a grenade off of it. Now it's not obvious if that stack of sandbags is actually a single surface and my grenade will bounce off of a gap or if it will go through it. Or if that random bucket I'm shooting at is synced on the server and real or is a local prop.
- xnorswap 3y ago
  Yes, this effect is fascinating. I've been playing de_dust2 for 20 years. And in my mind the quality has always felt essentially the same, through CS, CS:Source, CS:GO and now CS2. Each was a significant rendering upgrade. And I know I could never go back an iteration, but going forward as it has, the game in my mind's eye is just how CS looks and how it's always looked. I'm the opposite about "retro" gaming though. Having experienced better fidelity and more readable fonts and better sound, I struggle to play games which don't have that, or worse, deliberately choose bad font rendering as a "retro" effect. It's why one of my favourite games is Factorio, because it's almost the opposite of retro. Despite being sprite based, it's the cutting edge of modern sprite rendering. The sprites are generated from 3d renders, and you don't find yourself suddenly in 640x480 or crappy fonts out of some nod to the ages.
PostOnce 3y ago
High-DPI OLEDs and CRT shaders are the answer for preservation, I think. Shaders can cover a hell of a lot of the nuance. Phosphor persistence (fade-out time?), light bleeding over into the next uh... thingie. We have the technology :) the shaders may not be perfect yet, but it makes me happy that we have the option.
- zozbot234 3y ago
  High-DPI OLED can do even better than the analog effect of CRT's. The latter is basically like a Gaussian blur (which is the best you can do in the purely analog domain!) but a high-DPI screen can use Lanczos upscaling for a much sharper effect, somewhat reminiscent of the look of oil or water-color paintings. There are also pixel-art specific upscaling algorithms that preserve the limited color palette of old retrogames while still smoothing out lines and curves.
  - PostOnce 3y ago
    I lose it when I go to an arcade and they have some bootleg emulator running with one of those hideous blurry upscaling filters turned on. It's like George Lucas and his Original Vision problem... it's not good to mess with existing art people already love
  - thfuran 3y ago
    >water-color paintings That's not really a medium known for its sharp edges and fine details.
    - zozbot234 3y ago
      Yes, the point is that given any level of detail the water-color picture is a lot sharper than the Gaussian-blur equivalent, which is like putting a pane of frosted glass over the picture.
    - ralferoo 3y ago
      Maybe not, but if you were to compare a low-resolution scan and a high-resolution scan of the painting, you'd easily see the difference.
tomxor 3y ago
Shameless plug, animation trying to illustrate a Trinitron aperture grille scanline effect in 140 js chars: https://www.dwitter.net/d/12335 https://www.dwitter.net/d/12335 Although like the author I feel like the Trinitrons don't look so good. Although this is entirely subjective, I'm pretty sure I grew up on playing games on a "crappy" old shadow mask TV where the colours seem to bleed together better because of the subpixel arrangement that I think makes it blend on the Y axis as well as the X axis. [edit] Hah, found my old TV/monitor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7S_WLrvHW8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7S_WLrvHW8 Can't figure out if it's a shadow mask or not though.
- keyle 3y ago
  That's cool!
jl6 3y ago
You know how food tastes better when you’re hungry? That’s the element of nostalgia that is still unaccounted for in the emulation/preservation scene. Most of us who grew up playing games were hungry for it - our parents allowed us a fairly limited supply of games, on their budget and schedule, and they probably put limits on when and how long we could play them for, right? Maybe we had to travel to a friend’s house because they were the only one in the neighborhood with a particular game or console. Furthermore, entertainment options in general were limited, and the games offered a genuine novelty that you couldn’t get anywhere else - even the crappy ones. Thus we savored every opportunity to play, and the satisfaction of that hunger is what our nostalgic memories are built on. Contrast to today, where you can download NES.zip and possess literally every game on that platform, almost instantly. As an adult, you can play as much as you like. But you probably don’t even want to play that much because you’ve also got a universe of streaming TV and movies and media and a back catalog of AAA-games a mile long and VR and gadgets and social media and a million other entertainment options, distractions and responsibilities. We’re not hungry at all - we’re obese from media and stuffed to the gills with it.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  My son got an N64 because he likes F-Zero and was looking for a CRT to go with it, I spoke to the director of our reuse center who said they send them to the hazardous waste landfill all the time but they’d hold one out for us and in a few weeks we got a cute little TV with a built-in VCR. I was hoping to get a home theatre from the late analog era but we didn’t see one so I got him a 2-channel receiver from NAD that looked like the gear I would have lusted over in the 1980s.
- DWe1 3y ago
  I have noticed this and built a system of scarcity in my consumption. I have a "random walk" of movies where I randomly go from one movie to the next based on director, writer, cast, prizes etc. I make sure the walk is not a slog and there is enough good movies that I encounter. That way it's really fun to "hit" a very good movie. It's almost like gambling but then with media consumption. I do that with restaurants/activities too (to a certain extent that I control) with all kinds of subsystems in it that I designed to be fun for myself. For video games my system is not random, but I will go 20 years in the past and play the major releases of that year. So I'm playing Beyond Good & Evil soon and already look forward to Half Life 2 next year. Makes me hyped but without fail because I know the actual release was a hit.
rwmj 3y ago
This channel has a bunch of videos about how CRTs handle retro video games: https://www.youtube.com/@mylifeingaming https://www.youtube.com/@mylifeingaming Unfortunately youtube seems to have broken the ability to search only within a channel, so I can't find the exact one I'm thinking about. Edit: This one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAi8AVj9GV8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAi8AVj9GV8
Yeul 3y ago
Videogames as a medium are entirely reliant on technology. There are many games which were let down by the shitty state of it. Yes I can play them as teenagers used to back in the day: cheap tiny Panasonic CRT and terrible English voice acting. I'm sure for some people that gives them a warm fuzzy nostalgic feeling. But there's a reason why remakes and remasters are popular.
tvst 3y ago
Great video, except for a few wrong details that really get to me... - The pixels in an LCD aren't little light bulbs. They are little lamp shades. (The pixels in an OLED display are little light bulbs though) - A CRT doesn't shoot light. It shoots electrons. - The video makes it seem like pixels in an LCD update all at once. Not true! They're scanned. - The video makes it seems that there's no temporal bleeding on CRTs. This sounds unlikely to me... - The main difference in image quality between coaxial and composite inputs is not that coaxial needs to stuff audio and video together. It's that in coaxial the signal is shifted to a carrier frequency as if it came from an antenna (usually channel 3 or 4) so the decoder needs to bring it down to the frequency it uses internally (called the intermediate frequency) before sending it to the screen. This degrades the signal.
- michaelteter 3y ago
  "tiny little light bulbs" - cracked me up.
  - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
    He was exactly right for OLED and Plasma though.
- blackguardx 3y ago
  I think the phosphors of CRTs usually had a very low persistence in that the decay time was less than a frame time. If you look at out of sync videos of CRT displays, it looks as if only perhaps 1/8 of the screen is illuminated at one time.
- turnsout 3y ago
  CRTs absolutely DO "ghost." Much like turning off a filament light bulb, the phosphors respond instantly, but there's a long tail where they fade out. In practice, it's not perceptible, just as it's not perceptible in any good LCD or OLED. There were also a few wrong numbers in this video, such as the idea of a normal CRT refreshing 75 times a second (nope). And I was expecting some discussion of interlacing, which had a big impact on how pixels and animations appeared on CRTs. But I agree—it was fun to watch!
winstonrc 3y ago
I wrote a brief article discussing my thoughts on playing 240p games on a CRT compared to a modern display[0]. It’s hard to perfectly convey, but the picture really does look exceptional and so much better than on a modern display and is something worth seeing in person. The MiSTer FPGA does an excellent job with filters to recreate that experience but isn’t 100% there yet. The Analogue Pocket also does a great job recreating the look of GB, GBC, and GBA games. I’m very impressed by the people that have developed these filters and am optimistic about their implementation in the future. I’m not always going to have a CRT, so filters are the next best thing to capturing the original look. [0] https://www.winstoncooke.com/blog/2023-08-26-appreciating-240p https://www.winstoncooke.com/blog/2023-08-26-appreciating-24...
- paldepind2 3y ago
  Thanks for sharing. Those photos of Samus give a very good impression of the difference. The CRT one is clearly better.
  - winstonrc 3y ago
    It looks so much better in person too! I had a difficult time accurately capturing the CRT screen with an iPhone. Perhaps I could borrow a DSLR with a tripod to take a better photo one of these days.
- pipes 3y ago
  Retro arch does a good with filters too, especially the mega bezel ones. Though I mostly use my mister these days. Both on the same Samsung quantum dot oled. Street fighter 2 looks amazing on both.
- eternityforest 3y ago
  Is anyone making physical lenses to go over an LCD? Old CRTs were convex instead of flat, which is almost more noteworthy than the look of the actual pixels, especially in up close in an arcade machine.
  - 3y ago
parski 3y ago
The most crucial difference (in my opinion) between sample-and-hold displays and a CRT is the motion resolution. Motion just looks so much better on a CRT. Lately this has been remedied with features like black frame insertion, high refresh rates and technologies like ULMB 2. Also, using HDR on capable displays we can replicate the glow of the phosphor with much greater accuracy. I can't wait to get my hands on the RetroTink 4K and play around with BFI and HDR along with the filters after the perfect upscale to 2160p.
hx8 3y ago
I play a lot of retro games in the 16bit and 32bit era. I usually play 120hrs/month or more most of which is on original hardware and not emulators. I do not use CRTs because I've had bad luck maintaining the hardware. It's hard to find good equipment, it's expensive to ship if you find something, and it's hard to get it serviced. I often wonder if there is room for a single CRT manufacturer in the marketplace. I would switch to CRT if I could buy new, have a warranty, and be reasonably assured I can find a replacement easily if it fails.
- nightowl_games 3y ago
  What games are you playing?
- skyyler 3y ago
  I wonder how many people would contribute to a crowdfund for this...
  - musha68k 3y ago
    I wonder how many engineers are left from that era that could even help with setting up a manufacturing site. Probably not many. I for sure would pay a lot of money for a new hires 16:9 tube solely for modern games. The market would be small though I fear. Lots of people now prefer 60”+ OLED screens for gaming, which to be honest are indeed amazing at this point.
dbttdft 3y ago
After researching this I believe the main je ne sais quoi of old console games on CRT in order of importance is vsync, lack of motion blur due to CRT, low black level (and thus high contrast that LCD cannot begin to compare to), and then phosphor layout. >LCD is comprised of tiny light bulbs: LEDs No, it's comprised of liquid crystal (LC) units, each of which effectively control how much of the backlight (which may be LCD or CCFL) passes through itself and thus how bright that pixel is. Although I can see why you would think this with the introduction of "LED Monitors" around 2010, which is totally not intentional misrepresentation from the marketers. >This is way slower than a CRT LEDs are fast but LCs are indeed slow. >Even if you could turn it on and off really fast there's a little bit of a fade that's what they call grey to grey Smearing is not noticable in LCDs made after the early 2000s. There is still motion blue but that's due to no black frame insertion. >Some pixels in the LCD if they are a similar color will not even change This is not a known thing, it's made up. That would require storing a frame and anaylzing it against the previous frame although I wouldn't put that above them (and they do this for other reasons once in a while). This sounds like a corruption of spatial/temporal dithering which actually is a thing in most or at least half of LCDs. >It doesn't draw the entire thing at once like on an LCD LCDs don't draw all at once, they scan out just like CRTs (some draw all at once but it's pointless and adds (some) input lag). >The camera is 30 fps and the tv is 30 fps and somehow you see the band go across the screen It's because the camera has to be synchronized with the TV and have the exposure set up a certain way otherwise it will capture the screen, e.g., half way through the scanout of a frame. Although I'm not sure you can find any CRT or LCD that can go down to 30Hz.
yieldcrv 3y ago
What are the efforts to emulate TV CRTs from the early 90s? I want a uniform way to include them in my art Whether its a CSS transformation or filter for a website Or an action in photoshop Or a webgpu thing Or a standalone emulator
TacticalCoder 3y ago
Emulation for preservation is a bit weird but why not. Now... CRTs are still built and sold today and you can also buy brand new CRT controller boards from China. Not "new old stock" but brand new stuff, still built today. For anyone who has the room for it, just go buy an actual arcade cab with a CRT in it. Then put a Raspberry Pi with a "Pi2JAMMA" (not affiliated with these guys, but I like it) connector in it. You'll have thousands of games and it's basically the real thing (short of very specific cases like the game Tempest that was directly controlling the electron beam). I'm a happy camper with one vintage arcade cab, which I own since years. A friend of mine saw it and went berzerk: he now has six arcade cabs. If I wanted to be facetious I'd say it's arguably less work to buy a vintage arcade cab with an actual CRT and put a RPi + Pi2JAMMA adapter in it then try to get a shader working on a modern screen. If you want the real arcade feeling you need proper arcade joysticks anyway: at that point we're probably already talking about a cab (you could have just the joysticks controller, but it's not as good as the joystick in an arcade cab). So if you've got a cab, you may as well go with a real one (with a CRT that is) and an adapter that'll drive the CRT (like the Pi2JAMMA one). As a bonus you'll also be able to put real vintage PCBs in your cab.
- eropple 3y ago
  > CRTs are still built and sold today and you can also buy brand new CRT controller boards from China. Not "new old stock" but brand new stuff, still built today. Have any recommendations? Buying a PVM is a bit outside my price range.
  - aastronaut 3y ago
    There was one in an article on hackaday[0], also featured here[1]. [0]: https://hackaday.com/2023/08/16/new-motherboard-improves-old-crt-television/ https://hackaday.com/2023/08/16/new-motherboard-improves-old... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37174147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37174147
    - fomine3 3y ago
      Is there a new CRT itself?
Jeema101 3y ago
I was at a retro barcade not too long ago and came across an old Centipede machine. Maybe this machine just had a really good CRT in it, but the level of intense brightness against the pitch black background was honestly sort of mesmerizing. I had forgotten just how good CRTs were in that regard. (A little bit off-topic from what the guy in the video is discussing, but I thought it's worth mentioning since it could be another reason why people have such fond memories of CRT gaming.)
honkycat 3y ago
IMO the main thing is the bleed between "pixels" in retro games. I recently bought a "Metal Slug" art book, and was AGHAST that all of the assets in the art-book were obvious screen caps from an emulator. The assets looked like shit, and I considered the book lazy and crappy because of this. The game assets were designed on CRT screens with the bleed as part of the aesthetic. It is amazing to see the difference between assets on a CRT screen vs an LCD screen with no shaders. Do some basic googling if you are interested, it is crazy how much better a low-poly model, or illustration looks. Especially on stuff like the classic King of Fighter and Street Fighter games.
rikthevik 3y ago
I've been following @MrmoTarius on twitter for a while and I'm just loving their work. This CRT filter is just wonderful. https://mrmotarius.itch.io/mrmocrt https://mrmotarius.itch.io/mrmocrt (The scuffed paper and cross-stitch filters are very good too.)
ddingus 3y ago
CRT displays are still being made. These are small for specialized uses. They are still being refurbished too. To me, a good plasma display offers a lot of what people like about the CRT. Phosphorus glowing in tubes are fast and high contrast. And maybe the micro-LED displays will be similar. Pixels lighting up, are still nicer than trying to block always on bright light. Those things said, people like the CRT. One mounted in a cabinet, for example, will deliver a really compelling experience! About the only thing I can see competing is a laser projection of some kind. Really high refresh, interlaced CRT rasters have a look too. So does higher refresh rate, progressive scanned motion. Maybe this ends up like vinyl. We have not lost the tech yet. Maybe there will be a return like we have seen for vinyl. And here is an idea for someone: Make the shadow mask on glass and enclose it in a vacuum, but not big like we need for an electron gun. Just big enough to enclose the phosphor. Then, from the rear, excite the phosphor with lasers. Or even a few groups of them to get a full, high speed raster made up of multiple smaller ones all running in parallel. Think 4 rectangular displays stacked together with their longer edges touching. Doing that keeps the deflection angle down. And the lasers can be enclosed. But it won't be necessary to pull a high vacuum for the whole thing. Just the thin, front, phosphor portion. And that could be replaced when it gets tired, and or when burned in, or scratched up. Registration becomes a software problem. Good displays have .01x inch phosphor dot pitches. Violet light is orders better at 0.000015 inches. Light just outside visible would work great. The phosphor glass assembly could be recycled or refurbished and relaxed vacuum requirements means avoiding toxic glass. I bet a display like that would deliver the CRT experience and then some. Someone go make the thing. I want one. Or, maybe I hit the lottery! Then I will make my own.

171 points by MrJagil 3y ago

This video is making so many mistakes. From claiming that LCDs use "a separate light bulb for each pixel" to claiming that retro games "run at 30FPS".

jcrites 3y ago

Are there any emulators that try to account for this? (I did a brief search and came across graphics libraries and discussions about shaders, but didn't find anything easily downloadable...)

zokier 3y ago
Oh yes, for example https://docs.libretro.com/shader/crt/ https://docs.libretro.com/shader/crt/ and https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/CRT_shaders https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/CRT_shaders
undersuit 3y ago
A bunch, I knew of some of these filters from using SNES9x over a decade ago: https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/NTSC_filters https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/NTSC_filters
- metaphor 3y ago
  s/a decade/two decades/
  - undersuit 3y ago
    Yeah, it's getting there.
washadjeffmad 3y ago
Yes, quite a few! This topic tends to draw in resident experts, but what I can offer is that the complexity you experienced is because CRT shaders are designed around the qualities and features of modern display hardware with the intent to accurately reproduce the effects of a CRT. Your display matters. These aren't generic visual imitations like early Super Eagle or scanline filters. The ones I've been using require a 4K 120HZ OLED for contrast and latency, and to be able to accurately represent how the frames would be rendered over a CRT's pixels. It's pretty wild how good it is.
- Sakos 3y ago
  Which ones do you use?
  - washadjeffmad 3y ago
    Well, that's the complicated part. For NTSC content, you might use an NTSC shader with a color hack or shadow mask, integer scaling, and either RBG, composite, RF, or S-Video depending on the generation of console or cabinet you're going for. Some people just want to recreate the experience of their childhood TV, others want to model a quirk of a specific tube or board rev. Lots of options! If you haven't, check the libretro forums for "new-sonkun-crt-guest-advanced-presets-thread". I've only tried with RetroArch for management, but it's not limited to that.
DvdGiessen 3y ago
One I remember is [0], mostly because of the excellent accompanying blogpost about how it works [1]. [0]: https://piratehearts.itch.io/supercrt https://piratehearts.itch.io/supercrt [1]: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/crt-simulation-in-super-win-the-game https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/crt-simulation-in-...

zokier 3y ago

Of course this is well-known in retrogaming/emulation community, which is why there is a wealth of really good CRT shaders out there

ekianjo 3y ago
Crt shaders cant really replicate what CRTs actually look like.
- bni 3y ago
  With HDR and OLED I think its very close
- musha68k 3y ago
  They fundamentally don’t but a high quality / high refresh OLED display can come very close and if implementation done right IMHO can even surpass experience in some cases. I still play old games on my old beloved tubes but to be frank often just for purity / nostalgic reasons and because I like the original 4:3 format without (“perfect black” even) overhead on the sides. I hope Apple will finally Switch to OLED for their iPads as the aftermarket / replace displays for those usually are well affordable and usable for e.g. a wall mounted “cabinet”.
- PostOnce 3y ago
  Why not, specifically?
- giantrobot 3y ago
  They most certainly can but the requirements are steep. Being able to run at 4K/120Hz is where you start to get very accurate simulation of a CRT. You need a high resolution to draw the phosphors, mask, and bloom. You need the high refresh rate to be able to have realistic phosphor draw and decay.
- Tade0 3y ago
  To me this is sounds like the tube vs solid state amplifier in guitars debate again. I think the question should really be: can they do a good enough job? My take is that with the right display they can. CRTs didn't have an impossible refresh rate, colour gamut, contrast or resolution - arguably they kind of suck in each of these areas compared to modern displays. I mean, we didn't see screens show deep teals until OLED arrived.

loveparade 3y ago

Very cool! But what's even more interesting to me is the effect of our brain filling in the missing details that are now explicitly rendered in modern games. I think I felt more immersed in retro games because my brain knew that it's supposed to fill in all these details. With modern games it's close to realistic, but not quite, and my brain doesn't even try to fill in what's missing. It's also more difficult to concentrate on the gameplay when all details are rendered on screen. I'm also constantly surprised how little graphics matter for an enjoyable experience. A game with amazing graphics blows my mind for 15 minutes. But then I'm used it and I stop caring about visuals altogether, unless they get in my way.

somedude895 3y ago
> It's also more difficult to concentrate on the gameplay when all details are rendered on screen. I‘ve noticed that as well. I much prefer say Tomb Raider 2 with its clear edges and flat surfaces to the modern ones with all the foliage and clutter and lighting effects. But I put that down to getting old.
- semi 3y ago
  this is why I never could get into counterstrike after 1.6 it's not just the visual noise, it's also the inconsistent behavior introduced by those details. Yes everything being flat boxes was boring looking but I knew exactly what would happen when I tried to shoot through it or bounce a grenade off of it. Now it's not obvious if that stack of sandbags is actually a single surface and my grenade will bounce off of a gap or if it will go through it. Or if that random bucket I'm shooting at is synced on the server and real or is a local prop.
xnorswap 3y ago
Yes, this effect is fascinating. I've been playing de_dust2 for 20 years. And in my mind the quality has always felt essentially the same, through CS, CS:Source, CS:GO and now CS2. Each was a significant rendering upgrade. And I know I could never go back an iteration, but going forward as it has, the game in my mind's eye is just how CS looks and how it's always looked. I'm the opposite about "retro" gaming though. Having experienced better fidelity and more readable fonts and better sound, I struggle to play games which don't have that, or worse, deliberately choose bad font rendering as a "retro" effect. It's why one of my favourite games is Factorio, because it's almost the opposite of retro. Despite being sprite based, it's the cutting edge of modern sprite rendering. The sprites are generated from 3d renders, and you don't find yourself suddenly in 640x480 or crappy fonts out of some nod to the ages.

PostOnce 3y ago

High-DPI OLEDs and CRT shaders are the answer for preservation, I think. Shaders can cover a hell of a lot of the nuance. Phosphor persistence (fade-out time?), light bleeding over into the next uh... thingie. We have the technology :) the shaders may not be perfect yet, but it makes me happy that we have the option.

zozbot234 3y ago
High-DPI OLED can do even better than the analog effect of CRT's. The latter is basically like a Gaussian blur (which is the best you can do in the purely analog domain!) but a high-DPI screen can use Lanczos upscaling for a much sharper effect, somewhat reminiscent of the look of oil or water-color paintings. There are also pixel-art specific upscaling algorithms that preserve the limited color palette of old retrogames while still smoothing out lines and curves.
- PostOnce 3y ago
  I lose it when I go to an arcade and they have some bootleg emulator running with one of those hideous blurry upscaling filters turned on. It's like George Lucas and his Original Vision problem... it's not good to mess with existing art people already love
- thfuran 3y ago
  >water-color paintings That's not really a medium known for its sharp edges and fine details.
  - zozbot234 3y ago
    Yes, the point is that given any level of detail the water-color picture is a lot sharper than the Gaussian-blur equivalent, which is like putting a pane of frosted glass over the picture.
  - ralferoo 3y ago
    Maybe not, but if you were to compare a low-resolution scan and a high-resolution scan of the painting, you'd easily see the difference.

tomxor 3y ago

Shameless plug, animation trying to illustrate a Trinitron aperture grille scanline effect in 140 js chars: https://www.dwitter.net/d/12335 https://www.dwitter.net/d/12335 Although like the author I feel like the Trinitrons don't look so good. Although this is entirely subjective, I'm pretty sure I grew up on playing games on a "crappy" old shadow mask TV where the colours seem to bleed together better because of the subpixel arrangement that I think makes it blend on the Y axis as well as the X axis. [edit] Hah, found my old TV/monitor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7S_WLrvHW8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7S_WLrvHW8 Can't figure out if it's a shadow mask or not though.

keyle 3y ago
That's cool!

jl6 3y ago

You know how food tastes better when you’re hungry? That’s the element of nostalgia that is still unaccounted for in the emulation/preservation scene. Most of us who grew up playing games were hungry for it - our parents allowed us a fairly limited supply of games, on their budget and schedule, and they probably put limits on when and how long we could play them for, right? Maybe we had to travel to a friend’s house because they were the only one in the neighborhood with a particular game or console. Furthermore, entertainment options in general were limited, and the games offered a genuine novelty that you couldn’t get anywhere else - even the crappy ones. Thus we savored every opportunity to play, and the satisfaction of that hunger is what our nostalgic memories are built on. Contrast to today, where you can download NES.zip and possess literally every game on that platform, almost instantly. As an adult, you can play as much as you like. But you probably don’t even want to play that much because you’ve also got a universe of streaming TV and movies and media and a back catalog of AAA-games a mile long and VR and gadgets and social media and a million other entertainment options, distractions and responsibilities. We’re not hungry at all - we’re obese from media and stuffed to the gills with it.

PaulHoule 3y ago
My son got an N64 because he likes F-Zero and was looking for a CRT to go with it, I spoke to the director of our reuse center who said they send them to the hazardous waste landfill all the time but they’d hold one out for us and in a few weeks we got a cute little TV with a built-in VCR. I was hoping to get a home theatre from the late analog era but we didn’t see one so I got him a 2-channel receiver from NAD that looked like the gear I would have lusted over in the 1980s.
DWe1 3y ago
I have noticed this and built a system of scarcity in my consumption. I have a "random walk" of movies where I randomly go from one movie to the next based on director, writer, cast, prizes etc. I make sure the walk is not a slog and there is enough good movies that I encounter. That way it's really fun to "hit" a very good movie. It's almost like gambling but then with media consumption. I do that with restaurants/activities too (to a certain extent that I control) with all kinds of subsystems in it that I designed to be fun for myself. For video games my system is not random, but I will go 20 years in the past and play the major releases of that year. So I'm playing Beyond Good & Evil soon and already look forward to Half Life 2 next year. Makes me hyped but without fail because I know the actual release was a hit.

rwmj 3y ago

This channel has a bunch of videos about how CRTs handle retro video games: https://www.youtube.com/@mylifeingaming https://www.youtube.com/@mylifeingaming Unfortunately youtube seems to have broken the ability to search only within a channel, so I can't find the exact one I'm thinking about. Edit: This one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAi8AVj9GV8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAi8AVj9GV8

Yeul 3y ago

Videogames as a medium are entirely reliant on technology. There are many games which were let down by the shitty state of it. Yes I can play them as teenagers used to back in the day: cheap tiny Panasonic CRT and terrible English voice acting. I'm sure for some people that gives them a warm fuzzy nostalgic feeling. But there's a reason why remakes and remasters are popular.

tvst 3y ago

Great video, except for a few wrong details that really get to me... - The pixels in an LCD aren't little light bulbs. They are little lamp shades. (The pixels in an OLED display are little light bulbs though) - A CRT doesn't shoot light. It shoots electrons. - The video makes it seem like pixels in an LCD update all at once. Not true! They're scanned. - The video makes it seems that there's no temporal bleeding on CRTs. This sounds unlikely to me... - The main difference in image quality between coaxial and composite inputs is not that coaxial needs to stuff audio and video together. It's that in coaxial the signal is shifted to a carrier frequency as if it came from an antenna (usually channel 3 or 4) so the decoder needs to bring it down to the frequency it uses internally (called the intermediate frequency) before sending it to the screen. This degrades the signal.

michaelteter 3y ago
"tiny little light bulbs" - cracked me up.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  He was exactly right for OLED and Plasma though.
blackguardx 3y ago
I think the phosphors of CRTs usually had a very low persistence in that the decay time was less than a frame time. If you look at out of sync videos of CRT displays, it looks as if only perhaps 1/8 of the screen is illuminated at one time.
turnsout 3y ago
CRTs absolutely DO "ghost." Much like turning off a filament light bulb, the phosphors respond instantly, but there's a long tail where they fade out. In practice, it's not perceptible, just as it's not perceptible in any good LCD or OLED. There were also a few wrong numbers in this video, such as the idea of a normal CRT refreshing 75 times a second (nope). And I was expecting some discussion of interlacing, which had a big impact on how pixels and animations appeared on CRTs. But I agree—it was fun to watch!

winstonrc 3y ago

I wrote a brief article discussing my thoughts on playing 240p games on a CRT compared to a modern display[0]. It’s hard to perfectly convey, but the picture really does look exceptional and so much better than on a modern display and is something worth seeing in person. The MiSTer FPGA does an excellent job with filters to recreate that experience but isn’t 100% there yet. The Analogue Pocket also does a great job recreating the look of GB, GBC, and GBA games. I’m very impressed by the people that have developed these filters and am optimistic about their implementation in the future. I’m not always going to have a CRT, so filters are the next best thing to capturing the original look. [0] https://www.winstoncooke.com/blog/2023-08-26-appreciating-240p https://www.winstoncooke.com/blog/2023-08-26-appreciating-24...

paldepind2 3y ago
Thanks for sharing. Those photos of Samus give a very good impression of the difference. The CRT one is clearly better.
- winstonrc 3y ago
  It looks so much better in person too! I had a difficult time accurately capturing the CRT screen with an iPhone. Perhaps I could borrow a DSLR with a tripod to take a better photo one of these days.
pipes 3y ago
Retro arch does a good with filters too, especially the mega bezel ones. Though I mostly use my mister these days. Both on the same Samsung quantum dot oled. Street fighter 2 looks amazing on both.
eternityforest 3y ago
Is anyone making physical lenses to go over an LCD? Old CRTs were convex instead of flat, which is almost more noteworthy than the look of the actual pixels, especially in up close in an arcade machine.
- 3y ago

parski 3y ago

The most crucial difference (in my opinion) between sample-and-hold displays and a CRT is the motion resolution. Motion just looks so much better on a CRT. Lately this has been remedied with features like black frame insertion, high refresh rates and technologies like ULMB 2. Also, using HDR on capable displays we can replicate the glow of the phosphor with much greater accuracy. I can't wait to get my hands on the RetroTink 4K and play around with BFI and HDR along with the filters after the perfect upscale to 2160p.

hx8 3y ago

I play a lot of retro games in the 16bit and 32bit era. I usually play 120hrs/month or more most of which is on original hardware and not emulators. I do not use CRTs because I've had bad luck maintaining the hardware. It's hard to find good equipment, it's expensive to ship if you find something, and it's hard to get it serviced. I often wonder if there is room for a single CRT manufacturer in the marketplace. I would switch to CRT if I could buy new, have a warranty, and be reasonably assured I can find a replacement easily if it fails.

nightowl_games 3y ago
What games are you playing?
skyyler 3y ago
I wonder how many people would contribute to a crowdfund for this...
- musha68k 3y ago
  I wonder how many engineers are left from that era that could even help with setting up a manufacturing site. Probably not many. I for sure would pay a lot of money for a new hires 16:9 tube solely for modern games. The market would be small though I fear. Lots of people now prefer 60”+ OLED screens for gaming, which to be honest are indeed amazing at this point.

dbttdft 3y ago

After researching this I believe the main je ne sais quoi of old console games on CRT in order of importance is vsync, lack of motion blur due to CRT, low black level (and thus high contrast that LCD cannot begin to compare to), and then phosphor layout. >LCD is comprised of tiny light bulbs: LEDs No, it's comprised of liquid crystal (LC) units, each of which effectively control how much of the backlight (which may be LCD or CCFL) passes through itself and thus how bright that pixel is. Although I can see why you would think this with the introduction of "LED Monitors" around 2010, which is totally not intentional misrepresentation from the marketers. >This is way slower than a CRT LEDs are fast but LCs are indeed slow. >Even if you could turn it on and off really fast there's a little bit of a fade that's what they call grey to grey Smearing is not noticable in LCDs made after the early 2000s. There is still motion blue but that's due to no black frame insertion. >Some pixels in the LCD if they are a similar color will not even change This is not a known thing, it's made up. That would require storing a frame and anaylzing it against the previous frame although I wouldn't put that above them (and they do this for other reasons once in a while). This sounds like a corruption of spatial/temporal dithering which actually is a thing in most or at least half of LCDs. >It doesn't draw the entire thing at once like on an LCD LCDs don't draw all at once, they scan out just like CRTs (some draw all at once but it's pointless and adds (some) input lag). >The camera is 30 fps and the tv is 30 fps and somehow you see the band go across the screen It's because the camera has to be synchronized with the TV and have the exposure set up a certain way otherwise it will capture the screen, e.g., half way through the scanout of a frame. Although I'm not sure you can find any CRT or LCD that can go down to 30Hz.

yieldcrv 3y ago

What are the efforts to emulate TV CRTs from the early 90s? I want a uniform way to include them in my art Whether its a CSS transformation or filter for a website Or an action in photoshop Or a webgpu thing Or a standalone emulator

TacticalCoder 3y ago

Emulation for preservation is a bit weird but why not. Now... CRTs are still built and sold today and you can also buy brand new CRT controller boards from China. Not "new old stock" but brand new stuff, still built today. For anyone who has the room for it, just go buy an actual arcade cab with a CRT in it. Then put a Raspberry Pi with a "Pi2JAMMA" (not affiliated with these guys, but I like it) connector in it. You'll have thousands of games and it's basically the real thing (short of very specific cases like the game Tempest that was directly controlling the electron beam). I'm a happy camper with one vintage arcade cab, which I own since years. A friend of mine saw it and went berzerk: he now has six arcade cabs. If I wanted to be facetious I'd say it's arguably less work to buy a vintage arcade cab with an actual CRT and put a RPi + Pi2JAMMA adapter in it then try to get a shader working on a modern screen. If you want the real arcade feeling you need proper arcade joysticks anyway: at that point we're probably already talking about a cab (you could have just the joysticks controller, but it's not as good as the joystick in an arcade cab). So if you've got a cab, you may as well go with a real one (with a CRT that is) and an adapter that'll drive the CRT (like the Pi2JAMMA one). As a bonus you'll also be able to put real vintage PCBs in your cab.

eropple 3y ago
> CRTs are still built and sold today and you can also buy brand new CRT controller boards from China. Not "new old stock" but brand new stuff, still built today. Have any recommendations? Buying a PVM is a bit outside my price range.
- aastronaut 3y ago
  There was one in an article on hackaday[0], also featured here[1]. [0]: https://hackaday.com/2023/08/16/new-motherboard-improves-old-crt-television/ https://hackaday.com/2023/08/16/new-motherboard-improves-old... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37174147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37174147
  - fomine3 3y ago
    Is there a new CRT itself?

Jeema101 3y ago

I was at a retro barcade not too long ago and came across an old Centipede machine. Maybe this machine just had a really good CRT in it, but the level of intense brightness against the pitch black background was honestly sort of mesmerizing. I had forgotten just how good CRTs were in that regard. (A little bit off-topic from what the guy in the video is discussing, but I thought it's worth mentioning since it could be another reason why people have such fond memories of CRT gaming.)

honkycat 3y ago

IMO the main thing is the bleed between "pixels" in retro games. I recently bought a "Metal Slug" art book, and was AGHAST that all of the assets in the art-book were obvious screen caps from an emulator. The assets looked like shit, and I considered the book lazy and crappy because of this. The game assets were designed on CRT screens with the bleed as part of the aesthetic. It is amazing to see the difference between assets on a CRT screen vs an LCD screen with no shaders. Do some basic googling if you are interested, it is crazy how much better a low-poly model, or illustration looks. Especially on stuff like the classic King of Fighter and Street Fighter games.

rikthevik 3y ago

I've been following @MrmoTarius on twitter for a while and I'm just loving their work. This CRT filter is just wonderful. https://mrmotarius.itch.io/mrmocrt https://mrmotarius.itch.io/mrmocrt (The scuffed paper and cross-stitch filters are very good too.)

ddingus 3y ago

CRT displays are still being made. These are small for specialized uses. They are still being refurbished too. To me, a good plasma display offers a lot of what people like about the CRT. Phosphorus glowing in tubes are fast and high contrast. And maybe the micro-LED displays will be similar. Pixels lighting up, are still nicer than trying to block always on bright light. Those things said, people like the CRT. One mounted in a cabinet, for example, will deliver a really compelling experience! About the only thing I can see competing is a laser projection of some kind. Really high refresh, interlaced CRT rasters have a look too. So does higher refresh rate, progressive scanned motion. Maybe this ends up like vinyl. We have not lost the tech yet. Maybe there will be a return like we have seen for vinyl. And here is an idea for someone: Make the shadow mask on glass and enclose it in a vacuum, but not big like we need for an electron gun. Just big enough to enclose the phosphor. Then, from the rear, excite the phosphor with lasers. Or even a few groups of them to get a full, high speed raster made up of multiple smaller ones all running in parallel. Think 4 rectangular displays stacked together with their longer edges touching. Doing that keeps the deflection angle down. And the lasers can be enclosed. But it won't be necessary to pull a high vacuum for the whole thing. Just the thin, front, phosphor portion. And that could be replaced when it gets tired, and or when burned in, or scratched up. Registration becomes a software problem. Good displays have .01x inch phosphor dot pitches. Violet light is orders better at 0.000015 inches. Light just outside visible would work great. The phosphor glass assembly could be recycled or refurbished and relaxed vacuum requirements means avoiding toxic glass. I bet a display like that would deliver the CRT experience and then some. Someone go make the thing. I want one. Or, maybe I hit the lottery! Then I will make my own.