LastRetro games really did look better on a CRT
ShinYeah, there’s a crazy amount of tricks they employed to bring the sprites to life in a way that just isn’t possible on modern displays. The sharp pixel look is actually an unfortunate byproduct of the transition to newer tech.
RightHandOfIkarosAbusing and exploiting slotmasks and such were what made games designed for CRTs look so much better on them. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work backwards, because newer games designed for LCDs and LEDs don’t look any better or worse on CRTs, outside of overscan and resolution issues.
Shredder’s Revenge has entered the chat.
For real though many modern pixel art titles use these same color techniques, and while they do not depend on crt blending them at all, they can often see slight visual benefits from the pixel blending that is possible with a modern shader adding that effect.
Fight n’ Rage has a built in set of shaders that do just this and it is beautiful. It is on by default, but still optional.
Running shredders revenge with a very mild crt effect also looks really good on a lot of the blended colors.
wavebeamSonic Mania has a very good built-in CRT shader. It’s not a perfect recreation, but it think it looks excellent! And I also think it looks really great on a CRT using a downscaler.
A lot of games depend on a CRT for color blending / smoothing / transparency effects. I actually don’t really like how nearly all 8 / 16bit games look on modern displays, filters generally don’t do a good enough job emulating the look.
Pope-King JoeIt’s called dithering, and it’s super nice imo. Still, I kinda like the super pixely look if I’m being honest.
Some games did transparency by alternating frames which on interlaced sets would draw every other line per frame or something along those lines.
Those effects do not appear in screenshots or generally on any progressive scan modern display without specific emulation
That’s so cool. I never considered the sort of analog nature of the frame being redrawn being used to create unique effects. If I understand because the previous frame would “fade” instead of turn instantly on or off it produced a transparency effect.
Interlaced vs. Progressive Scan - 1080i vs. 1080p
Yeah, you’re pretty much right. Interlacing complicates it a bit more because not only would the previous frame “fade” but half of the frame was drawn, every other line, and then the next half. So it didn’t look like a flicker because it was basically 60fps for half of the total screen, but an alternating 30 frames for each half of the image. This is why on early and terrible transcodes, you can get a “comb” effect, it’s not properly combining the image per frame and showing you half of the last frame and half of the next frame and the motion in the image shows in combs.
It’s really interesting stuff, imo.
There's something very satisfying about it being actually pixel-perfect.
However, there's also something to be said for a/b comparing for each sperate game and deciding what you think looks best for it. Having options is always best.
In Linux you can try gamescope with fsr upscaling. It’s a must-have for playing old games.
Thanks! I’ve never heard of this until now, and it’s available on my distro.
happy to help! gamescope is pretty amazing
thingsiplay@LastoftheDinosaurs gamescope was created by a Valve employee for the Steam Deck and made available for Linux in general! -> https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope
This might be a dumb question, but would you know if you can put that on a steam deck?
yes, I think it was even originally intended for the deck.
Thank you. I’m supposed to be sleeping now, but I don’t think I will anymore.
The last time I set up an emulator I looked into this and it really improved things!
nakalWould a simple blur filter be enough to emulate this?
jayrhackerMost emulators have extensive CRT emulation filtering, I wouldn't be surprised if both the above images were created by an emulator.
It's been many years since I emulated the SNES with either Snes9x or ZSNES but I'm pretty sure they both had different rendering filters to make the screen more blurry. Whether you like that more or less is of course up to you, hence why it is good to have it as an option, but it of course won't help you if you're hooking up an actual SNES to a modern TV.
Here’s a quick guide on applying shader with retroarch.
How to Automatically Load Shaders in RetroArch
skellenerBetter is subjective
I may be the only person in the planet that doesn’t agree. The left image just looks darker and blurrier to me. And I understand a lot of people think the blurring as makes it look better because it hides the pixels, but I suppose it just doesn’t work for me, since I can still see all the pixels just fine.
To me raw pixels look like something out of mspaint and the crt one looks like there’s depth and more detail present. Something to maybe also consider is that these are close ups? Probably looks better further away same at it would be zooming in on pixels for modern day content.
There’s also different crt filters that can lessen certain effects. Darkness stuff if this indeed a image of a crt screen isn’t really an issue with crt filter.
CRT filters are worse because almost none of them look realistic. The only one I’ve seen that came close is Loop Hero.
I don’t have a real life reference point for CRTs, so for me just going from these flat images to something that suddenly looked like there was more detail sold me on it. Prior to that my assumption had been old games on modern displays must be better until comparisons made me see how there was actually more attempts to be more than mspaint type pixel presentation back in the day.
So these raw pixels look even less realistic to how the final product actually ended up coming out back on old devices to me. So between the two unrealistic options I prefer Crt filters now, and I in the past hadn’t liked them either thinking all people had wanted was scanlines.
What games are you playing that have CRT filters that make things look better for you? Most CRT filters I’ve just put fake scan lines over the image, which to me, looks neither more accurate nor better (but I suppose it’s all a matter of opinion.)
I’ve liked it for snes games and for like ps1 era games, but yeah it is subjective. I do get it, since for a long I defaulted to no CRT filters. Emulation is freedom after all, so shaders exist for those who want it or not with some doing opposite of CRT shaders where instead it smooths out pixels for a different look.
idunnololz_testThis might be a hot take but I actually prefer the version on the right.
kbityDamn, that does look a lot better.
It's a hot take, but I agree with you.
Actually, I try to find a noise overlay that emotionally simulates the nostalgia effect, minimizes the looks-like-shit effect, but then also makes sure to impart the minimum amount of dither needed to technically have it look it's best.
Less is more, and even back in the day, a lot of these games on crappy CRTs looked like absolute trash. A lot of them were bright, colorful, and actually good, but a lot of them just looked like smeary poopoo.
If I can just squint my eyes and it looks better than your filter, you're doing it wrong. I think it takes a high nit display, vsync, with the right array of colors to hit the crt emulation just right.
Just go get an old tv at this point, damn. You'll get the buttons, the sound of it turning on, the high pitched whistle of it just being on, the smell of the burning dust, the ozone or whatever smell too, the brightness, the curve, the colors, the emotional risk of hitting the wrong channel and blasting yourself with full volume white noise and having to panic look for the volume buttons or the remote.... You can even use the in-tv speakers to output sound! Tv speakers were actually decent before flat screens.
Am I selling us all on this idea, yet? ;P
samus12345Agreed. Blowing up the image to a size that you’d never see in actual gameplay makes it look worse than it actually is.
To be fair, that probably is a REALLY nice broadcast-grade CRT like a SONY BVM-20F1U or something… which most people did NOT have access to back in the day.
Hell, my wealthy buddy’s family had a “flat screen” (meaning the CRT didn’t have a curved face) SONY WEGA CRT in the mid-90s and I know it had S-Video, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t even have a component connection, let alone the quality aperture grille/shadow masking, or the contrast ratio that the BVMs did (because those things were at local TV news stations running 24/7).
In reality, there’s a bunch of differences with connection types providing various levels of quality and CRT display technology , but the accessibility that new TVs give us all to astoundingly good picture quality at a pretty reasonable price means we are living in a golden era for retro gaming if you know what you’re doing.
I’ll take my gigantic 4K OLED hooked up to a MiSTer with some great shaders rendering the sub-pixel effects a real CRT has to emulate this visual effect with run-ahead to minimize the latency + input lag over anything except a BVM-20F1U in near mint condition almost any other day of the week.
TL;DR - you can emulate those sub-pixel CRT era display technology display artifacts with a decent shader on a good 4K OLED, and probably spend less than you’d need to get almost the exact same visual effect with pretty much none of the pitfalls you get with old CRTs like massive electricity use, having to carry a 150-250lb CRT, hope it has no burn-in, decent remaining bulb life, etc.
@JDPoZ Most people not from that time think that CRT look is just bunch of clean black lines overlapping the image (keyword scanlines) without anything else to consider, and call it a day.
Man I’m such an old fart I prefer my emulated games appear using different era CRT shaders to accurately reflect the sort of TV connection I had access to when playing. Like emulating shittier RF for older NES games, S-Video for SNES - N64, and then component for PS1 - PS2 era.
Like… I enjoy playing Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out using a shader that makes it look like a shitty RF connection with inaccurate desaturated colors bleeding, interlace jitter, etc. I’m actually kinda wistful when I can’t see the preview channel 3 TV guide blending through the crappy connection. I almost want to see if someone has made a shader that could render in a YouTube stream of retro late 80s to early 90s TV at like 5% opacity to get the same effect I saw as a kid sitting 2 ft away from my old 16” Magnavox.
@JDPoZ (I'm not sure why your reply does not appear in my view, but only if I look at your profile... Guess Kbin does not work correct at the moment?)
Me too! But where I live we did not use RF connection for NES, but had composite through RCA connection. I have different setups for the kind of system I am emulating. For NES and that time period my Shader choice is "composite" cable variant, SNES era "svideo" and "rgb" (or for you known as "component") connection. There are many more configurations for other systems and handhelds as well. Handhelds in example aren't CRTs, but LCD displays.
Great information, thank you! I’ve saved this comment for later.
Nah, those phosphor strips of that screenshot on the left are plenty coarse to be achievable with a consumer grade CRT. Throw in the fact that European sets pretty much all had RGB and it’s pretty realistic. Although most of us only heard about RGB cables with the advent of chipped PS1s and pirated NTSC discs (they oftentimes only displayed in black and white and RGB cables were the widely known fix for that).
My man. Now THIS person knows about CRT gaming. I’m merely an old man with limited time to research all this. Anyone talking about phosphor strips and halation and magnetic interference /gaussing.
I just know I like wearing the nostalgia goggles that add those artifacts my old eyes still hazily remember and weirdly prefer.
If you have the space, I highly recommend just getting a mid-sized CRT for the lulz :D It’s such a fun hobby. I went down the rabbit hole a little too hard in 2016 and have to downsize now. But I’d still get one to play around with while they’re still available for a couple of bucks (I hear it has gotten harder in the US already).
@Elektrotechnik Here in the EU/Germany we was used to SCART connection, even on the SNES (and upwards). MULTI-OUT/SCART supported composite, Svideo and RGB. The image I had was cleaner than what I emulate nowadays!
YES! Please join us! I don’t want our community to be full of elitists, play how you enjoy playing! But I happen to really love the look and nostalgia of playing on CRTs. Everyone is welcome to come and post about CRTs, or even CRT filters and masks in emulators to get that authentic experience!
klieg2323
FirninWhat does this MiSTer thingy do?
Oh the MiSTer is awesome! It’s like an emulation device, but instead of emulating with software it uses a thing called an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). the short explanation of what that means is that the chip reconfigures itself physically to mimic the hardware of old systems, which results in super accurate, lag-free emulation. It also allows for both digital and analogue output, loads from mass storage like an SD card or USB hard drive, and works with the oldest systems up to things like the PS1.
Play how you enjoy playing! I will say that this looks like a consumer-grade pitch, and that there is some value in consumer-grade sets today, even with something like composite, since the mixed colors were used on many occasions, Sonic’s waterfalls are the classic example.
Personally I enjoy playing on CRTs when I can, but I also love filters on modern displays! I think the biggest gap right now isn’t playing things like SNES on a 4K OLED with filters, but things like GameCube that we can get on those displays with GCVideo adapters like the Carby and EON Mk2, but then they are pretty limited in options for scaling and filters. RetroTink 5x Pro of course is an option, but they add up! It’s so easy to get a cheap or free CRT to enjoy lag free without spending hundreds on scalers and hardware mods.
There’s this profile on pixelfed that posts very nice pixel pics with and without CRT emulation - lashman
lashman (@[email protected])
1.2K Posts, 1.4K Following, 1.4K Followers · game/film composer • VFX/motion graphic artist • occasionally gamedev
This artist’s work is extremely visually pleasing lol thanks for sharing!
This is a dope account! I did think you meant it was an account like CRTPixel on twitter, but it actually just looks like an artist who’s aesthetic is CRT Pixel art. Super awesome!
I’ve personally been replaying Chrono Trigger recently on PC using Reshade with the CRT-Royale settings for exactly this reason.
Of course there’s also a setting in most emulators to do the same thing.
@TugOfWarCrimes I use Shaders on emulators for a while now, but never got into any other. Can Reshade be used with any game? I need to have a look at this program.
@LastoftheDinosaurs There are filters for emulators called "Shaders" which can make games look close to a CRT look and feel. I use RetroArch to emulate games, which has first class support for such Shaders for use with any supported emulator core. If you want, have a look at what is possible with an article I wrote a while back, which has sliders to see a before and after effect: https://thingsiplay.game.blog/2022/03/08/crt-shader-showcase-for-retroarch/
Here a screenshot without and with my favorite Shader called "Royale" and a variant of the Shader that simulates even more characteristics, "Royale NTSC SVideo" :
ChrisFheyVery interesting read. Thank you for sharing.
It's impressive how much of a difference those CRT shaders make, and it explains why I often remember games looking better than they do when I try to replay them now.
LatecoereA better comparison image would’ve been sonic the hedgehog with the waterfalls. Such a huge difference without the crt dithering type effect.
This one?
Yeah, well maybe a better quality pic on the right as it looks quite raw lol.