Retro games really did look better on a CRT

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).

EDIT oh by the way, the community CRTgaming also made it over here to Lemmy :-) I'll have to post some content there...

@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.

What does this MiSTer thingy do?

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.

@onichama Good game artists of that time period knew the limitation of their current technology and created the graphics with it in mind. In some games more apparent than on others. The linked image (often cited) is a good example of a game artist being aware.

It really is a stunning comparison. Designing art for CRTs was like painting with light.

"It was not by MY hand I was once again given pixels!"

Symphony of the Night is one of the games that took the most advantage from CRTs. In them it creates an illusion of additional details. Without them it looks grainy and the gradients don't come together right.

which one, left or right? I dont game

Abusing 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.

The last time I set up an emulator I looked into this and it really improved things!

This might be a dumb question, but would you know if you can put that on a steam deck?

I hate a lot of modern pixel art games for that reason. Those old games weren't meant to have super defined pixels. The programmers knew they were going to get some blending due to the limitations of the technology at the time. If you're going for the old school aesthetic at least use a shader or two.

Composite lol, my Sega came with an RF connector with a switch. It was either TV signal or console.

Ah yes, just how I remember the Gameboy, struggling to see the screen.

But seriously, the top ones look great!

Ah yes, just how I remember the Gameboy, struggling to see the screen.

But seriously, the top ones look great!

Oh boy, Cpt. Kirk's eye shadow? Just have to tell ourselves that male beauty standards changed over the centuries lol

Very 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.

I disagree but only because I've seen it showed to me by my friends who are super into this. When games were made for TV and consoles especially in the late 80's and 90's they did things that took advantage of the analog nature Cathode Tubes used to display the image. Not every game took advantage of these techniques but the ones that do are nothing short of amazing when you think about it. They make filters these days that emulate some of these effects but analog is still analog and isn't something a digital display can always emulate regardless of resolution. I would say for most people it just doesn't matter that much but if your a retro gamer you want the OG experience. It's difficult to emulate these analog techniques because they are specific to an era and the techniques can sometimes be unique or trial and error by the devs.

There are other things as well for example light guns which just straight do not work on a newer display. Games that had live action recorded video look hilarious because the same techniques that were used to make things look better were applied in make up form to the actors.

What is a bit sad is the specific techniques these developers used aren't being well recorded and documented which I think would be very useful for future emulation and filtering.

Yeah, of course games made back then are going to look ridiculous scaled up to 1080p or higher. The SNES had a resolution of 256×224, and the graphics were designed with the drawbacks of 50/60hz interlaced displays in mind. Nowadays, we have progressive scan consumer-grade TVs at 4K resolutions and refresh rates of 120hz. It doesn't make sense to scale the graphics up directly.

It's also about resolution scaling. When 240p or 480p was common, most people only had 15-25" screens so they looked accurate. Nowadays 40-65" is common and 4K is the common resolution, or 1080p for smaller/cheaper TVs.

1080p is 2.25 times larger than 480p, 4K is 8 times larger than 480p (my math may be off...). Take any 480p picture and then zoom in 800% and it will look like shit, putting a 480p picture on a screen with a native 4K resolution will do the same thing. The screen is simply too big for it to look like it would on a common CRT unless you're like 25 feet away from the screen.

It's called dithering, and it's super nice imo. Still, I kinda like the super pixely look if I'm being honest.

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!

Just curious, did you grow up in the era of crt low pixel games? I suspect there is some form of nostalgic preference to whatever someone is used to playing.

CRT filters are a huge cheap and easy blessing for retro gaming. Absolutely essential.

Consoles are debatable, players were probably on a couch at the end of a wire while their parents shouted at them not to sit too close to the TV, but arcade games were actually made for people to play and experience while standing right in front of the screen. Standard viewing distance was short enough for this to matter, and arcade monitors were generally tuned for up-close viewing more than household TVs.

This image is a better example

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

Agreed. Blowing up the image to a size that you'd never see in actual gameplay makes it look worse than it actually is.

Isn't the input lag insanely high in projectors?

I'm surprised no one has mentioned a specific filter or trick for just emulating this on modern screens. Surely one exists?

Edit: Literally the comment right below mine: gamescope

Yeah, there were pretty much two types of pixel art in games. Those made for TV-based games up to PS1 which are expected to be seen through CRT blur so they rely more on complex gradients and precise use of contrast. And those made for LCD portables, which were always expected to be sharp and clear and tend to lean more into a blocky style. Modern indie games are largely an evolution of the latter.

Also, the games were designed to run on that display hardware. They exploited the limitations and artifacts to get a better over all image. When you play on something without those artifacts, those tricks don't work. Hell, you can't even play some games like Duck Hunt on modern hardware without significant modifications.

And we definitely played that close to our faces sometimes because not everyone had a big TV and no one had wireless controllers so you'd be sitting on the floor between the TV and the coffee table, which was in front of the couch. If you were lucky, you had the game system and an old hand-me-down TV in your bedroom so the TV was likely as close as your toes, or closer.

I have a MiSTer and was telling my friend about it. We started playing SNES games on my 65" OLED TV and he was like "this looks like shit and it cost you about $500?! The Raspberry Pi looks way better than this!" and then I told him it's because the MiSTer is an accurate recreation of what the actual console was like and the Pi attempts to make everything look good on modern hardware. If you could connect a NES up to a 65" flatscreen it would look the same way as the MiSTer since the NES was meant to be played on a 15-25" CRT screen not a 65" inch OLED screen. It's no different than trying to watch a show or movie from the 80s or 90s where it's 480p on a 4K TV, you're stretching the picture out to like 8x larger than it's supposed to be.

Decent games still highlight important stuff. But usually in a very mild way so you, as a player, don't notice the difference, but still can feel what's important and what's not.

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.

Some games used that bleeding effect to create special effects lol. I forgot which game, but one game has a character having glowing red eyes because of the bleeding of the red pixel. On a LCD, it looks like a red square lol.

play gameboy games (native LCD) on like a super nintendo

That's the Super Game Boy adapter, you slot a GB cart onto it, and pop it into your SNES

Most n64 emulators make the games run at a higher res by default, which makes all the low poly models and low res textures easier to see. If you run them at their original target resolution, they look MUCH better.

Huh I played it on a LCD and thought it was terrible. Like how did anyone play this?

Oh man I LOVE my Sony PVM 8045Q! I’ve been really wanting one of those consumer grade 9” ones, like the KV-9PT60. But they go for quite a bit now!

@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.

Depends on the game but I don't think people needed high-end TVs to notice the difference. When I was a kid and I first tried emulation, I remember noticing how some games looked weird and blocky on PC, even though my CRT TV was an extra blurry hand-me-down.

Most emulators have extensive CRT emulation filtering, I wouldn't be surprised if both the above images were created by an emulator.

Here's a quick guide on applying shader with retroarch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZpBRR4DGG0

Glorious. Very cute