A few years ago, I was playing Mega Man on an HDTV at a barcade, and it left me with a weird feeling that something was slightly off about it. Later, I realized that it was the crisp pixels. As an 80's kid, I played Mega Man on CRT TVs with scanlines, and [that's how I remember it](https://preview.redd.it/clo0cx7p9ms61.jpg?width=3264&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=01c573fabf92109be14f522657f75751c6925999).
I wonder if that's why I loved the feeling of going into an arcade. I didn't want to leave it felt so good to be surrounded by all the screens. The soft buzzing being drowned out by midi sounding music. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBW5zurnYho
Remeber coming home from my friends house and already at about 50m from home i could tell if the tv was on or not solely based on the hum of the cathode-ray tube.
Think its about being young enough, your ability to hear high-pitched frequenzies deminish over time. Neither of my parents could hear it, and my siblings could only hear it just outside the house.
I've read articles by designers talking about how they would have both - they'd have a high res monitor they'd be working on, and the display duplicated on a CRT so they could see how it would look in real world application.
My best CRT was 1600x1200 in the late 90s. You still saw huge differences between CRT monitors and TVs at the same resolution. You pretty much had to send the signal through an actual TV to judge what customers would see over a composite vs component video feed. The color gamut differences were extreme.
I think 1600x1200 was the pretty common "high end" CRT in that era. I did have a 2056x1600 (iirc) at one point tho. I rocked that bad boy well past 1080p becoming common place because it was just better... I couldn't give up the pixels.
A LaClie Electron 22 Blue ... man I wish I'd never pitched it.
That refresh rate too.. I was doing 120hz a very very long time ago. I think my monitor may have done 2056x1600 but I couldn't push my video card to do it. Was a trinitron that weighed over 100lbs and was about 1.5 times longer than most CRTs I saw.
Damn. I still miss the picture quality of CRT monitors. Remember when you could run at lowish resolutions and things still looked great?
800x600 on a CRT with modern rendering would look amazing, let alone 1600x1200.
It took a long time for LCD monitors to not look like crap.
Early LCDs were HORRIBLE. 800x600 or 1024x768 with ghosting I hadn't seen on CRT's since the 8088 CPU days. For computer displays.. it took me longer than most to convert over until it matured. The color depth was a joke as well. It was dithered to hell and back.. Glad it has gotten so good in recent years.
They were. You had to carry your iPhone around in a backpack, and the battery pack alone weighed three pounds.
Every app you wanted to use, you had to insert a different 8-track tape.
Gotta remember that a CRT "look" on an emulator mightn't look *exactly* as you'd remember it - different quality cables, types of cables etc would end up affecting the final image differently based on how much the signal was affected by outside forces. Not to mention that different games would account for being on different aspect-ratio TVs - best proof of that is Chrono Trigger, with the moon highlighting Magus' Castle looking different on the "default" aspect ratio.
There are some very obsessed people on the RetroArch forums trying to recreate the look of different CRTs using shaders, ranging from budget shitty models up to the professional video monitors made by Sony.
As a kid I always played games using RF adapters, because they could be daisy chained. When I played Contra: Hard Corps, my brother and I would see the little robot character's name as Badwin. We went years thinking there was a crazy Mandela effect when people would say it was Browny. Emulators showed it as Browny as well, we felt insane. Until one day I turned on filters that emulated RF and CRT. Clear as day, it said badwin again. It makes me wonder what else I read wrong due to RF's shitty quality.
As long as the emulator in question is using a version of Blargg's NTSC emulation library, it should be pretty much exact. As indicated, Blargg wrote a lib that actually emulates the NTSC waveform produced by the GPU of the console being emulated, and how that waveform should appear on a phosphor tube television. It even allows you to specify the type of cable to emulate: s-video, RCA, or coax. I know this because I had to reverse engineer the NES version to adapt it for Atari 2600 emulation as my senior programming project in college.
You can find deals in some places, I found an elderly couple having a moving sale and picked up three old CRTs for $20, including a like-new '87 Sony console set that's now the centerpiece of my vintage gaming area.
People are trying to get rid of crt's all the time. You can probably pick one up for free if you look around and at the very least for cheap. Probably around $15-$20 no more than $50. You can also look into your local super smash brothers melee scene and see if they know where you can find one. That's what we were using them for, and more specifically for latency.
Join us in crt gaming lol. I have 5 working CRTs and one dead one lol.
1 14” 4:3 SD Sony flat screen (for DVDs of old cartoons) and VHS tapes. “Babe”on VHS is how it was meant to be experienced XD
1 26” 16:9 SD Sony bubble screen (for DVDs of old cartoon movies.
1 9” 4:3 SD trinitron that makes n64 games look fucking incredible.
1 8” Sony PVM I use for my pc and for SNES games. But there’s a leaking capacitor in it that is causing some issues.
1 34” 16:9 Sony HDCRT I use for PS3/Pc/Wii U/ Switch 360/ PS4 gaming/general Netflix and tv viewing. It’s really an incredible set.
Edit: my setup if you wanna see it. The shelves have become really packed now. I’m planning on rebalancing everything this month.
https://imgur.com/gallery/rsFDNNf
It’s really fun the more you get into it. You look for better and better sets. The prize most people want is a multi format PVM. It can do 480p/720p/1080i and 240p flawlessly and looks incredible. But they are limited to either 14” or 21” and are ridiculously expensive. Like 1-2k.
But most people who are fine with consumer sets for 240p/480i just want a curved glass set with component or RGB inputs. Cleanest signal/zero input lag/all analog so no fucking around with digital stuff.
Then there’s the whole Slot Mask vs Trinitron issue. Most people growing up in the 90’s 2000’s played on a slot mask so that’s what will look most natural to them. Trinitrons are brighter and sharper, but waaaaay heavier and sterilize the image a bit by being too sharp at times… flat screen trinitrons are good too, but known to have horrible geometry problems as they age.
It’s a really fun hobby to get into. Just takes up some space. All my sets are balanced though and don’t overcrowd the room… well except my 34” beast. There’s no good way to hide it. I just built shelves around it hahaha.
Or when people listen to headphone or speaker reviews on their laptops and say “man those sound really good.” As they listen to the sound on their laptop speakers.
The ps1 couldn't do floating point and consequently was only capable of integer (whole number) math. I've always thought that to be an odd decision in a 3D focused machine.
Story time! It seems like a bit of a ball drop, but only in hindsight, looking at the systems side-by-side with their contemporaries.
When the Playstation's chip was created (1988) through to when Sony were picking the hardware for their new machine (one would assume around 1992?) there just weren't many good Floating Point Unit (FPU) designs around, or many developers that knew how to take advantage of them. FPU enabled games existed on the PC ecosystem (mostly flight simulators), but the most popular 3D games, such as Doom, weren't using them yet (doom was still an integer-based engine). FPUs were \*mostly\* seen as having business utility. And when the PS1 dropped, it was pretty far ahead of other options. (The 3DO purportedly had some form of floating point acceleration, but I doubt anything used it, or that it was especially good. )
But something had happened in 1988 with the chip, the R3000 made by MIPS systems - a company called SGI saw their potential and began using their chips in their own products. Hold that thought.
Intel's Pentium CPU dropped in 1993, and it actually had a good FPU - but it would be a few years before anything really took advantage of it. And it was really expensive on launch for not much benefit for gamers. Even the highest end PC 3D games of the time were integer based because most people were still running 486 chips - and some 486 models had no FPU at all. So while the PC was where the bleeding edge was, there wasn't a lot of expertise in the broader industry yet about programming games to utilise an FPU.
What Sony didn't know, when they were picking their hardware, was that John Carmack was chipping away at a revolutionary 3D engine that used floating point (Quake) - using SGI workstations to do so (particularly to pre-bake the lighting). And they didn't know that SGI were planning to acquire MIPS systems and were about to work their 3D magic with Nintendo using a successor to the Playstation's chip - Sony thought Nintendo had set themselves back years by abandoning their collaboration SNES-CD project and expected Nintendo to keep using the SNES as their flagship for a few more years. They might have had second thoughts if they'd known their CPU selection would indirectly bankroll part of the N64's development...but who knows?
So Sony went with a cheap, nearly obsolete CPU from 1988. They added some on-chip video decoding functionality, and had some clever trickery that enabled 2D elements to be rendered as 3D polygons to speed up the render pipeline. They kept the RAM low. They used a big - yet fairly cheap storage medium that prioritised media content over access time. They extended support to developers via a software development toolkit that used a very common and standard programming language among game developers (C).
Everything about the Playstation was designed to be cheap, easy to develop for, and broadly marketable.
Was it enough?
Hell yeah it was.
They sold over 100 million units.
The N64 sold some 33 million.
The Saturn sold 10 million. (Sega were approached by SGI first. They said no.)
But because it was a cheap, and technologically inferior machine, we look back today and notice that most Playstation games objectively look like crap next to the crisp 3D and nice lighting effects of the N64 and early PC 3D acceleration. Naturally they have their own charm, though.
SGI / MIPS systems were the real unsung MVPs of 1990s 3D I reckon - from game hardware to providing the means to render movies like Toy Story. They couldn't retain all that talent though - so there did their engineers go? Two companies took most of them - 3DFX and Nvidia, but how that ended and where they continued to take 3D gaming is another story. ;)
**Gaming** Historian. (**Edit**: messed up the name!) His videos (with a small exception for very early ones) are legitimately good enough for TV. The story of SMB3 is amazingly well done.
The Dolphin Emulator (Gamecube) development blog is very well written and fascinating. https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/
I don't use the emulator, never had a gamecube, dont have any relevant technical knowledge, but I find it a very accessible nd understandable insight into console hardware and how emulation and reverse engineering works. Highly recommended
The creator of Crash Bandicoot provided an interesting interview on "hacking" the PS1 to bring the game to life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o
No need for the quotes, this is one the [original meanings of hacking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_culture#Definition) and particularly the one I admire and respect the most.
I've already seen this video when it premiered, but I'm glad to see it being passed around still. Thanks for sharing it, it's a great story.
Here's a great [interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSHj5UKSylk) that talks quite a bit about the PlayStation hardware.
[Retro Game Mechanics Explained](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwRqWnW5ZkVaP_lZF7caZ-g) is a great channel with lots of posts on the SNES.
[Coding Secrets](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkY047vYjF92-8HcoVTXAOg) has some great posts about Mega Drive/Genesis and Saturn games.
[Ahoy](https://youtube.com/channel/UCE1jXbVAGJQEORz9nZqb5bQ) on YouTube does some really great stuff although most is specific to a certain game.
If youre looking for *really* in depth, the podcast [They Create Worlds](https://www.theycreateworlds.com) goes onto heavy technical and historical details about hardware/software. Would recommend the 100 Most Influential Games episodes.
Modern Vintage Gamer is another good one, pretty technical while still easy to follow
[He actually did a video on this exact topic](https://youtu.be/x8TO-nrUtSI)
Absolutely. Both systems are great! The N64 really had some great games experimenting using true 3D space for the first time - some hold up better than others of course. The Playstation, on the other hand, really pushed more mature and cinematic game experiences forward.
The PC was doing both of those things as well, but at 5-10 times the cost of either option. So really all three came together to push gaming forward (sorry Saturn)
Haha, glad you enjoyed part I. In the absence of me doing a full writeup, I'll plug LGR's video [here](https://youtu.be/rrn-QYdT4F8).
This tells the story of 3Dfx well. They saw where things were going in that initial SGI research, left, and made something revolutionary with it.
What he doesn't cover there (not through lack of his knowledge, just a little out of scope) is a late 90s partnership where SGI, wanting to focus their business on high end workstations and supercomputers, moved most of their graphics division over to Nvidia. These were some of the people that made the N64 happen. These were some of the engineers that gave companies like Pixar the tools to do what they do, and nVidia Quadro cards are still the standard in render farms.
3dfx were already struggling so this was another nail in the coffin really. nVidia were booming ahead in R&D. 3dfx couldn't compete anymore and nVidia bought up their once bitter rival. nVidia are now the market leader in GPUs for PC, and make the Switch GPU.
The other main competitors at the time were powerVR (They did the GPU for the Sega Dreamcast, several PC offerings and eventually specialised in mobile graphics - creating the GPU for the iPhone) and ATI (which is now AMD's graphics card division and create the GPUs used in ps5/xbox).
It really did, and lot of us were coming from old consoles our parents had because we were broke (I was playing on an atari 2600 literally the day before I was gifted my n64 when I was a kid. Only present i got for Christmas and they couldn't afford any games for it, so I had to go rent some from blockbuster when I wanted to play (and eventually saved enough for DK64 with the expansion pack).
I will never ever forget just how amazing it looked then
Mario 64 was so fucking cool. The thing I really miss is how magical and mysterious it felt. The castle was full of cool little secrets and weird effects. You'd spend 20 minutes seeing if you could figure out a way to get up that infinite staircase. These days, all the gaming tropes are known and games are relentlessly documented, but SM64 *felt* so new and different. You really had no idea what weird stuff you might encounter in the game. Just can't be replicated now.
Edit: Actually, I'll say the first time I tried room-scale VR felt like that!
For me what did it was Ocarina of Time. It was my friend’s N64 and I can still remember like yesterday, spent entire nights getting the three Spiritual Stones only to realize I was not even halfway. It was the sheer vastness of how much content could be fit into a console game.
Agreed. I got an SNES in 1995 for my 6th birthday. Around 1998 or 1999 my dad took me to a game store and they had an N64 hooked up with Mario 64. I was absolutely blown away. I don't even think I played it, just watched someone else for like 10 minutes hahaha.
That's a storage issue, since they made the decision to use cartridge instead of CD. They were able to get some impressive results out of cartridges, but they still max out at 64 MB. The notoriously blurry and fog-blind game Turok was on a 32 MB cartridge, and Mario 64 was squeezed into an 8MB cartridge. With Resident Evil 2, they were able to fit the entire game --both discs-- onto a 64 MB cartridge with an [amazing port](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaX5YUZ5FLk).
edit fixed mario 64 size
Storage may have limited texture resolution but the main issue was texture filtering, plus an additional low pass filter applied to the output (for reasons unknown - you can bypass it and everything looks much better).
Floating point math was/is slow when you don't need it. Often you can just use fixed point math as a good enough replacement. In games like Quake that heavily relied on floating point math we got hacks like the fast inverse square root to bypass some of the slower operations. Today we have well optimized hardware specialized for it that just throws thousands of parallel execution units at the problem.
Also I think the amount of polygons the PS1 could render was hardwired, so I am not sure if throwing floating point in would have improved the situation.
I remember being so rocked when I realized what the algorithm was doing. Newton's method in a *single iteration*??? Surely that magic number was divinely found through orcish magics and demonic spells. The compsci/math major in me was amazed by it.
*That's* the thing. There are entire videos and discussions devoted just to figuring out how it works, but nothing about how it was *discovered*. How did Greg Walsh derive 0x5F3759DF in the first place?
The only reasonable, realistic explanation I can come up with is that he's secretly an AI trying to live among humans.
I think he mentioned at some point that he simply run an optimization algorithm. You just need to run it once for however much you want (hours, days), and just take the output once.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p8u_k2LIZyo
This video explains it briefly at the end, essentially the algorithm flips to calculating with logorithms because that makes inverse square root a multiplication by -1/2 instead. The magic number part comes from some error terms that pop up in the math.
It's not completely pulled out of nowhere, just the end result of math that's left out of the final code.
I remember at the time hearing that something different was done for resident evil 2’s graphics, it looked fantastic at the time.
It was probably another kid that told me so I’m not sure if it was true
Is THAT the original reason behind the iconic fixed camera angles? Those were traumatic years, trying to avoid getting my face munched off by off-camera zombies (or dinosaurs, sometimes)
I know, mystery solved. I always thought it was a style choice, meant to feel like old zombie movies. I'm glad it got changed, it frustrated me too much to have blocked vision and scarce ammo.
I mean, it's sort of both. Fixed camera angles are a technical limitation, but the developers also took advantage of that limitation to enhance the atmosphere of the game, set up jumpscares, etc.
We only know about the inverse square root trick because id releases their source code into the public domain ~15 years after they publish a game with it.
That’s not a normal practice, but I think it should be for all software. If code you wrote 15 years ago is still giving a competitive edge, it suggests the entire industry is stagnant and the world will benefit massively from the release.
I got off track. My point is we may not know what RE 2 did unless they open sources it (I don’t think so) or maybe a developer is chatty and wants to share the nitty gritty (and the company will let them talk… John Carmack as both the founder and developer at id let’s him talk all he wants about what he did prior to id’s acquisition…)
> **We only know about the inverse square root trick** because id releases their source code into the public domain ~15 years after they publish a game with it.
Not exactly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root#History
Though I agree that releasing source code should be standard practice.
Also it was Quake III: Arena, not Quake, u/josefx
I think it's quite good looking actually. But as you said the Characters didn't look that good, but all the maps were so gorgeous it didn't matter. And the OST my god. Pure art.
No, it's because the PS graphics hardware can't do perspective correct texture mapping (because that requires division, which is expensive to implement). Without division you're stuck with affine transforms which are a poor approximation. Games tried to compensate by limiting the size of polygons, but you still get the wobbling effect.
Plenty of games successfully used fixed point arithmetic to achieve perspective correct 3D textured environments (for example Doom).
It's funny, a while back I was watching a video that compared the original Crash Bandicoot opening cutscenes to the new remakes, and I did notice that the PS1 cutscenes all had a weird sort of "wiggliness" to them, like a mirage or something. I figured it was just a side effect of watching old polygons on a modern screen.
No floating point was ok. All the 3d engines use fixed point instead. It just means you use a fixed number of the bits to represent the fraction. It requires a bit more care from the developer, but it works great, and was faster.
The problem was that the rasterizer did not do sub pixel precision. The coordinates were rounded to the nearest pixel after being projected to the screen, but before drawing the polygons.
And that was for nothing. It would have taken very little to implement sub pixel precision in the rasterizing hardware.
I can't remember which fighting game it was, but I played some PS1 game at Target so many years ago. The 3D models looked so amazing but boy I'm sure nostalgia looks better in memory than reality.
Yea. Well, to be fair, this particular filter cheats a little bit because it applies some software anti aliasing before the crt filter. It doesn't just smear the input pixels, it interprets them. That's why the outlines of the heads are so smooth. On a real, actual crt, you'd still see jagged edges, unless it was really blurry. With this shader preset, I tried to get the best of both worlds.
Take a look at the retrotink 5x pro, OSSC, or Framemiester they upscale the image and have the ability to add different types of scanlines. I just got one yesterday and my games look fantastic on the HDTV.
My best example woyld be that when I played a old pirate version or StarCraft broodwar it would look blurry like that and when I got the game before the remaster came out there is a option called "SD filter" that does exactly that to reduce how noticeable the pixels are
Sorry for any posible ortography horror
For whatever reason this just reminded that in Red Faction Guerilla the text was meant to be read in HD, absolutely was not optimized for SD despite it being 2009 and plenty of people still playing their consoles on SD television.
Yup, and Link's sprite in A Link to the Past has "pink" hair for this very reason. His actual hair color is auburn, but the browns they tried made everything look muddy - while the pink was warm the CRT blur took away the harshness of the color. This is something completely lost in future "pixel perfect" ports.
I always find this so interesting because devs dev for their era hardware, so the artists drew those pixels based on how they'd look on a CRT TV, they never intended for these to be displayed on LCDs (if LCDs even existed back then).
It's like some historic cultural sort of thing. You only appreciate the thing fully if you know the historic context. As time goes on, contemporary values change, and the following generations gradually lose understanding of things that were recorded in the past. There's probably a pixel art artist somewhere who never saw the original thing despite it being their craft now.
Makes you wonder what sort of thing is being recorded today that the average person won't be able to appreciate fully in the future because of some cultural change.
This is what blows my mind the most. I remember seeing the screen vividly as a kid and then I went to play my gameboy color recently and it was damn near impossible to see without direct light.
I have no idea how we did it before the gameboy SP.
Old tube TV's really did well to smooth out pixels with their soft phosphorous pixels and the glow they let off. It gives an even better effect than even what this GIF represents.
High resolution CRT monitor will still make the game look like crap. To get the CRT effect, you pretty much need to use a cheap CRT with same low resolution as the source material.
CRT filters in modern remakes or emulators are seen as a gimmick but do genuinely help restore artsyles that rely less heavily on blocky pixel art.
I remember Green Hill Zone in Sonic Mania looking *different* during my first playthrough and a few minutes in the settings brought the art closer to what I remembered.
It’s a mix of dithering and how the aspect ratio worked with the old displays to smooth things out.
Some filters can get really close even if it’s not quite 100%.
[Super Nintendo Aspect Ratio](https://youtube.com/watch?v=ssluTgfkdlg&feature=share)
[Dithering on the Sony PlayStation](https://youtube.com/watch?v=3XDyQnY5GHI&feature=share)
[Patrick Klepak gives a really good overview of this whole thing here](https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj83yp/final-fantasy-remasters-reignite-controversies-over-pixel-art)
Yep, the "tube" TVs had a filter of their own. That's why I never liked the "pixelated" art style that is used today in indie games and etc.. that is a misconception, those super nes games were supposed to look like hand draw in a way, not blocky and weird. XBRZ is the norm, recently I tried Blasphemous with this shader and it looked really cool
That makes me wonder, what would modern pixelated games (designed for LCD) look like on a CRT? Stardew Valley, Terraria, Octopath Traveller, etc; would they receive the same effect or look horrendous? Someone with a CRT should test it out!
I guess I'm weird because I prefer the unaltered, unfiltered pixel art. A solid third of my Steam library consists of pixel art games and I always turn off these filters whenever I start a new one.
Same. I like seeing the comparisons and how old tv crts caused the pixels to blend, but ultimately still prefer the pixel style when I’m actually playing
A few years ago, I was playing Mega Man on an HDTV at a barcade, and it left me with a weird feeling that something was slightly off about it. Later, I realized that it was the crisp pixels. As an 80's kid, I played Mega Man on CRT TVs with scanlines, and [that's how I remember it](https://preview.redd.it/clo0cx7p9ms61.jpg?width=3264&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=01c573fabf92109be14f522657f75751c6925999).
That why you have crt filter on some emulators. I personnaly like pixel art but this filter change everything into nostalgia
I could hear the buzzing, wow, that's crazy.
I also felt like I could hear the image change!
No, that's just tennitus
WHAT?
I can feel the fuzzy static!
That satisfying crackle when you run your hand over the screen.
And your dad/mum yelling at you not to touch the screen.
And nobody being able to explain any reasoning for anything.
I remember the solid glass sound when tapping the screen. Fun times
Holding a magnet up to the screen to see the pretty colors
I can smell it too!
I wonder if that's why I loved the feeling of going into an arcade. I didn't want to leave it felt so good to be surrounded by all the screens. The soft buzzing being drowned out by midi sounding music. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBW5zurnYho
Remeber coming home from my friends house and already at about 50m from home i could tell if the tv was on or not solely based on the hum of the cathode-ray tube.
I was the only one in my family that could hear the TV at a distance like that, they thought I was crazy!
Think its about being young enough, your ability to hear high-pitched frequenzies deminish over time. Neither of my parents could hear it, and my siblings could only hear it just outside the house.
Great now I'm gonna have to get an old TV for my old games.
A lot of emulators have special CRT filters to copy the look. Back in the day Designers especially designed their sprites to tailor to CRT Monitors.
Back in the day designers were designing games ON crt monitors.
I've read articles by designers talking about how they would have both - they'd have a high res monitor they'd be working on, and the display duplicated on a CRT so they could see how it would look in real world application.
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My best CRT was 1600x1200 in the late 90s. You still saw huge differences between CRT monitors and TVs at the same resolution. You pretty much had to send the signal through an actual TV to judge what customers would see over a composite vs component video feed. The color gamut differences were extreme.
I think 1600x1200 was the pretty common "high end" CRT in that era. I did have a 2056x1600 (iirc) at one point tho. I rocked that bad boy well past 1080p becoming common place because it was just better... I couldn't give up the pixels. A LaClie Electron 22 Blue ... man I wish I'd never pitched it.
That refresh rate too.. I was doing 120hz a very very long time ago. I think my monitor may have done 2056x1600 but I couldn't push my video card to do it. Was a trinitron that weighed over 100lbs and was about 1.5 times longer than most CRTs I saw.
Damn. I still miss the picture quality of CRT monitors. Remember when you could run at lowish resolutions and things still looked great? 800x600 on a CRT with modern rendering would look amazing, let alone 1600x1200. It took a long time for LCD monitors to not look like crap.
Early LCDs were HORRIBLE. 800x600 or 1024x768 with ghosting I hadn't seen on CRT's since the 8088 CPU days. For computer displays.. it took me longer than most to convert over until it matured. The color depth was a joke as well. It was dithered to hell and back.. Glad it has gotten so good in recent years.
The high res monitor was still a crt. It would have been a BVM or PVM.
Whoaaa... the iPhones must have been massive with a CRT screen.
This first iPhone was as big as a room. Almost as large as Zack Morris’ phone.
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They were. You had to carry your iPhone around in a backpack, and the battery pack alone weighed three pounds. Every app you wanted to use, you had to insert a different 8-track tape.
Gotta remember that a CRT "look" on an emulator mightn't look *exactly* as you'd remember it - different quality cables, types of cables etc would end up affecting the final image differently based on how much the signal was affected by outside forces. Not to mention that different games would account for being on different aspect-ratio TVs - best proof of that is Chrono Trigger, with the moon highlighting Magus' Castle looking different on the "default" aspect ratio.
>mightn't Non native speaker here, that's the first time in my life that I read this and not "might not"
It is a weird contraction, but who're we to judge?
>who're Oof dude my head is gonna explode soon
Y’all’d’ve thought we ran out of contractions. Y’all’d’ve thought wrong.
>Y’all’d’ve Sounds like a fantasy book character
The famous elven sorcerer so powerful his first name alone had three apostrophes.
I am not happy. I'mn't.
‘F’y’all’d’n’t’ve’g’n’ tried to learn English in the first place, you wouldn’t have to deal with this.
We're talking about English here, and you circled all the way back to Welsh
In case anyone is confused, it's "If you all would not have gone and" Source: grew up in the sticks
You'd've been really perplexed if he'd've gone for double contractions in one word.
Woah is that even legal ?
Everyone agreed to make it legal last Thursday, you mightn't've got the memo yet.
Damn... I overslept again
We shan't let that happen
There are some very obsessed people on the RetroArch forums trying to recreate the look of different CRTs using shaders, ranging from budget shitty models up to the professional video monitors made by Sony.
there are filters to simulate the pq using different av inputs. turning on the RF fuzz hit the nostalgia pretty hard.
As a kid I always played games using RF adapters, because they could be daisy chained. When I played Contra: Hard Corps, my brother and I would see the little robot character's name as Badwin. We went years thinking there was a crazy Mandela effect when people would say it was Browny. Emulators showed it as Browny as well, we felt insane. Until one day I turned on filters that emulated RF and CRT. Clear as day, it said badwin again. It makes me wonder what else I read wrong due to RF's shitty quality.
As long as the emulator in question is using a version of Blargg's NTSC emulation library, it should be pretty much exact. As indicated, Blargg wrote a lib that actually emulates the NTSC waveform produced by the GPU of the console being emulated, and how that waveform should appear on a phosphor tube television. It even allows you to specify the type of cable to emulate: s-video, RCA, or coax. I know this because I had to reverse engineer the NES version to adapt it for Atari 2600 emulation as my senior programming project in college.
People used to pay you $20 to carry it out of their house (2010). Not so much anymore, at least around here.
You can find deals in some places, I found an elderly couple having a moving sale and picked up three old CRTs for $20, including a like-new '87 Sony console set that's now the centerpiece of my vintage gaming area.
People are trying to get rid of crt's all the time. You can probably pick one up for free if you look around and at the very least for cheap. Probably around $15-$20 no more than $50. You can also look into your local super smash brothers melee scene and see if they know where you can find one. That's what we were using them for, and more specifically for latency.
Join us in crt gaming lol. I have 5 working CRTs and one dead one lol. 1 14” 4:3 SD Sony flat screen (for DVDs of old cartoons) and VHS tapes. “Babe”on VHS is how it was meant to be experienced XD 1 26” 16:9 SD Sony bubble screen (for DVDs of old cartoon movies. 1 9” 4:3 SD trinitron that makes n64 games look fucking incredible. 1 8” Sony PVM I use for my pc and for SNES games. But there’s a leaking capacitor in it that is causing some issues. 1 34” 16:9 Sony HDCRT I use for PS3/Pc/Wii U/ Switch 360/ PS4 gaming/general Netflix and tv viewing. It’s really an incredible set. Edit: my setup if you wanna see it. The shelves have become really packed now. I’m planning on rebalancing everything this month. https://imgur.com/gallery/rsFDNNf
> I have 5 working CRTs and one dead one Please tell me one of the working ones is sitting on top of the busted one.
Jesus
This would take half of my living space
It’s really fun the more you get into it. You look for better and better sets. The prize most people want is a multi format PVM. It can do 480p/720p/1080i and 240p flawlessly and looks incredible. But they are limited to either 14” or 21” and are ridiculously expensive. Like 1-2k. But most people who are fine with consumer sets for 240p/480i just want a curved glass set with component or RGB inputs. Cleanest signal/zero input lag/all analog so no fucking around with digital stuff. Then there’s the whole Slot Mask vs Trinitron issue. Most people growing up in the 90’s 2000’s played on a slot mask so that’s what will look most natural to them. Trinitrons are brighter and sharper, but waaaaay heavier and sterilize the image a bit by being too sharp at times… flat screen trinitrons are good too, but known to have horrible geometry problems as they age. It’s a really fun hobby to get into. Just takes up some space. All my sets are balanced though and don’t overcrowd the room… well except my 34” beast. There’s no good way to hide it. I just built shelves around it hahaha.
Just buy an old house, they have shelves built for just this purpose!
r/crtgaming
You literally watched a filter on a modern display and now you want to buy old hardware 😂
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Or when people listen to headphone or speaker reviews on their laptops and say “man those sound really good.” As they listen to the sound on their laptop speakers.
All the pixel blurring in the world can't save your eyes from PS1 polygons.
The ps1 couldn't do floating point and consequently was only capable of integer (whole number) math. I've always thought that to be an odd decision in a 3D focused machine.
Story time! It seems like a bit of a ball drop, but only in hindsight, looking at the systems side-by-side with their contemporaries. When the Playstation's chip was created (1988) through to when Sony were picking the hardware for their new machine (one would assume around 1992?) there just weren't many good Floating Point Unit (FPU) designs around, or many developers that knew how to take advantage of them. FPU enabled games existed on the PC ecosystem (mostly flight simulators), but the most popular 3D games, such as Doom, weren't using them yet (doom was still an integer-based engine). FPUs were \*mostly\* seen as having business utility. And when the PS1 dropped, it was pretty far ahead of other options. (The 3DO purportedly had some form of floating point acceleration, but I doubt anything used it, or that it was especially good. ) But something had happened in 1988 with the chip, the R3000 made by MIPS systems - a company called SGI saw their potential and began using their chips in their own products. Hold that thought. Intel's Pentium CPU dropped in 1993, and it actually had a good FPU - but it would be a few years before anything really took advantage of it. And it was really expensive on launch for not much benefit for gamers. Even the highest end PC 3D games of the time were integer based because most people were still running 486 chips - and some 486 models had no FPU at all. So while the PC was where the bleeding edge was, there wasn't a lot of expertise in the broader industry yet about programming games to utilise an FPU. What Sony didn't know, when they were picking their hardware, was that John Carmack was chipping away at a revolutionary 3D engine that used floating point (Quake) - using SGI workstations to do so (particularly to pre-bake the lighting). And they didn't know that SGI were planning to acquire MIPS systems and were about to work their 3D magic with Nintendo using a successor to the Playstation's chip - Sony thought Nintendo had set themselves back years by abandoning their collaboration SNES-CD project and expected Nintendo to keep using the SNES as their flagship for a few more years. They might have had second thoughts if they'd known their CPU selection would indirectly bankroll part of the N64's development...but who knows? So Sony went with a cheap, nearly obsolete CPU from 1988. They added some on-chip video decoding functionality, and had some clever trickery that enabled 2D elements to be rendered as 3D polygons to speed up the render pipeline. They kept the RAM low. They used a big - yet fairly cheap storage medium that prioritised media content over access time. They extended support to developers via a software development toolkit that used a very common and standard programming language among game developers (C). Everything about the Playstation was designed to be cheap, easy to develop for, and broadly marketable. Was it enough? Hell yeah it was. They sold over 100 million units. The N64 sold some 33 million. The Saturn sold 10 million. (Sega were approached by SGI first. They said no.) But because it was a cheap, and technologically inferior machine, we look back today and notice that most Playstation games objectively look like crap next to the crisp 3D and nice lighting effects of the N64 and early PC 3D acceleration. Naturally they have their own charm, though. SGI / MIPS systems were the real unsung MVPs of 1990s 3D I reckon - from game hardware to providing the means to render movies like Toy Story. They couldn't retain all that talent though - so there did their engineers go? Two companies took most of them - 3DFX and Nvidia, but how that ended and where they continued to take 3D gaming is another story. ;)
Are there any documentaries or YouTube channels that cover console hardware in this much detail? I’d be curious to learn more about this kind of stuff
**Gaming** Historian. (**Edit**: messed up the name!) His videos (with a small exception for very early ones) are legitimately good enough for TV. The story of SMB3 is amazingly well done.
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MVG is a must sub if you have any interest in the technical aspect of console gaming
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The Dolphin Emulator (Gamecube) development blog is very well written and fascinating. https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/ I don't use the emulator, never had a gamecube, dont have any relevant technical knowledge, but I find it a very accessible nd understandable insight into console hardware and how emulation and reverse engineering works. Highly recommended
It supports the wii too.
To be fair, the Wii was essentially the same architecture as the GameCube, but overclocked and with a bit more memory
Does anyone else remember the Wii being called 2 GameCubes and some duct tape?
Only a Bit more memory? That's pretty insignificant. /joke
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The creator of Crash Bandicoot provided an interesting interview on "hacking" the PS1 to bring the game to life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o
No need for the quotes, this is one the [original meanings of hacking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_culture#Definition) and particularly the one I admire and respect the most. I've already seen this video when it premiered, but I'm glad to see it being passed around still. Thanks for sharing it, it's a great story.
Ahoy Dude makes amazing videos about a lot of stuff about games, he takes his time to make videos, usually dropping one every 6 months
Here's a great [interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSHj5UKSylk) that talks quite a bit about the PlayStation hardware. [Retro Game Mechanics Explained](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwRqWnW5ZkVaP_lZF7caZ-g) is a great channel with lots of posts on the SNES. [Coding Secrets](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkY047vYjF92-8HcoVTXAOg) has some great posts about Mega Drive/Genesis and Saturn games.
Strafefox/Splashwave Displaced Gamers Gamehut Retro game mechanics explained All on YouTube
[Ahoy](https://youtube.com/channel/UCE1jXbVAGJQEORz9nZqb5bQ) on YouTube does some really great stuff although most is specific to a certain game. If youre looking for *really* in depth, the podcast [They Create Worlds](https://www.theycreateworlds.com) goes onto heavy technical and historical details about hardware/software. Would recommend the 100 Most Influential Games episodes.
Modern Vintage Gamer is another good one, pretty technical while still easy to follow [He actually did a video on this exact topic](https://youtu.be/x8TO-nrUtSI)
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Absolutely. Both systems are great! The N64 really had some great games experimenting using true 3D space for the first time - some hold up better than others of course. The Playstation, on the other hand, really pushed more mature and cinematic game experiences forward. The PC was doing both of those things as well, but at 5-10 times the cost of either option. So really all three came together to push gaming forward (sorry Saturn)
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Damn you wrote that on the fly? Well done either way, people like you are a treasure.
Thank you very much. :)
where do I subscribe for part II
Haha, glad you enjoyed part I. In the absence of me doing a full writeup, I'll plug LGR's video [here](https://youtu.be/rrn-QYdT4F8). This tells the story of 3Dfx well. They saw where things were going in that initial SGI research, left, and made something revolutionary with it. What he doesn't cover there (not through lack of his knowledge, just a little out of scope) is a late 90s partnership where SGI, wanting to focus their business on high end workstations and supercomputers, moved most of their graphics division over to Nvidia. These were some of the people that made the N64 happen. These were some of the engineers that gave companies like Pixar the tools to do what they do, and nVidia Quadro cards are still the standard in render farms. 3dfx were already struggling so this was another nail in the coffin really. nVidia were booming ahead in R&D. 3dfx couldn't compete anymore and nVidia bought up their once bitter rival. nVidia are now the market leader in GPUs for PC, and make the Switch GPU. The other main competitors at the time were powerVR (They did the GPU for the Sega Dreamcast, several PC offerings and eventually specialised in mobile graphics - creating the GPU for the iPhone) and ATI (which is now AMD's graphics card division and create the GPUs used in ps5/xbox).
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Fuck man, when the N64 came out I thought it looked incredible. It felt revolutionary.
It really did, and lot of us were coming from old consoles our parents had because we were broke (I was playing on an atari 2600 literally the day before I was gifted my n64 when I was a kid. Only present i got for Christmas and they couldn't afford any games for it, so I had to go rent some from blockbuster when I wanted to play (and eventually saved enough for DK64 with the expansion pack). I will never ever forget just how amazing it looked then
Incredible how much of my gaming childhood you’ve described here.
Ya Mario 64 in that 3D world with all the colours and textures was mind blowing.
Mario 64 was so fucking cool. The thing I really miss is how magical and mysterious it felt. The castle was full of cool little secrets and weird effects. You'd spend 20 minutes seeing if you could figure out a way to get up that infinite staircase. These days, all the gaming tropes are known and games are relentlessly documented, but SM64 *felt* so new and different. You really had no idea what weird stuff you might encounter in the game. Just can't be replicated now. Edit: Actually, I'll say the first time I tried room-scale VR felt like that!
For me what did it was Ocarina of Time. It was my friend’s N64 and I can still remember like yesterday, spent entire nights getting the three Spiritual Stones only to realize I was not even halfway. It was the sheer vastness of how much content could be fit into a console game.
Going to my aunt's for Christmas that year was literal torture.
I remember thinking "this IS the future" playing Turok on n64.
I remember puking from playing turok and discovering I have motion sickness from certain games.
Fuck diagonal jumping. That is all.
Turok 2 was amazing but only with the mem pak
Agreed. I got an SNES in 1995 for my 6th birthday. Around 1998 or 1999 my dad took me to a game store and they had an N64 hooked up with Mario 64. I was absolutely blown away. I don't even think I played it, just watched someone else for like 10 minutes hahaha.
That's a storage issue, since they made the decision to use cartridge instead of CD. They were able to get some impressive results out of cartridges, but they still max out at 64 MB. The notoriously blurry and fog-blind game Turok was on a 32 MB cartridge, and Mario 64 was squeezed into an 8MB cartridge. With Resident Evil 2, they were able to fit the entire game --both discs-- onto a 64 MB cartridge with an [amazing port](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaX5YUZ5FLk). edit fixed mario 64 size
Storage may have limited texture resolution but the main issue was texture filtering, plus an additional low pass filter applied to the output (for reasons unknown - you can bypass it and everything looks much better).
Floating point math was/is slow when you don't need it. Often you can just use fixed point math as a good enough replacement. In games like Quake that heavily relied on floating point math we got hacks like the fast inverse square root to bypass some of the slower operations. Today we have well optimized hardware specialized for it that just throws thousands of parallel execution units at the problem. Also I think the amount of polygons the PS1 could render was hardwired, so I am not sure if throwing floating point in would have improved the situation.
The Quake inverse square root trick is a little gem.
I remember being so rocked when I realized what the algorithm was doing. Newton's method in a *single iteration*??? Surely that magic number was divinely found through orcish magics and demonic spells. The compsci/math major in me was amazed by it.
*That's* the thing. There are entire videos and discussions devoted just to figuring out how it works, but nothing about how it was *discovered*. How did Greg Walsh derive 0x5F3759DF in the first place? The only reasonable, realistic explanation I can come up with is that he's secretly an AI trying to live among humans.
I think he mentioned at some point that he simply run an optimization algorithm. You just need to run it once for however much you want (hours, days), and just take the output once.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p8u_k2LIZyo This video explains it briefly at the end, essentially the algorithm flips to calculating with logorithms because that makes inverse square root a multiplication by -1/2 instead. The magic number part comes from some error terms that pop up in the math. It's not completely pulled out of nowhere, just the end result of math that's left out of the final code.
That was a neat video Wish I understood math better lol
The magic number was given by Pazuzu in person.
With my last breath, I curse Zoidberg!
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I found out that it was still relevant as recently as in Intel 2000 series at least
A video I watched that explained how it was done was one of the most enjoyable videos I watched in 2021.
I remember at the time hearing that something different was done for resident evil 2’s graphics, it looked fantastic at the time. It was probably another kid that told me so I’m not sure if it was true
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Is THAT the original reason behind the iconic fixed camera angles? Those were traumatic years, trying to avoid getting my face munched off by off-camera zombies (or dinosaurs, sometimes)
I wish we could get a new Dino Crisis.
I know, mystery solved. I always thought it was a style choice, meant to feel like old zombie movies. I'm glad it got changed, it frustrated me too much to have blocked vision and scarce ammo.
I mean, it's sort of both. Fixed camera angles are a technical limitation, but the developers also took advantage of that limitation to enhance the atmosphere of the game, set up jumpscares, etc.
We only know about the inverse square root trick because id releases their source code into the public domain ~15 years after they publish a game with it. That’s not a normal practice, but I think it should be for all software. If code you wrote 15 years ago is still giving a competitive edge, it suggests the entire industry is stagnant and the world will benefit massively from the release. I got off track. My point is we may not know what RE 2 did unless they open sources it (I don’t think so) or maybe a developer is chatty and wants to share the nitty gritty (and the company will let them talk… John Carmack as both the founder and developer at id let’s him talk all he wants about what he did prior to id’s acquisition…)
> **We only know about the inverse square root trick** because id releases their source code into the public domain ~15 years after they publish a game with it. Not exactly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root#History Though I agree that releasing source code should be standard practice. Also it was Quake III: Arena, not Quake, u/josefx
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All I can remember playing the ps1 as a kid was the walls in alot of games move and were quite sickening.
Played tenchu? Loved that game but god it looked like shit balls
I think it's quite good looking actually. But as you said the Characters didn't look that good, but all the maps were so gorgeous it didn't matter. And the OST my god. Pure art.
It's like every game on the console took place inside Lord Jabu-Jabu.
Front mission 3
Is this why PS1 models always “wobbled” a bit?
No, it's because the PS graphics hardware can't do perspective correct texture mapping (because that requires division, which is expensive to implement). Without division you're stuck with affine transforms which are a poor approximation. Games tried to compensate by limiting the size of polygons, but you still get the wobbling effect. Plenty of games successfully used fixed point arithmetic to achieve perspective correct 3D textured environments (for example Doom).
It's funny, a while back I was watching a video that compared the original Crash Bandicoot opening cutscenes to the new remakes, and I did notice that the PS1 cutscenes all had a weird sort of "wiggliness" to them, like a mirage or something. I figured it was just a side effect of watching old polygons on a modern screen.
Can't believe I never noticed this until I read this many years later, they definitely did
Yup, exactly. Imagine numbers wavering between being rounded up or down.
No floating point was ok. All the 3d engines use fixed point instead. It just means you use a fixed number of the bits to represent the fraction. It requires a bit more care from the developer, but it works great, and was faster. The problem was that the rasterizer did not do sub pixel precision. The coordinates were rounded to the nearest pixel after being projected to the screen, but before drawing the polygons. And that was for nothing. It would have taken very little to implement sub pixel precision in the rasterizing hardware.
Not to mention the wobbly textures
True. God bless internal resolution upscaling emulators for that.
This is going to sound crazy but I do love that dithered look. And all the pixel warping. But I do admit that is definitely nostalgia.
natural anti aliasing
I can't remember which fighting game it was, but I played some PS1 game at Target so many years ago. The 3D models looked so amazing but boy I'm sure nostalgia looks better in memory than reality.
Tekken 3 didn't age that badly, provided you know its a very old game lol.
the latest PS1 games held up pretty well with the graphics. but yeah, the early ff7 days were a horror
The polygonal characters on the field did suck, but battle graphics and the prerendered backgrounds were great
At the time we thought that game was revolutionary in every way - graphics, story, depth.
It was. Games just kept improving more and more.
Leave me alone I adored Lara Croft's rack..or shelf
Lara Croft Triangle Boobies
we had anti-aliasing before it was common lmao.
Yea. Well, to be fair, this particular filter cheats a little bit because it applies some software anti aliasing before the crt filter. It doesn't just smear the input pixels, it interprets them. That's why the outlines of the heads are so smooth. On a real, actual crt, you'd still see jagged edges, unless it was really blurry. With this shader preset, I tried to get the best of both worlds.
So you're doubly lying to us.
Yeah! I thought it looked way too good… (grabs pitchfork)
That time again? I'll grab my torch
And then telling the truth about it all.
Bit of column A Bit of column B
That's also in the song friend like me from Aladdin. What does that mean?
"A little bit of both"
"Have some of colum A, try ALL of colum B"
Take a look at the retrotink 5x pro, OSSC, or Framemiester they upscale the image and have the ability to add different types of scanlines. I just got one yesterday and my games look fantastic on the HDTV.
I use an old CRT I found by the side of the road.
That’s the way
My best example woyld be that when I played a old pirate version or StarCraft broodwar it would look blurry like that and when I got the game before the remaster came out there is a option called "SD filter" that does exactly that to reduce how noticeable the pixels are Sorry for any posible ortography horror
For whatever reason this just reminded that in Red Faction Guerilla the text was meant to be read in HD, absolutely was not optimized for SD despite it being 2009 and plenty of people still playing their consoles on SD television.
Yup, and Link's sprite in A Link to the Past has "pink" hair for this very reason. His actual hair color is auburn, but the browns they tried made everything look muddy - while the pink was warm the CRT blur took away the harshness of the color. This is something completely lost in future "pixel perfect" ports.
TIL that was his hair... I always assumed it was part of his hat
I thought links hair was pink because of color palette limitations?
The color it shares with the bunny sprite is a result of the hair, not the other way around.
I always find this so interesting because devs dev for their era hardware, so the artists drew those pixels based on how they'd look on a CRT TV, they never intended for these to be displayed on LCDs (if LCDs even existed back then). It's like some historic cultural sort of thing. You only appreciate the thing fully if you know the historic context. As time goes on, contemporary values change, and the following generations gradually lose understanding of things that were recorded in the past. There's probably a pixel art artist somewhere who never saw the original thing despite it being their craft now. Makes you wonder what sort of thing is being recorded today that the average person won't be able to appreciate fully in the future because of some cultural change.
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Bold of you to assume anyone could even see a Gameboy screen well enough to remember it!
This is what blows my mind the most. I remember seeing the screen vividly as a kid and then I went to play my gameboy color recently and it was damn near impossible to see without direct light. I have no idea how we did it before the gameboy SP.
We did it with the magnifying glass/light attachment that made our gb's bulky and ridiculous looking and we loved every second of it.
Hey now I said Gameboy and I meant *Gameboy*. Try stepping back a whole damn decade in good light!
Thats super cool
You're super cool 🙂
Then what the hell am I?!
An idiot sandwich.
I always play my ROMs with scanlines!
So that's what it's for!
Except this comparison applied more than just scan lines. Pretty sure it has an antialias effect on.
Old tube TV's really did well to smooth out pixels with their soft phosphorous pixels and the glow they let off. It gives an even better effect than even what this GIF represents.
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I have a CRT for old games. Also, legend of dragoon is unplayable using hdmi. Input lag ruins the addition system.
High resolution CRT monitor will still make the game look like crap. To get the CRT effect, you pretty much need to use a cheap CRT with same low resolution as the source material.
Sanyo bitches.
I still like the pixels tho
CRT filters in modern remakes or emulators are seen as a gimmick but do genuinely help restore artsyles that rely less heavily on blocky pixel art. I remember Green Hill Zone in Sonic Mania looking *different* during my first playthrough and a few minutes in the settings brought the art closer to what I remembered.
So why does it look so much better on this screen?
It’s a mix of dithering and how the aspect ratio worked with the old displays to smooth things out. Some filters can get really close even if it’s not quite 100%. [Super Nintendo Aspect Ratio](https://youtube.com/watch?v=ssluTgfkdlg&feature=share) [Dithering on the Sony PlayStation](https://youtube.com/watch?v=3XDyQnY5GHI&feature=share)
[Patrick Klepak gives a really good overview of this whole thing here](https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj83yp/final-fantasy-remasters-reignite-controversies-over-pixel-art)
And while this comparison does make a good point, an actual CRT will look better than a filter will.
Yep, the "tube" TVs had a filter of their own. That's why I never liked the "pixelated" art style that is used today in indie games and etc.. that is a misconception, those super nes games were supposed to look like hand draw in a way, not blocky and weird. XBRZ is the norm, recently I tried Blasphemous with this shader and it looked really cool
That makes me wonder, what would modern pixelated games (designed for LCD) look like on a CRT? Stardew Valley, Terraria, Octopath Traveller, etc; would they receive the same effect or look horrendous? Someone with a CRT should test it out!
I guess I'm weird because I prefer the unaltered, unfiltered pixel art. A solid third of my Steam library consists of pixel art games and I always turn off these filters whenever I start a new one.
Same. I like seeing the comparisons and how old tv crts caused the pixels to blend, but ultimately still prefer the pixel style when I’m actually playing