The peach on the author's CRT looks pretty awful, as does the photo. I'm curious what sort of CRT produced the meme image. Maybe it can't be done by a real CRT, but the author's CRT doesn't look anything like the example from the CRT database they have below.
They also said the impression is different since it's so close up - what does it look like at the size you'd really see it in game?
He seemed to test it on a bunch of computer monitors, and not a standard 480i consumer television set? The different shadow masks phosphor patterns change how things look
> I'm curious what sort of CRT produced the meme image.
The article mentions later that it's a PVM-20L2MD [1]. This is a professional CRT monitor for medical devices. It uses the same signals as a consumer TV, but comes with a higher quality tube that has a sharper picture.
I have a Retrotink 4k. I mostly use it for VHS transfer these days, but it's original purpose is upscaling retro game images and applying various masks and filters to make the game look like it's using a CRT on a modern display.
It works beautifully, and you no longer need a clunky, heavy, dying CRT. I'm sure the purists will say it's not the same, but I've done sides by side comparisons IRL and it's good enough for me even when pixel peeping. I prefer the emulated CRT look on a modern OLED to the real thing these days.
I do something like this for my old game consoles, except that I pipe them trough an old analog video capture card that supports 240p60 and use the video processing module in Retroarch to do the capture with minimal lag. After adding some fancy CRT shaders and other image adjustment carefully tailored for this, the image comes out looking great! I sometimes toggle the shaders off and wince at the "raw" digital capture. I actually bought this capture card back in 2008 for this purpose but detested using it until around 2018 when I started using it in conjunction with retroarch and CRT shaders.
For that period it even shaped my perception that analog video and specially n64 graphics were always bad, but all that was vindicated by those shaders, it really does make a big difference, and made me find a new appreciation for n64 graphics in particular.
There is some internet misconception that the inherently "blurry" output of an n64 is bad (And sure, some games are just ugly/bad from an artistic standpoint), but it's actually the smoothest image any analog console will ever produce when hooked up to a proper CRT or CRT shader, and it's consistent across all games because of "forced" high quality AA in all games. Even the next generation of consoles seldomly used AA.
I started playing Policenauts recently, and when I first booted the game I was straining my eyes trying to read the blocky pixelated text. I only recently started using RetroArch, but I did some digging and figured out how to enable a CRT filter and immediately it was 1000% easier on my eyes.
The anime art and FMV sequences looked way better too.
This reminds me of my favorite way of watching movies at home was on a 1365x768 plasma TV at 24fps. I really didn't like 1080p, 120Hz, and 4k that came after it. Great for sports and news, not so much for fiction.
This is fun to see right now. I've been playing around with CRT shaders in retroarch for the last few days. My main goal is to use the [CRT-Beam-simulator](https://github.com/blurbusters/crt-beam-simulator) at 120hz and get some sort of CRT slot or shadow mask at the same time. I've landed on some settings I enjoy for N64 games, and it really has improved the experience for me.
On the post's notes on the Sonic waterfall effect, the [Blargg NTSC Video Filter](https://github.com/CyberLabSystems/CyberLab-Custom-Blargg-NT...) is intended to recreate that signal artifact, but similar processing is included in a lot of the CRT shaders that are available. I found that RGB had a visual artifact when moving that made the waterfall flicker, but composite didn't, so I played on that setting. Running it with the beam simulator is probably causing some of that.
When I played NES and SNES as a kid, the resolution was so low that I only saw pixels. (Edit: I saw whole pixels when using the RF switch.) To this day, when I go back and play those games on modern consoles I just can't use CRT emulation.
Maybe I just didn't play games that used tricks to get around the pixels?
---
That being said, I remember that "New Super Mario Brothers" on Wii appeared to use a CRT trick to try and make the background flash in a boss room. I always played my Wii in 480p, so it just looked like there were vertical lines in the boss room.
I wonder if anyone has employed the services of a hyperrealistic artist to depict the image they see on a CRT.
Given their ability to generate a painting that appears identical to a photo, could they depict how the image appears to them, eliminating any loss from mechanical capture.
> Sometimes, all we want to do is shout "CRTs were magic, bro, just trust me!"
I certainly feel that way when watching interlaced video. There's far too much bad deinterlacing out there. One of the biggest problems that I encounter is that deinterlacers tend to reduce the frame rate. (IE, 60i -> 30p instead of 60p, or 50i -> 25p instead of 50p)
(That being said, when I would watch interlaced live TV on a 30" or more TV, I'd see all kinds of interlacing artifacts.)
It genuinely baffles me that people are nostalgic about CRTs. CRTs were universally god-awful and I paid top dollar to have the best that money could buy for myself since I worked from home and it was still terrible. Modern monitors are better in every possible way.
> It genuinely baffles me that people are nostalgic about CRTs.
I don't get nostalgic about any technologies - and certainly wouldn't get nostalgic about cathode ray tubes which were big, heavy and had innate limitations. However, I am serious about vintage game preservation and I care about seeing classic game art which was created on and for CRTs accurately presented as the original developers and artists saw it. These days that's as easy as playing games from the CRT era with a good CRT-emulation pixel shader.
What frustrates me is when I see classic 80s games on popular retro YouTube channels objectively looking far worse than they actually did in the 80s. That happens because some of that artwork was painstakingly hand-crafted to exploit the unique traits of both the analog video format and CRTs. When presented without a pixel shader, some of those titles simply look wrong - and in some cases, egregiously so. I know because I'm old enough to have been there, worked with and learned from some now-legendary 80s game developers and artists.
The hard-edged, square pixel blocks many young people (who've never seen a CRT) think a retro game like Pac-Man or Joust should have, is a strange historical anomaly. When I show them what the games actually looked like either via a good pixel shader or on my arcade emulation cabinet's 25-inch analog RGB, quad-sync CRT (which was made for high-end arcade cabinets), they're often shocked. I hear things like "Wow, I thought retro was cool because it looked so janky but it was actually softly beautiful." To me, the importance of CRTs (and CRT shaders) isn't about injecting analog degradation to recreate some childhood nostalgia for the crappy RCA TV your parents had in the living room (with rolling hum bars from the unshielded RF modulator), it's about making games like Pac-Man and Joust look as good as they really did on the industrial CRT in their arcade cabinet (which could be better than the best TV many consumers ever owned). Or alternatively, making console games look as good as they did to the original developers and artists, who usually used the highest-quality CRTs they could because they were after the best-possible image for the same reasons recording studios have always used reference-grade audio speakers.
So yeah, it's not honoring those historic games when retro YouTubers show them in a degraded form that looks far worse than they ever did in the day - especially when it's now so easy to present them accurately by turning on a CRT shader that's already built into many retro emulators. As others in this thread point out, even the best pixel shaders aren't completely perfect, but as a retro-purist (and video engineer whose career spanned the analog and digital video eras) I concede today's best pixel shaders are 'accurate enough' and certainly far better than hard-edged block pixels. It's weirdly tragic because what some people think 'retro' games looked like isn't worse than a bad consumer TV was - or better than a good analog RGB CRT was - it's just wrong on some bizarre third-axis of digital jank which never existed in the CRT era.
In my opinion: CRT has problems including distortion; however, LCD can be bad if the picture is the wrong resolution that does not match the display, while CRT can handle this problem better. LCD is good if the source of the picture is made for the LCD at its resolution.
I’ll take the chance to link to Derek Yu’s (of Spelunky fame) pixel art tutorial, where he explains techniques such as anti-aliasing and sel-out: https://www.derekyu.com/makegames/pixelart.html
Emulators also struggle to faithfully reproduce artwork for the Game Boy Color and the original Game Boy Advance. Those consoles used non-backlit LCD displays with a low contrast ratio, a small colour gamut, and some ghosting between frames. Many emulators just scale the console's RGB colour values to the full range of the user's monitor, which produces far too much saturation and contrast.
It's a shame, because I really like the original, muted colour palette. Some artists produced great results within the limitations of the LCD screen. Similar to the CRT spritework in this article, it feels like a lost art.
However, there's an interesting complication: quite a lot of Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance developers seem to have created their game art on sRGB monitors, and then shipped those graphics without properly considering how they would appear on the LCD. Those games appear muddy and colourless on a real console - they actually look much better when emulated "incorrectly", because the two errors exactly cancel out!
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 53.0 ms ] threadThey also said the impression is different since it's so close up - what does it look like at the size you'd really see it in game?
The article mentions later that it's a PVM-20L2MD [1]. This is a professional CRT monitor for medical devices. It uses the same signals as a consumer TV, but comes with a higher quality tube that has a sharper picture.
[1] https://crtdatabase.com/crts/sony/sony-pvm-20l2md
It works beautifully, and you no longer need a clunky, heavy, dying CRT. I'm sure the purists will say it's not the same, but I've done sides by side comparisons IRL and it's good enough for me even when pixel peeping. I prefer the emulated CRT look on a modern OLED to the real thing these days.
For that period it even shaped my perception that analog video and specially n64 graphics were always bad, but all that was vindicated by those shaders, it really does make a big difference, and made me find a new appreciation for n64 graphics in particular.
There is some internet misconception that the inherently "blurry" output of an n64 is bad (And sure, some games are just ugly/bad from an artistic standpoint), but it's actually the smoothest image any analog console will ever produce when hooked up to a proper CRT or CRT shader, and it's consistent across all games because of "forced" high quality AA in all games. Even the next generation of consoles seldomly used AA.
The anime art and FMV sequences looked way better too.
Playing something like The Dark Knight Rises from an UHD Blu-ray on a good OLED looks incredible!
I still play Diablo I on the Sony to this day. Wonderful monitor. I will cry when it finally dies.
On the post's notes on the Sonic waterfall effect, the [Blargg NTSC Video Filter](https://github.com/CyberLabSystems/CyberLab-Custom-Blargg-NT...) is intended to recreate that signal artifact, but similar processing is included in a lot of the CRT shaders that are available. I found that RGB had a visual artifact when moving that made the waterfall flicker, but composite didn't, so I played on that setting. Running it with the beam simulator is probably causing some of that.
Maybe I just didn't play games that used tricks to get around the pixels?
---
That being said, I remember that "New Super Mario Brothers" on Wii appeared to use a CRT trick to try and make the background flash in a boss room. I always played my Wii in 480p, so it just looked like there were vertical lines in the boss room.
Given their ability to generate a painting that appears identical to a photo, could they depict how the image appears to them, eliminating any loss from mechanical capture.
I certainly feel that way when watching interlaced video. There's far too much bad deinterlacing out there. One of the biggest problems that I encounter is that deinterlacers tend to reduce the frame rate. (IE, 60i -> 30p instead of 60p, or 50i -> 25p instead of 50p)
(That being said, when I would watch interlaced live TV on a 30" or more TV, I'd see all kinds of interlacing artifacts.)
I don't get nostalgic about any technologies - and certainly wouldn't get nostalgic about cathode ray tubes which were big, heavy and had innate limitations. However, I am serious about vintage game preservation and I care about seeing classic game art which was created on and for CRTs accurately presented as the original developers and artists saw it. These days that's as easy as playing games from the CRT era with a good CRT-emulation pixel shader.
What frustrates me is when I see classic 80s games on popular retro YouTube channels objectively looking far worse than they actually did in the 80s. That happens because some of that artwork was painstakingly hand-crafted to exploit the unique traits of both the analog video format and CRTs. When presented without a pixel shader, some of those titles simply look wrong - and in some cases, egregiously so. I know because I'm old enough to have been there, worked with and learned from some now-legendary 80s game developers and artists.
The hard-edged, square pixel blocks many young people (who've never seen a CRT) think a retro game like Pac-Man or Joust should have, is a strange historical anomaly. When I show them what the games actually looked like either via a good pixel shader or on my arcade emulation cabinet's 25-inch analog RGB, quad-sync CRT (which was made for high-end arcade cabinets), they're often shocked. I hear things like "Wow, I thought retro was cool because it looked so janky but it was actually softly beautiful." To me, the importance of CRTs (and CRT shaders) isn't about injecting analog degradation to recreate some childhood nostalgia for the crappy RCA TV your parents had in the living room (with rolling hum bars from the unshielded RF modulator), it's about making games like Pac-Man and Joust look as good as they really did on the industrial CRT in their arcade cabinet (which could be better than the best TV many consumers ever owned). Or alternatively, making console games look as good as they did to the original developers and artists, who usually used the highest-quality CRTs they could because they were after the best-possible image for the same reasons recording studios have always used reference-grade audio speakers.
So yeah, it's not honoring those historic games when retro YouTubers show them in a degraded form that looks far worse than they ever did in the day - especially when it's now so easy to present them accurately by turning on a CRT shader that's already built into many retro emulators. As others in this thread point out, even the best pixel shaders aren't completely perfect, but as a retro-purist (and video engineer whose career spanned the analog and digital video eras) I concede today's best pixel shaders are 'accurate enough' and certainly far better than hard-edged block pixels. It's weirdly tragic because what some people think 'retro' games looked like isn't worse than a bad consumer TV was - or better than a good analog RGB CRT was - it's just wrong on some bizarre third-axis of digital jank which never existed in the CRT era.
It's a shame, because I really like the original, muted colour palette. Some artists produced great results within the limitations of the LCD screen. Similar to the CRT spritework in this article, it feels like a lost art.
However, there's an interesting complication: quite a lot of Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance developers seem to have created their game art on sRGB monitors, and then shipped those graphics without properly considering how they would appear on the LCD. Those games appear muddy and colourless on a real console - they actually look much better when emulated "incorrectly", because the two errors exactly cancel out!