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The raw pallette Nintendo video with NTSC filters looks amazing in RetroArch on a modern screen. It looks like how I remember. I’ll see if I can find a screenshot of mine later.
Eh, I’ll just show some from search results. Notice how the color bleeds between pixels, and edges have color artifacts.
Also, check out this amazing Game Boy filter!
Ah yes, just how I remember the Gameboy, struggling to see the screen.
But seriously, the top ones look great!
Did they? Considering, you know, we can make them look like this on an LCD.
I remember not knowing what, like, 40% of the shit on a given screen in a video game was meant to be because it was all a blurry mass of pixels. Important shit looked better than background stuff (in a decent game, anyway) and the characters were always the most detailed thing.
Now I can play the 17th iteration of a game series that went from the above, to being able to count the individual fibers of a berber carpet.
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.
More about size. We play shit on screens WAY bigger than we used to back then. That image is just an icon. not meant to be that large or on a computer monitor that close to your face. CRT can help it look less bad when that big and that close, but can also remove detail when small and far.
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.
A Raspberry Pi software emulator usually outputa the same picture as a Mister FPGA core. The only difference is the post-processing filters available for each. Mister has a lot of really good CRT filters available too that you can load per core.
Yeah, my point was the Pi usually has all that stuff pre-loaded whereas the MiSTer is for the hardcore people that want the original experience. Every time I load up a core for the MiSTer I have to set the filters and upscaling.
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.
Emulation made everyone forget that old school pixel art was made to blend in the really shitty consumer crts of the 90s using composit video. I don’t like how crispy modern pixel art looks.
Composite lol, my Sega came with an RF connector with a switch. It was either TV signal or console.
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.
I disagree completely. The pixel art Castlevania games on Nintendo DS look amazing! So many little details. It’s fantastic.
The Castlevania games on the NDS look great,
Symphony of the Night, originally made for CRTs in the PS1 era, just looks wrong when blown-out by a large LED screen on the PS4.
If they’re truly trying to be old school, I agree. Many such games actually come with adjustable filters to simulate that kind of distortion, and even arcade-like screen curvature (e.g., Hammerwatch).
That said, modern pixel art is evolving its own aesthetic that is valid and enjoyable in its own right. I don’t think everyone making modern pixel art games is necessarily trying to be old school.
The artists, not the programmers.
It just looks soooo much better.
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!”
@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.
which one, left or right? I dont game
The one on the left is an emulated version, and the one on the right is a photo of a CRT with a composite signal (the yellow cable that was pair with white and red audio) most common back in the 90’s. The image illustrates how the graphic designers for this game knew they were going to be displayed on a CRT that would fuzz the image and so they deliberately made Dracula’s eyes that color of red with that placement because they knew it’d get mixed to give it a more ethereal effect to look like he’s got glowing red eyes. The ruffles in his shirt are also a great example of how the CRT enhanced the look.
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.
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…
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!
I mod the one here on Lemmy.world - !crtgaming@lemmy.world
!CRTs@kbin.social as well!
@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.
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.
What 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.
They didn’t all benefit from this and many CRTs looked like shit regardless (I recall having multiple CRTs where certain colors looked off or bled too much). Specifically, the numbers on most games (Specifically Zelda:A Link to the Past) had a tendency to bleed if the device brightness was set to anything near visible in a room during the day.
There was a device to let you play gameboy games (native LCD) on like a super nintendo or something, and they actually looked better there because of the native filtering. I’d argue the filters you can apply to gameboy games look even better now, even on LCDs.
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.
That one is Symphony of the Night, one of the most well known examples of the effect in use.
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
Or the gameboy player on the gamecube!
compared to what? an emulator’s output?
ya’ll are wild for acting like CRT’s are some miraculous displays. Way too many apples to oranges comparisons ITTdeleted by creator
We’re literally viewing this “difference” on an LCD, for comparison.
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You… posted it.
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So? There’s not an expiration date on replying to a post.
Why post something then get mad people are responding to it.
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One of the best things you can get on some emulators are the CRT filters you can apply to give it that authentic look.
CRT filters are a huge cheap and easy blessing for retro gaming. Absolutely essential.
@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” :
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.
Yeah, 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.
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.
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.
Sonic 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.
This is reminiscent of watching TOS Star Trek restored for modern HD TVs. You can see all the make-up really clearly because they had to make everyone pop for old CRT screens. They look awful now.
I agree if we are talking about being this zoomed in. However, at standard viewing distances the difference becomes negligible. As well as on small retro devices with 3-4 inch screens.
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.
RetroTINK 5X. Peep it if you can’t find a framemeister.
Not exactly CRT quality, but likely the best we’ll have on modern displays.
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