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.
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.
A really great hack for retro gamers who dont want to have a CRT tv hanging around the house is buy a cheap 1080p projector and project it onto an unprepped painted wall. The slight blur and bleed really smooths everything out.
I bought all those rerelease retro consoles and Metal Slug on a 3 meter screen is pretty badass.
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.
Just curious, did you grow up in the era of crt low pixel games? I suspect there is some form of nostalgic preference to whatever someone is used to playing.
It’s mentioned further down, but hopefully people can help get this to the top - if you enjoy this kind of content, please join us over at !crtgaming@lemmy.world!
When i was a kid, I use to love ANSi Art and always wanted to do it. I would download ‘thedraw’ and attempt to create art like my favorite Ansi groups… i sucked at it, but I always admired it… that image on the right reminds me of some of the artwork that people would create.
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.
It’s not only 2D games. Super Mario 64 looks terrible on a modern panel imo, and it still looks great on a CRT, as if the CRT has some kind of texture filtering lol. Not only the jagged edges are gone, but the textures look smoother too. You don’t want to see low res textures in perfect contrast, brightness and sharpness lol.
Most n64 emulators make the games run at a higher res by default, which makes all the low poly models and low res textures easier to see. If you run them at their original target resolution, they look MUCH better.
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.
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!
My man. Now THIS person knows about CRT gaming. I’m merely an old man with limited time to research all this. Anyone talking about phosphor strips and halation and magnetic interference /gaussing probably knows their 💩.
I just know I like wearing the nostalgia goggles that add those artifacts my old eyes still hazily remember and weirdly prefer.
If you have the space, I highly recommend just getting a mid-sized CRT for the lulz :D It’s such a fun hobby. I went down the rabbit hole a little too hard in 2016 and have to downsize now. But I’d still get one to play around with while they’re still available for a couple of bucks (I hear it has gotten harder in the US already).
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.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !retrogaming@lemmy.world
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.
A really great hack for retro gamers who dont want to have a CRT tv hanging around the house is buy a cheap 1080p projector and project it onto an unprepped painted wall. The slight blur and bleed really smooths everything out.
I bought all those rerelease retro consoles and Metal Slug on a 3 meter screen is pretty badass.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned a specific filter or trick for just emulating this on modern screens. Surely one exists?
Edit: Literally the comment right below mine: gamescope
deleted by creator
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.
Eh, I -like- the clear, chunky pixels. No filters, integer scaling.
Just curious, did you grow up in the era of crt low pixel games? I suspect there is some form of nostalgic preference to whatever someone is used to playing.
I grew up with the Atari 5200 and would absolutely have chosen crisp pixels back then if it were possible.
I grew up on Atari and Coleco. Still prefer the chunky, clearer integer scaling available now.
It’s mentioned further down, but hopefully people can help get this to the top - if you enjoy this kind of content, please join us over at !crtgaming@lemmy.world!
deleted by creator
When i was a kid, I use to love ANSi Art and always wanted to do it. I would download ‘thedraw’ and attempt to create art like my favorite Ansi groups… i sucked at it, but I always admired it… that image on the right reminds me of some of the artwork that people would create.
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.
Oh boy, Cpt. Kirk’s eye shadow? Just have to tell ourselves that male beauty standards changed over the centuries lol
It’s not only 2D games. Super Mario 64 looks terrible on a modern panel imo, and it still looks great on a CRT, as if the CRT has some kind of texture filtering lol. Not only the jagged edges are gone, but the textures look smoother too. You don’t want to see low res textures in perfect contrast, brightness and sharpness lol.
Most n64 emulators make the games run at a higher res by default, which makes all the low poly models and low res textures easier to see. If you run them at their original target resolution, they look MUCH better.
yes
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.
deleted by creator
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!
Ah yes, just how I remember the Gameboy, struggling to see the screen.
But seriously, the top ones look great!
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
My man. Now THIS person knows about CRT gaming. I’m merely an old man with limited time to research all this. Anyone talking about phosphor strips and halation and magnetic interference /gaussing probably knows their 💩.
I just know I like wearing the nostalgia goggles that add those artifacts my old eyes still hazily remember and weirdly prefer.
If you have the space, I highly recommend just getting a mid-sized CRT for the lulz :D It’s such a fun hobby. I went down the rabbit hole a little too hard in 2016 and have to downsize now. But I’d still get one to play around with while they’re still available for a couple of bucks (I hear it has gotten harder in the US already).
deleted by creator
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.
In Linux you can try gamescope with fsr upscaling. It’s a must-have for playing old games.
deleted by creator
happy to help! gamescope is pretty amazing
The last time I set up an emulator I looked into this and it really improved things!
This might be a dumb question, but would you know if you can put that on a steam deck?
yes, I think it was even originally intended for the deck.
Thank you. I’m supposed to be sleeping now, but I don’t think I will anymore.
This might be a hot take but I actually prefer the version on the right.
Agreed. Blowing up the image to a size that you’d never see in actual gameplay makes it look worse than it actually is.