One thing they show but don’t mention is image persistence for transparency. If you toggle a sprite on and off every frame, the persistence between frames on CRTs and LCDs means it looks partially transparent. That effect was commonly used for character shadows.
Great resource and explains so much with pretty solid examples. Thanks for sharing! I used to PC game on my Dell (Sony), flat CRT for years, and then an IBM Trinitron too until I moved to a pure laptop for a bit (17" Vostro) and eventually on to LCD.
Until 2013 I used to play Wii on a 36" Philips CRT, even though the other room had a larger plasma.
Now that we have 4k HDR displays, tools are starting to popup to accurately emulate the CRT look and feel. 1080p wasn’t enough to catch all the subtle details, but we are finally there. Kinda cool to see the age of CRT never fully died.
I wonder if there’s a way to emulate the old CRT displays. My brother built an arcade cabinet, but it’s got a modern monitor in it so the graphics don’t quite look right.
There are some very convincing shaders that work really well to emulate the look. I sold my consoles long ago and may have a faulty memory but the right shader looks just like I remember.
There are some hardware scalers that work really well.
But most that offer good compatibility with a wide range of older consoles cost about as much as a complete high end pc to run an emulator on.
Well many of these games did look better in CRT monitors: https://www.tumblr.com/crtpixels/700962490988773376/damn-uhhhhhh-this-one-really-did-some-numbers-huh
What an awesome set of examples. Thanks for sharing.
One thing they show but don’t mention is image persistence for transparency. If you toggle a sprite on and off every frame, the persistence between frames on CRTs and LCDs means it looks partially transparent. That effect was commonly used for character shadows.
Great resource and explains so much with pretty solid examples. Thanks for sharing! I used to PC game on my Dell (Sony), flat CRT for years, and then an IBM Trinitron too until I moved to a pure laptop for a bit (17" Vostro) and eventually on to LCD.
Until 2013 I used to play Wii on a 36" Philips CRT, even though the other room had a larger plasma.
Here is how I was set up back then.
Now that we have 4k HDR displays, tools are starting to popup to accurately emulate the CRT look and feel. 1080p wasn’t enough to catch all the subtle details, but we are finally there. Kinda cool to see the age of CRT never fully died.
I wonder if there’s a way to emulate the old CRT displays. My brother built an arcade cabinet, but it’s got a modern monitor in it so the graphics don’t quite look right.
There are some very convincing shaders that work really well to emulate the look. I sold my consoles long ago and may have a faulty memory but the right shader looks just like I remember.
OLED is as close as you can get for response times and color depth. It lacks some subtle glow and blending that you get with CRTS
There are some hardware scalers that work really well. But most that offer good compatibility with a wide range of older consoles cost about as much as a complete high end pc to run an emulator on.