I remember how disappointed I was with some games when I got my first HD lcd screen.We regressed in terms of display technology. Lcd tech is smaller, more efficient but games simply looked better on crt tv's and monitors. I recently visited my buddy from another city, he has an old school crt monitor and still plays modern games on that screen. He even repaired it twice, I think the caps went bad and the other time the something related to the tube itself went wrong. It's crt but it has rgb analog inputs. I played a little bit bfV on that screen and I was amazed. That thing in 720i resolution looks better then modern flat panel lcd tv's reproducing 4k content. I was shocked. And the refresh rate, my god how we regressed.
You mean a video explaining, not showing. Because you won't be able to see the clarity difference in a modern screen.Someone needs to make a video comparing the motion clarity of CRTs to high refresh monitors honestly. I used to have a VG248QE and it didn't really come close to old CRTs.
Hence the term comparison. An informative video highlighting all the differences.You mean a video explaining, not showing. Because you won't be able to see the clarity difference in a modern screen.
Apparently it is... RetroArch being the only platform that does this right.It can’t be that difficult to incorporate decent scanline options in most games surely, lacklustre scanlines give the process a bad name.
I’m not a fan of the sharp pixel look at all, old 2D games were made with CRTs in mind. In fact I try to avoid games without a scanline option. Unfortunately most filters that allegedly offer a scanline option are terrible, blurry messes that usually make the screen look worse. It’s rare to find developers that care enough to put decent scanlines in their games. I thought that M2 were usually good enough to make decent scanlines a priority but even they falter from time to time. Just look at the options in the Megadrive Mini and the Konami collections, they look trash.
It can’t be that difficult to incorporate decent scanline options in most games surely, lacklustre scanlines give the process a bad name.
Not at all. Plenty of emulators are almost perfectly accurate, especially for older consoles.Ohhh you are talking about emulation is actual hardware... well emulation is just emulation and it is far from perfect.
Fixed that.My enjoyment of Sonic is not determined by a waterfall not being transparent enough.
There was no realistic path for CRT TV's larger than about 30-40 inches without going to rear projection which was horrible. Yes there are trade-offs going to various flat panel TV technologies but the reason you can buy a 65+ inch TV and have it weigh 40 lbs. instead of 400 lbs. is because of this changeover.We regressed in terms of display technology. Lcd tech is smaller, more efficient but games simply looked better on crt tv's and monitors. I recently visited my buddy from another city, he has an old school crt monitor and still plays modern games on that screen. He even repaired it twice, I think the caps went bad and the other time the something related to the tube itself went wrong. It's crt but it has rgb analog inputs. I played a little bit bfV on that screen and I was amazed. That thing in 720i resolution looks better then modern flat panel lcd tv's reproducing 4k content. I was shocked. And the refresh rate, my god how we regressed.
Fixed that.
See, you think i make this issue seem bigger than it is and you are maybe right. Most non-purists will not care. But i feel like some people make this issue look smaller than it is. Like how you describe the correct look of the Sonic waterfall as "blurry" because that word usually describes something negatively. Some people would probably sacrifice the sharpness to make the waterfall look transparent but nobody would do that just so it looks "blurry".
It's not about making games look blurry, it's about making them look correct, or as close to how the developers intended. It's a sharpness VS intended look apparently. It's fine if you prefer sharpness but for others it might be useful to know what they are missing.
Allow me to disagree then. Yes, you are looking a game as it is, it's RAW output. But it's not that a game looks as it looks on lesser technology because of said technology. It looks as it is because the developer used said lesser technology to his advantage in order to create fake extra effects that are a part of the overall art direction. It's not only the transparencies. It's also the extra colors and how the pixels get rounded at their edges, if you zoom in on a CRT you can see that.But the waterfall factually isn’t transparent. The devs used the fact that a 1-pixel-wide gap would be blurred together by the low picture quality to create an illusion. Most people do not wish to downgrade the picture quality of the entire game to make some waterfalls look kinda transparent.
With few exceptions, I’d rather just see the game as it is rather than how it looked on lesser technology.
The issue is that most people don't know better. They just buy a "retro" game on some service and have no idea how these games are really supposed to look or at least, how they looked. And the majority of "CRT filters" in official releases are barebones, nothing more than an overlay of lines (and let's not even talk about emulation inaccuracies that don't exist in proper homebrew emulators).Anyone who cares about those waterfalls can get a secondhand CRT or find an emulator with a satisfactory effect. It’s not like there’s a lack of ability to see the games on the intended hardware; Those TVs are still in existence, and people are trying to make it look like that in emulators.
Oh Boys, you're all going wrong thinking new technologies are always better than the old ones.
As I was a young boy, now I am 40 Years old, i listen to my music via some thin called CD. Uncompressed Music was saves on this thing.
Now..... 90 percent listen to streams mp3s...
I reactivated my portable CD Player some weeks ago and was totally shocked that it sounds much better than what I expected.
The same is it with crt and lcd.
Was watching a couple of DF Retro videos showing some Genesis games and they looked horrible with all those raw pixels and heavy dithering.
And it's the same thing with modern releases of old games. At best you get a bilinear filter and a very simple scan-line overlay.
RetroArch is the only platform where i can see these games look somewhat correct, if i use a good CRT shader that also blends dithering.
Here is a very good video that explains what i'm talking about:
And here are some other examples. Here's how people today think a Genesis game looks like:
Here's how it's supposed to look:
Notice how the colors blend with each other. This creates extra colors and even transparencies in other cases. More examples here: http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-case-for-composite.html
And here are some RAW screen-shots VS CRT captures. Look how rounded the sprites in the CRT images look despite the zooming.
In conclusion, these games are not supposed to look like a sharp, pixellated mess. The common CRT and even the composite blending was something the developers had in mind when designing these games. Without those its like you are missing an important layer and it's not the result the developers wanted. And this is why most indie "retro" 2D games look so dad IMO, it's because they get their reference from raw emulator images instead of how the games actually looked. We never had to see sharp, fat pixels on our CRTs with our composite cables.
No good solution. If you show scanlines or filters in a YouTube video, due to scaling variation between devices, it winds up looking horrible and messy. Raw pixels are the only way to ensure a clean presentation. That's why filmed shots are often mixed up in there to demonstrate what it can look like on a real CRT.This is an awesome video by DF but in other videos of retro games they still show them as raw pixels
I would expect something more accurate from them, or at least mention something about it. The Sparkster video was especially painful to watch because that game uses a lot of dithering that needs to be blended.
Maybe D dark10x could comment on that?
You are right, scanlines always look uneven in videos. But is any other filter like composite blending or bilinear possible? At least for games that use a lot of dithering?No good solution. If you show scanlines or filters in a YouTube video, due to scaling variation between devices, it winds up looking horrible and messy. Raw pixels are the only way to ensure a clean presentation. That's why filmed shots are often mixed up in there to demonstrate what it can look like on a real CRT.
The video makes this pretty clear actually. Of course it won't be readable on a 480i CRT TV. These should be kept for 240p sources, which they are perfect for.This video is so misleading... Not long ago i used to play with a playstation 3 in and 26” CRT TV, and was almost impossible to read the subtitles, and was hard to see the details. Maybe the ultra high-end CRTs where better but not what everbody had.
I'm kind of thorn between the NTSC / CRT filters and clear image, so I switch from clean to dirty from time to time.I know that the dithering you see in the old Mega Drive/Genesis games was a trick to fake transparency, but...I actually like the way it looks on modern displays. Very crisp, and to me aesthetically pleasing for some weird reason...
When it comes to the question of aspect ratio, I tend to ignore the "correct aspect ratio" when using emulators since fairly recently, simply because a lot of games stretch too much horizontally (circles becoming ovals, etc.).
Oh Boys, you're all going wrong thinking new technologies are always better than the old ones.
As I was a young boy, now I am 40 Years old, i listen to my music via some thin called CD. Uncompressed Music was saves on this thing.
Now..... 90 percent listen to streams mp3s...
I reactivated my portable CD Player some weeks ago and was totally shocked that it sounds much better than what I expected.
The same is it with crt and lcd.
This video is so misleading... Not long ago i used to play with a playstation 3 in and 26” CRT TV, and was almost impossible to read the subtitles, and was hard to see the details. Maybe the ultra high-end CRTs where better but not what everbody had.
Refresh rates are a laugh. I remember buying my first HD tv in the 2000s and was like WTF? Everything had this slight comet trail effect. After a while you get used to it, but for something that was around $2,000, you'd think it would be as good as basic colour tv technology from like 1962.We regressed in terms of display technology. Lcd tech is smaller, more efficient but games simply looked better on crt tv's and monitors. I recently visited my buddy from another city, he has an old school crt monitor and still plays modern games on that screen. He even repaired it twice, I think the caps went bad and the other time the something related to the tube itself went wrong. It's crt but it has rgb analog inputs. I played a little bit bfV on that screen and I was amazed. That thing in 720i resolution looks better then modern flat panel lcd tv's reproducing 4k content. I was shocked. And the refresh rate, my god how we regressed.
No no, it's not misleading at all. You're talking about a television - we're talking about computer monitors. They are *VERY* different things.This video is so misleading... Not long ago i used to play with a playstation 3 in and 26” CRT TV, and was almost impossible to read the subtitles, and was hard to see the details. Maybe the ultra high-end CRTs where better but not what everbody had.
This video is so misleading... Not long ago i used to play with a playstation 3 in and 26” CRT TV, and was almost impossible to read the subtitles, and was hard to see the details. Maybe the ultra high-end CRTs where better but not what everbody had.
Raw pixels are a sin.
You can argue all you want about those games looking exactly like they look unfiltered when devs were making them, but I can't find any value in the idea that they were meant to look like that to the final consumer. S-Video and RGB cables clean up the image from old analogue consoles but they also get rid of all the image artefacts that give the games their intended look in the process (OK, I'll admit that the use of "intended" here is questionable).
I have no interest in nostalgia,.
I am not questioning this.A lot of arcade games from the day used RGB. Master System and certainly Megadrive supported RGB natively. Sega even shipped the Saturn in Europe with an RGB scart cable, originally. Amiga owners preferred monitors if they could afford them too. Magazines used to use RGB sources for screenshots where possible. It was a source of frustration to have beautiful sprite work corrupted by interferrence and loss in the analogue signal.
CRTs forever, but RF and even S-video at times make me want to clean my eyes out with bleach. Going from RF to RGB was like ascending!
Here's what you can do:What are some good Retroarch shaders for SNES that approximate an old CRT TV with composite A/V Cables? I just slap in NTSC Gauss Scanlines 256 or something like that, but I think it blurs the image a bit much. OTOH using it without some kind of gaussian blur makes it look too pixelated and sharp. Maybe I've been playing without filters for so long I just need to get used to it?
The games don't look bad on a CRT.that's the reason your games look that bad, even today.