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JoeyJungle · Jan 30, 2014

I generally dislike emulation filters. I really, really love the NTSC/blur filter in Higan/BSNES, though. I tried to put it into other emulators (pSX, epsxe, snes9x for games I can't run in bsnes, etc.) and could not figure out how to do it.

Anyone know how?

Shadow Hog · Jan 30, 2014

I'm not too fussed, honestly, since I like my pixels plain, but there are some cases where I can appreciate it - notably, the Genesis's shitty composite output was abused to no end, having vertical bars of color blend together to create faux transparency effects. That's completely lost when you have a pixel-perfect image, and as such I sometimes turn a filter that emulates that on, just to see what the artist's interpretation kinda-sorta was.

For example:

dark10x said:
Here's an even more interesting example, I think.

Pitfall makes heavy use of a dithering effect to give the impression of solid colors. When viewed via a composite connection the end result was smooth color patterns while an RGB connection reveals the heavy dithering used to deliver such shades.

So many games from this era were designed to be viewed through a "fuzzy lens", so to speak, which helped to eliminate visual flaws. Donkey Kong Country looked unbelievable on a CRT via composite but, as displays became capable of resolving greater detail, the effect was shattered.

RGB - Composite

That said, I can live without ever seeing rainbow banding or dot crawl ever again.

Vipershark said:
Yes, because I prefer to play my games without feeling as though I have a visual impairment of some sort.

I don't stretch them, I scale them up by nearest neighbor so it keeps the pixels sharp.

You can scale by nearest neighbor and still fix the aspect ratio while you're at it, y'know. Chocolate Doom does just that; scales the 320x200 image n times horizontally, n*1.2 times vertically, resulting in an image that's correctly representing the graphics as intended, while still having sharp, clean pixels, free of any bilinear filtering. (ZDoom also renders all the graphics at 1.2 times their height - again, because that's the intended aspect ratio - but lets you use HD resolutions on top of that, soooo there's that.)

chrislowe · Jan 30, 2014

Yes graphics were a blurry mess with composite / svhs back in the days.

Thats why you used a scart/rgb cable instead to get them square pixels just like in the arcades.

Guess the games looked worse in ntsc-countrys and thats why you think those filters looked "right"?.

darkpaladinmfc · Jan 30, 2014

Orayn said:
Scanlines and curvature are a matter of taste, but there are some NTSC display features that are absolutely worth reproducing, like the color palette and a slight blur.

Allow me to demonstrate with some Final Fantasy VI screens taken by The Exodu5:

Look at those Goddamn bricks!

What's the name of this filter?

Fox Mulder · Jan 30, 2014

I think they're neat, although a bit overdone at times. Not everyone can play on a CRT.

you can get some neat effects in retroarch, and it can make playing a NES on a HDTV more bearable.

Alo81 · Jan 30, 2014

So you guys haven't been to the Retroarch emulator thread right? Alright cool check these out.

Options!

Shadow Hog · Jan 30, 2014

chrislowe said:
Yes graphics were a blurry mess with composite / svhs back in the days.

Thats why you used a scart/rgb cable instead to get them square pixels just like in the arcades.

Guess the games looked worse in ntsc-countrys and thats why you think those filters looked "right"?.

Well, as I just pointed out one post above you, some games were deliberately designed with their quirks in mind, so... yeah, there are cases where it is more "right".

Ivan · Jan 30, 2014

Awesome thread. I like all that.

Valnen · Jan 30, 2014

Lactose_Intolerant said:
I like Might & Magic X's retro filter

Ew. Why intentionally make a game look bad like that?

Slamtastic · Jan 30, 2014

Valnen said:
Ew. Why intentionally make a game look bad like that?

Roto13 · Jan 31, 2014

The Sega 3D Classics on 3DS (the Genesis ones) have a mode that makes your screen shaped like an old tube TV and uses the 3D effect to make the centre pop out a bit more than the outside and it's amazing.

Kai Dracon · Jan 31, 2014

I like scanlines in general. There's no way around the fact that a lot of pixel art was created to compensate for the hardware it was displayed on. Blowing it up on super clean displays can sometimes create the effect of taking a piece of pointillism art and zooming too far in to appreciate the effect intended by the artist.

Vipershark · Jan 31, 2014

jett said:
I like NTSC filters on my old 8 and 16 bit games, they look the way how I remember they looked like.

This looks right.

This just looks wrong, the colors are just fucked up.

Washed-out and incorrect colors, extremely visible chromatic abberation, blur, and fuzziness looks right to you?

You sure you aren't just remembering a broken TV?

Zombie James · Jan 31, 2014

Vipershark said:
Washed-out and incorrect colors, extremely visible chromatic abberation, blur, and fuzziness looks right to you?

You sure you aren't just remembering a broken TV?

That's how we played games in the 80s. That's how they looked.

Lactose_Intolerant · Jan 31, 2014

Zombie James said:
That's how we played games in the 80s. That's how they looked.

yep, you either played on a crappy small tv if you were lucky or you had it plugged into your wooden family tv.

Vipershark · Jan 31, 2014

I know; I played thousands of hours on CRTs as a kid.
Just because "that's how it looked" doesn't mean it was good.

Most of these filtered screens look like a bad screenshot taken from ancient capturing software, then printed onto and scanned from a magazine.

As that one guy said, why not just emulate screen burn-in as well if you're going to go that far out of your way to make your TV look like it's 30 year old deprecated technology in bad condition?

Tain · Jan 31, 2014

chrislowe said:
Yes graphics were a blurry mess with composite / svhs back in the days.

Thats why you used a scart/rgb cable instead to get them square pixels just like in the arcades.

Guess the games looked worse in ntsc-countrys and thats why you think those filters looked "right"?.

Again, even the nicest CRTs with an RGB signal had softer pixel edges than what the usual emulators' untouched nearest neighbor integer scaled image has.

MrCunningham · Jan 31, 2014

Lactose_Intolerant said:
yep, you either played on a crappy small tv if you were lucky or you had it plugged into your wooden family tv.

Pretty much.

This:

On an old ass Quasar TV in my parents basement. That's how NES games were played for me and my siblings. I remember going from this to S-Video on the SNES, the difference was like night and day.

ItsTheNew · Jan 31, 2014

I love filters vs just raw pixels. Anything from making it look like how it did back in the day and adding filters like Hq4x for 16bit games

HisshouBuraiKen · Jan 31, 2014

The pure-pixel no-filter look is why new "retro-style" games always look off too me. Straight up pixels with nothing applied to them are too clean and jaggy, you need that CRT blurriness to really FEEL like an old game. Scott Pilgrim is a good example.

Of course one solution would be to play them ON a CRT...

EasyMode · Jan 31, 2014

Left: Bilinear
Middle: RetroArch's crt-normalgamma shader
Right: Nearest Neighbor

^ click for a full screenshot

I like the CRT shader, personally.

bishopcruz · Jan 31, 2014

The thing I hate is the fetishization of pixels that has kinda overtaken a lot of the gaming community. I have generally always used filters because any monitor you were using back in the day had an automatic filter applied due to the scanlines and how a CRT worked. The pixel art is amazing because of how it looked on an actual TV/Monitor, with burring included, not because of the chunky pixels so many seem to adore. The image was MEANT to have some blur to it, hence why even bilinear filtering can have some amazing results. Right now I usually use scanlines mixed with a slight filter beneath them, and it looks pretty much amazing.

HisshouBuraiKen · Jan 31, 2014

This topic reminded me of this article: http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/04/atari-emulator/

Yes Boss! · Jan 31, 2014

I love dithering (minority). Love it. One reason I adore PSP and Cube games. Simple scanlines are good. All that cab stuff is terrible. Terrible! Those handheld games blown up to HDTV size are kinda bad too. 3DS has a nice option where scanlines are apparent in 2D and square pixels are seen in full 3D...something nobody mentions. Love the screen texture options on the GBC games. Less is more more me but when blur is introduced it is a major drawback. A lot of the PC emulatirs are too heavy.

Go for what you like, though. Lots of options for different tastes.

Coda · Jan 31, 2014

It depends from console to console for me but I love my VGA box with scanline generator with my Dreamcast, even some 3D games like Project Justice look amazing with scanlines even though it wasn't meant for them. I play my PS2 on a 2006 13 inch Sony Trintitron and it looks great with component video, 2D games and 3D.

shuri · Jan 31, 2014

Most software emulators are terrible and look nothing like actual games running on real crts.. Its like the people behind them never actually saw an arcade game in the flesh

revolverjgw · Jan 31, 2014

Cuphead's art style is so incredibly authentic but the CRT-ish filter makes no sense

jett · Jan 31, 2014

Vipershark said:
Washed-out and incorrect colors, extremely visible chromatic abberation, blur, and fuzziness looks right to you?

You sure you aren't just remembering a broken TV?

Nope, I'm remembering what vidya gaemz looked like 20 years ago.

elektrixx · Jan 31, 2014

Fake scanlines are STUPID!

I like my pixels as raw as possible. I like sharp blocks on my old games. I'm looking into HDMI output for my N64 currently.

AcceptableGhost · Jan 31, 2014

I appreciate the effort and am glad that the attempt to preserve the look is being made but at the end of the day raw output + filters on a modern set does not really look like it does on a CRT. I will just play it raw on a modern set or use my CRT.

Doctor_Thomas · Jan 31, 2014

It's like people intentionally make games look worse to try and fill some weird nostalgia fetish. We got rid of scanlines and screen curve for a reason. Every time I see a ROM running with some weird post processing it just makes me sad that some people were playing on broken TVs.

Dawnblade · Jan 31, 2014

MrCunningham said:
Pretty much.

This:

On an old ass Quasar TV in my parents basement. That's how NES games were played for me and my siblings. I remember going from this to S-Video on the SNES, the difference was like night and day.

Please don't remind me. ;-;

Miguel81 · Jan 31, 2014

EasyMode said:
Left: Bilinear
Middle: RetroArch's crt-normalgamma shader
Right: Nearest Neighbor

^ click for a full screenshot

I like the CRT shader, personally.

I understand people liking the bilinear look, but the clarity of nearest neighbor trumps it IMO. The less said of visible scanlines the better--I don't remember seeing them on my old CRTs unless I put my face up to it.

Kai Dracon · Jan 31, 2014

MTMBStudios said:
I appreciate the effort and am glad that the attempt to preserve the look is being made but at the end of the day raw output + filters on a modern set does not really look like it does on a CRT. I will just play it raw on a modern set or use my CRT.

That's why I say go with a subtle scanline filter.

You get some spacing to the pixels that the original artists compensated for with their technique. But not the actual inferior CRT technology resulting in things like color bleeding.

Sometimes absolute authenticity isn't as good as making something look how you remember it (rather than how it actually was).

Crisium · Jan 31, 2014

Orayn said:
Scanlines and curvature are a matter of taste, but there are some NTSC display features that are absolutely worth reproducing, like the color palette and a slight blur.

Allow me to demonstrate with some Final Fantasy VI screens taken by The Exodu5:

Look at those Goddamn bricks!

Tell me how to do this.

Orayn · Jan 31, 2014

Crisium said:
Tell me how to do this.

IIRC those screens just have aspect ratio correction, an NTSC palette, and bilinear filtering. I didn't take them so I don't remember the exact details.

Sixfortyfive · Jan 31, 2014

At most, I tolerate a well-done visual filter. I never go out of my way to implement them, and I find most of them to be of questionable taste. I prioritize performance, responsiveness (lag), and clarity; everything else is secondary and not terribly important.

I need to finally unpack the XRGB3 and give it a whirl on my old CRT monitor. It's been too long since I've played some of my old systems on the real deal.

system11 said:
I feel a lot of these filters kind of miss the point and they look horribly fake. You show me something with fake scanlines and do you know what it looks like to me? Fake scanlines.

The emulating tired tubes and curvature is also bizarre, two of the least liked aspects of arcade gaming and people are trying to copy that thinking it's the genuine experience? When you're playing on a curved CRT, looking straight at it, the lines do not look curved unless the monitor chassis has fucked geometry, so there's no sense making them look obviously curved trying to fake it. Any machine correctly configured doesn't stretch the picture to cover all the edges either, so if you really want to do it properly you want a curved edge area of black around a square image.

Every time I see this stuff I just quietly say to myself "god damn you're missing the point". I have a big collection of actual arcade games, best money I ever spent was buying up some of the last remaining NOS CRTs to replace tired old ones. If you want a CRT experience, buy a CRT - there are still plenty of very serviceable Trinitrons around which will actually run the games at the right resolution with zero display lag and scanlines which are there because they're part of the (analogue) technology.

I wonder if someone has emulated screen burn yet? On second thoughts I think I'd prefer not to know.

Pretty much this.

Curvature filters don't look like a CRT. They look like a photograph of a CRT. What is wrong with you people.

Zombie James said:
That's how we played games in the 80s. That's how they looked.

And in the 1980s, I longed for the days when I no longer had to tolerate screen curvature and overscan.

The fetishism of those technological shortcomings absolutely baffles me.

EDIT: I mean, look at this shit:

Probably nothing was a bigger pet peeve of mine as a young gamer than this. That's one level of "authenticity" that I'm more than happy to leave dead and buried forever.

Anteater · Jan 31, 2014

I kind of like some of them but I don't use them, mostly because I don't remember how the originals were suppose to look with old crts, and I don't know what filter to use.

For example that ff6 picture looks nice but I wouldn't know where to start especially if I were to play something on a different emulator.

KiraXD · Jan 31, 2014

dante81 said:
I understand people liking the bilinear look, but the clarity of nearest neighbor trumps it IMO. The less said of visible scanlines the better--I don't remember seeing them on my old CRTs unless I put my face up to it.

yeah nearest neighbor is awesome as hell.
Ive posted this before.. but i prefer (well it really depends based game to game)

simple 4x (basically pixel for pixel upscale, no filters so it has glorious HD pixel art)

and sometimes i like to smooth things over with HQ4x which i assume is similar to nearest neighbor.

1st is simple 4x, second is HQ4x

Ban Puncher · Jan 31, 2014

Sup?

darkpaladinmfc · Jan 31, 2014

KiraXD said:
yeah nearest neighbor is awesome as hell.
Ive posted this before.. but i prefer (well it really depends based game to game)

simple 4x (basically pixel for pixel upscale, no filters so it has glorious HD pixel art)

and sometimes i like to smooth things over with HQ4x which i assume is similar to nearest neighbor.

That looks so bad :'(. Chrono Trigger doesn't deserve this.

alr1ght · Jan 31, 2014

KiraXD said:

hideous

maybe somebody can make a filter that shocks you when you touch the screen.

Sixfortyfive · Jan 31, 2014

Man Puncher said:
http://i.imgur.com/Ew2q8AL.jpg

Sup?

Enjoy your 1.5 extra frames of lag for the low, low price of ~$300.

Miguel81 · Jan 31, 2014

Anteater said:
I kind of like some of them but I don't use them, mostly because I don't remember how the originals were suppose to look with old crts, and I don't know what filter to use.

For example that ff6 picture looks nice but I wouldn't know where to start especially if I were to play something on a different emulator.

Bilinear Filtering is what I recommend. It's simple and gets the job done. I prefer no filters because I prioritize clarity.

Danny Dudekisser · Jan 31, 2014

Sixfortyfive said:
Enjoy your 1.5 extra frames of lag for the low, low price of ~$300.

1.5 frames? Where are you getting that from?

Ban Puncher · Jan 31, 2014

Chacranajxy said:
1.5 frames? Where are you getting that from?

Source: Mad Jealousy

Danny Dudekisser · Jan 31, 2014

Man Puncher said:
Source: Mad Jealousy

Mad Jealousy is a lying son of a bitch.

Sixfortyfive · Jan 31, 2014

Chacranajxy said:
1.5 frames? Where are you getting that from?

http://retrogaming.hazard-city.de/micomsoft.html

Man Puncher said:
Source: Mad Jealousy

My retro setups don't lag. Nothing for me to be jealous of.

Danny Dudekisser · Jan 31, 2014

Sixfortyfive said:
http://retrogaming.hazard-city.de/micomsoft.html

In scaling mode, maybe. Otherwise:

A word about the processing delay: the XRGB-mini is fast, really fast! In fact, it's so fast, that I don't even understand how it works. I haven't measured the actual delay(s) yet, but from a comparison with the XRGB-3's B1 mode, the Mini doesn't "feel" any slower. The delay is supposed to be shown on the full status screen. Depending on the input resolution, the output resolution and the processing mode, the delays shown range from 1.03ms to 9.83ms. Even with proper 480i deinterlacing the delay is shown is with practically no delay. The weird thing about this is that a pixel-adaptive video deinterlacer needs to buffer at least two fields to be able to compute a new frame with information from both fields. Even weirder is that Micomsoft themselves state in the manual, that for timing-critical games the game mode should be used (instead of Standard mode) - though the Standard mode doesn't rate any slower (judging from the info screen). I'll look into this sometime soon, but any way this turns out: the Framemeister is fast enough to support even the most hardcore bullet hell shoot'em ups (or Bemani or whatever is your cup of tea).

Zombie James · Jan 31, 2014

I'm partial to this GTU shader:

Near the bottom of this post.

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