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Comment by fredoralive | Hacker News Reader

Slight rant, but I wish these CRT simulators could simulate decent CRTs, they always seem to emulate really shit ones with huge curvature and really exaggerated scanlines etc, can't they emulate a nice Trinitron TV or something. They always just look fake to me.

(Yeah, I know there is possibly a bit of memory cheating, plus I used RGB SCART for the later period of CRT use that avoided the composite problems).

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The ones I've seen included with MAME (or maybe it was a MAME front end) are pretty easy to configure to get the look of a nice CRT display. Maybe because of the focus on emulating high-end arcade hardware instead of the sort of television set that the typical NES was plugged into.

Shovel Knight is the only game that actually gets down and does CRT emulation correctly is this one: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/KylePittman/20150420/241442/C...

That article has a huge misunderstanding when it comes to ghosting. In normal CRT TVs or monitors you could not see the previous frame at all.

The whole frame, no. But due to the persistence of phosphors, any pixel which weren't re-excited in a replacement frame would have some amount of "ghosting" while the phosphors "cool down" from the previous frame. The effect is more pronounced on black backgrounds, and nonexistent on white backgrounds, with other colors being heavily dependent on the contents of previous frames. Higher-quality CRTs also tended to have less persistence (my VT 520, for example, has virtually no visible persistence).

It's been a while, but IIRC higan has a filter that just simulates NTSC composite effects without simulating the whole CRT. It's especially useful for things like SNES pseudo-alpha transparency (which relies on exploiting NTSC composite artifacting).

I can't wait for cheap OLEDs to start seeing CRT emulation that would look kind of like the real thing.

The good ones do! Try Micro64, its CRT simulation is completely configurable and you can set it up to match a high spec CRT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1qEP2vMe-I

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