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Comment by ASalazarMX | Hacker News Reader

Same with retro emulators. Smooth, blended pixels just feel wrong.

Funny, I grew up playing the original DOOM and Quake, and when the Nintendo 64 came out with texture filtering I wanted to get that look into those games more than anything in the world (at least in Quake it did eventually get official support via GLQuake). My last playthroughs were at my screen's native rez with texture filtering, a remixed music pack, remastered audio, and with Brutal Doom installed, and the experience was like everything I dreamed Doom was back in the day. A retro-accurate version of the game just feels bland.

(On another note, Quake II RTX revitalizes an already great game, definitely check it out if you can run it)

I find it really hard to play Doom, Quake and Quake II with any sort of filtering or texture packs.

There's always something that ruins the immersion for me. Round pixels, for example? Can't do it.

Texture packs I can agree with. Maybe I just like the filtered textures look.

Ironically I like to play emulated 8/16bit games upscaled with no smoothing, when CRTs of the day actually did some smoothing

You can turn texture filtering off in the modern Doom 64 port and its night and day

But Doom 64 on the 64 had filtered textures! It's the one place where that was default!

Oh I know that's how it originally was. I think the N64 required it but I'm not sure. Either way I didn't play it at the time so I don't have any nostalgia for the look. But IMO it looks leagues better without.

I feel like you're my exact opposite. Quake 2 is a boring game and the RTX version is like spraying a fine mist of water all over Quake 2 and shining at it with a flashlight. Doom is best enjoyed largely untouched mechanically because its design is still unique and unrivaled. Brutal Doom completely throws everything off and turns it into an obnoxious gorefest.

We should meet and fight in a schoolyard some time.

I think the first Quake it's more fun than Quake 2. And a total conversion called Malice totally owns Quake2.

Q2 is pretty boring compared to modern shooters, but it is one of the last games from it's particular vintage style of corridor-shooter FPS, and it does it better than it's priors mechanically. Full 3D, autorun, mouselook, none of this click-to-aim, walk-by-default crap

Soon thereafter Call of Duty hit the scene and everything goes downhill from there (save Half-Life)

edit- I remember seeing the fake screenshots on the back of the box of D-ZONE and getting pissed my game didn't look like that. It only took 20 years or so!

Thing is, CRT displays do a kind of smoothing on pixels

https://twitter.com/CRTpixels/status/1408451743214616587

Very noticeable with NeoGeo games. A simple scanline filter (25%) is like night and day with Metal Slug.

That's a wonderful Twitter account. Instant follow.

also there are shaders in many emulators that apply this effect on modern monitors. but this is usually only for old console games, never seen one for pc games (but this crispy doom - or other doom modernizartion - could maybe incorporate them?)

https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/74hzx3/what_is_t...

https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/CRT_Shaders

https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/CRT-Royale

But old games were not pixelated. The low resolution tied with the blurry, leaky old CRTs made sure of that.

The problem is our monitors, nowadays, are too good so we see pixels that we never saw back then.

That is true. I don't mind the pixel-perfect upgrade, but I wonder if any texture filter can do justice to vector games like Asteroids, where the bullets really lighted up the screen, it felt like they were dangerous and explosive.

I guess it all boils down to personal preferences. I grew up with consoles that used huge pixels, so in my mind they were perfect squares.

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