Pixel-Perfect retro gaming on LCD 480p EDTVs | Hacker News Reader

Pixel-Perfect retro gaming on LCD 480p EDTVs

blog.gingerbeardman.com

51 pointsmsephton27 comments

The problem with a solution like this is that you are limited to square pixels. Not all games and systems used square pixels, because CRTs didn't really _have_ pixels, only scanlines. Their vertical resolution was discrete, but their horizontal resolution was continuous as they displayed an analog signal.

For example, most SNES games ran at 256x224 (and were slightly letterboxed to fit the roughly 240 lines on a 4:3 NTSC CRT, though the border generally disappeared in the overscan area). The pixels were taller than they were wide.

Kirby's Dreamland 3 on the SNES ran at 512x224. Pixels were much wider than they were tall.

The original Doom ran at 320x200 in VGA mode 13h. It was not letterboxed but displayed in 4:3 on CRT monitors, so pixels were narrower than they were tall.

SNES and DOS do not use standard resolutions. However, PS2, GameCube, Wii, Xbox & Xbox 360, all Sega consoles, a wide variety of arcade hardware, etc. do. Anything that runs at standard hardware, which, barring super nintendo and certain PS1 software, IS the vast majority of the retro gaming catalog, will look awesome on these.

PS1 is an oddball. Most games run at standard resolution, like the Final Fantasy games. They will look awesome on these. Some, however, do not. Spyro runs at odd resolutions, similar to SNES games.

That being said, I still think this is an awesome option for retro gaming where CRT is not permitted.

I think there was a typo. If pixels were taller than they were wide at 256x224, then they'd be even more so at 512x224

When emulating original arcade cabinet games it gets even harder to be pixel perfect. Many used custom horizontal and vertical scanning frequencies because they were speccing the specific CRT in the game's cabinet. This changed not only the frame rate but the number of scan lines.

Emulating a collection of these games precisely requires a CRT that can scan at multiple frequency ranges. Fortunately, such monitors were made by arcade monitor manufacturers both for new OEM cabinets and monitor field replacement in existing cabinets. For my custom emulation cabinet I chose a Wells Gardner D9200, widely considered one of the best such monitors ever made. Fortunately, I originally built my cabinet back in 2008 when these CRTs were still being made. Of course, the PC and software have been updated many times but IMHO, there is no better single CRT for broad-based emulation of many titles in one system.

The D9200 accepts analog RGB input and will scan at an incredibly wide range of frequencies enabling the cabinet to emulate virtually all raster CRT based arcade games. Once you acquire such a monitor, proper emulation requires feeding it a native analog signal to avoid external transcoding. The last graphics card manufactured with native analog output was the Radeon R9 280x released in 2013. It's also the fastest GPU available for a purist emulation system. Although analog retro emulation doesn't typically require a GPU that fast, it can be useful if you also want to natively emulate titles from sixth generation home consoles such as PS2, Sega Dreamcast and Nintendo Gamecube which had 3D titles but still output analog video to CRTs at 480P.

To complete a pixel perfect emulation system you'll need to run a special version of the MAME arcade emulator called GroovyMAME, which works together with a specially hacked graphics card driver called CRT EMUDriver. This driver allows precisely setting the scanning frequencies of analog graphics card output. The maintainers of GMAME release new versions monthly in sync with MAME and have been doing so for over a decade. If you really want to do it right, I recommend the active community of hardcore retro analog purists at http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/board,52.0.html. Having played, worked on and owned many analog CRT based game cabs in the 1980s, I thought I knew a lot about retro analog emulation but I always learn something new there.

So called "Pixel Perfect" retro analog emulation of original arcade cabinets and home consoles isn't necessarily easy but it is possible - and IMHO absolutely worth it.

> Their vertical resolution was discrete, but their horizontal resolution was continuous as they displayed an analog signal

True, but based on the frequency and that Nyquist math, we can solve for the actual pixel size.

Not a pixel perfect representation of the past.

Claiming pixel perfect is wrong when the original experience had the channels making up the pixel colour arranged differently. Most gaming in those days were PC CRT's or TV screens.

Exhbit A: https://www.oled-a.org/uploads/9/6/8/6/96867108/published/al...

To be fair they do explictly say:

"That said, CRT emulation isn’t really the goal here—we just want a display that is able to display these low resolutions without any scaling."

in the article.

If you can tolerate borders, integer 4x scaling on 27" 4K monitor gets almost exactly the same physical viewable area as 20" 480p monitor. As a bonus you can do more crt emulation tricks with the higher pixel density, and color reproduction most likely is better too.

And modern panels will likely look better in motion with faster pixel response times than older panel tech.

The difference is not so pronounced. The Philips EDTV I have and of which there are photos in the blog post is a high end IPS so motion and response time, colour and brightness, are all very good and not a concern. Far better than you'd imagine.

Sure, there are lots of options. Your solution is equally valid but very different. Colour reproduction isn't a pronounced difference in my experience.

..this seems almost like the opposite of what I'm looking for in retro gaming, unless I'm misunderstanding something. Retroarch has a whole archive of shaders that are meant to simulate scanlines and other pixel imperfections (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC99UbS8-JI).

I don't think this is a misunderstanding, but rather simply that you're happy enough using shaders. This is for people who want real native resolution using the best display from the period the games were available. Probably only a niche of the "retro" scene.

Using period lcd is niche even inside the retrogaming niche. For ps2/xbox/gc/dc era, crt would be more typical choice and for x360/ps3/wiiu 1080p lcd makes more sense. So this edtv lcd falls bit awkwardly between the eras.

CRT would be the most common choice, yeah. These EDTV LCD were prohibitively expensive, at least for me at the time (~2004). Maybe it was between eras, it's a good point. We can consider Dreamcast (1999), PS2 (2000), Xbox (2001), my EDTV (2004), Xbox 360 (2005), PS3 (2006), Wii (2007)...though with later PS3 and Xbox 360 releases 4:3 support started to dry up, which was a broader problem.

The best display of the period was CRTs. LCDs back then were terrible. Plus games (particularly in the 8 and 16 bit era) were made to take advantage of the burring that CRTs had. They used that to create new colours.

Using an LCD is usually regarded as the least authentic way to play retro games.

Now if that’s how people want to play games then that’s fine. People can enjoy their media however they want. But the GP is correct that this isn’t technically pixel perfect.

"Enhanced Definition TVs are an almost forgotten range of TVs from the early 2000s that offer pixel perfect gaming for everything from NES, SNES and genesis/Mega Drove through PS1 and Saturn to Dreamcast. If you're willing to look a little harder even some PlayStation 2 and Xbox 360 games. They're a great option if your available space and budget don't stretch to CRT TVs."

> The term refers to devices capable of displaying 480-line or 576-line signals in progressive scan, commonly referred to as 480p[60] (NTSC-HQ) and 576p[50] (PAL/SECAM) respectively, as opposed to interlaced scanning, commonly referred to as 480i (NTSC) or 576i (PAL, SECAM).

My daughter and I were recently playing Super Mario Bros 2 on my childhood NES and an old TV, and I was struck by how fantastic the shiny cherries looked, implemented with a single white pixel. An emulator on a modern computer, even with retro CRT effects, somehow completely fails to replicate this.

Another thing that struck me was the animated shine on coins and question blocks in the original SMB; they look like glorious polished bronze glinting in bright sunlight. I don’t understand why this would be lost in the emulator.

> An emulator on a modern computer, even with retro CRT effects, somehow completely fails to replicate this.

Just curious, what shaders have you tried? Notably there is "Sony Megatron" shader out there for HDR displays that is supposed to be pretty good. Unfortunately I don't have the hardware at hand to try it out.

I have two beautiful Trinitrons and though they are both 480i they draw as fast as the console tells the electron beam to shoot and i wouldn't trade them for anything. May i interest you in a game of Duck Hunt?

I have CRTs too. For emergencies.

What's the problem with scaling up by even numbers, i.e. 2:1 or 3:1?

I think the article doesn't consider those to be scaling, which was slightly confusing.

Yeah, I could have gone into the differences between native resolution vs integer scaling vs integer scaling with simulated "scan lines". Maybe in another post. This one was written a couple of years ago.

Nothing inherently wrong with integer scaling, as long as you are aware you end up seeing more of the colour of each "pixel" as it is 4- or 6-times as big, with less/none of the space in-between, so there is a subtle change to the perception of the image. I'm fine with that I touch on this in the article though I probably could have gone into more depth. I wrote this a couple years ago.

The biggest issue is that CRT TVs add some bleed/blurring between pixels, which was taken into account when designing artwork.

"Pixel perfect" LCDs (upscaled or not) thus show a very different (and less pleasing) picture than what we've seen in CRT era.

You're spot on. The Philips LCD EDTV that I have is very close to the "aperture grille" look, but of course completely different in how it's achieved (through wide gaps between rows of the RGB triplets).

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