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Comment by prmoustache | Hacker News Reader

Aren't people interested with that kind of retro console really more interested in scoring an Sony Trinitron and the original console in the second hand market instead?

I don't see the newer generation getting suddenly attracted by the primitive graphics. Only the nostalgic, hardcore retro gamers do really care about that. And these are the kind of people who want the exact real experience, which mean using a CRT TV/monitor and the real machine. Only concession they sometimes do is using a cartdridge with sdcard support.

And it is not like those old Ataris are rare and difficult to find which would justify the existence of alternatives. I see a few ones available for around ~50€ in the local market, less than half the price of that thing.

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CRT monitors being out of production is the single biggest impediment to authentic retro gaming. It just doesn’t look anywhere near the same on a modern display, unless maybe if you use the most advanced CRT shaders on a high-powered PC with a 4K+ display, and then you still have the higher latency.

I got one of these four years ago so I could use an old VCR with a modern TV. Works great! Amazon shows no longer available, but similar products can be found for about $10.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07QPS7BK8

Nobody's having issues connecting them to modern TVs, the issue is they don't look even remotely the same.

Well, maybe nobody here is having issues, but right now I own only one monitor with a composite video input. None of the other dozen TVs and monitors I own have one. Fortunately most DTVs can still display NTSC RF, so that's also an option for old equipment.

Here are some pictures that illustrate the difference: https://wackoid.com/game/10-pictures-that-show-why-crt-tvs-a...

And here's some retro-arch shader comparisons:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4QOHe4bOZc

Interesting. What's the opinion on OLED? I've been pretty happy with the results connecting my Nintendo Wii to one.

Pretty much all modern displays are too sharp for low-resolution bitmaps designed for a CRT. The whole modern "pixel art" where you see the art being made up of visible squares is not what you actually would have seen in the 8/16-bit console eras on a TV. Later arcade cabinets were much sharper, but still pixels were more like overlapping circles with Gaussian blur than they were squares.

The Wii is fine on OLED, the issue is with older consoles. Anything designed for TV's before 720p was a thing are where you will run into display disparities.

I’ve often wondered of the feasibility of some kind of special built LED monitor with a custom chip to handle real-time (within a frame or two) scan line generation and CRT mask / phosphor glow emulation built in, with a slightly curved glass in front of it to complete the illusion.

That way, to my uneducated mind, the monitor itself would be handling the CRT shader effects and could accept any input, including real 80s/90s/00s devices.

But it’s quite likely that I’m underestimating what it would take to have a dedicated input processor in a display that works as well as the GPU shaders do, and underestimating the minimum amount of input lag required.

You could certainly integrate a shader into a monitor using a sufficiently powerful GPU or equivalent. But looking at https://i0.wp.com/wackoid.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/CRT... for example, you'd need at least 10 times the original resolution, which for NTSC would translate to roughly the same vertical resolution as an 8K display, if not more.

The curved glass wouldn't be necessary, nor very desirable, IMO. Trinitron TVs were approximatly flat and great for CRT gaming.

Some are, some aren't. I happily got the NES and SNES retro consoles when they came out and I play them on a modern TV or monitor. I don't care about the CRT scanlines and artifacting. (I do care about a CRT's lagless instant response time, which is an issue for some games. I do have HDMI monitors with as low lag time as you can get.)

The old Atari consoles are common, but it's hit and miss as to whether they work well or at all, particularly the power supply and also the controllers. It's reasonable to spend a few bucks on some modern hardware if you want. I probably wouldn't play Atari games quite enough to justify it myself.

This might be very subjective, but NES games were actually enjoyable. 2600 era games, while they were enjoyable for the time, were instantly obsoleted IMHO once the NES came around and you had games with stories, no matter how thin, and endings and such. The whole "high score" era of games, I personally have no interest in going back to those at all. Maybe one or two games of Grand Prix and River Raid, but I know I would get bored really quick.

I'd recommend some of the 2-player games, like Combat.

I have the original one (a heavy sixer), but connecting to a modern TV is a bit of a pain. I installed the modchip and have hi-def HDMI-to-Component adapter, and colors are still off, and overall image has some artifacts.

I think the 2600+ hits a sweet spot for nostalgic GenX-ers who don't want the hassle of making a 50+ yr-old console working with modern TVs. Plus, at $129, it's actually cheaper than buying a used console + converters.

I have many HDMI TVs, but no CRT (nor the space). I would consider this just for the HDMI connection, since I still have my old collection of games and controllers lying around. Getting my original console connected to HDMI doesn't really work.

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