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Comment by jcrites | Hacker News Reader

Are there any emulators that try to account for this?

(I did a brief search and came across graphics libraries and discussions about shaders, but didn't find anything easily downloadable...)

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Yes, quite a few! This topic tends to draw in resident experts, but what I can offer is that the complexity you experienced is because CRT shaders are designed around the qualities and features of modern display hardware with the intent to accurately reproduce the effects of a CRT. Your display matters.

These aren't generic visual imitations like early Super Eagle or scanline filters. The ones I've been using require a 4K 120HZ OLED for contrast and latency, and to be able to accurately represent how the frames would be rendered over a CRT's pixels. It's pretty wild how good it is.

Which ones do you use?

Well, that's the complicated part. For NTSC content, you might use an NTSC shader with a color hack or shadow mask, integer scaling, and either RBG, composite, RF, or S-Video depending on the generation of console or cabinet you're going for. Some people just want to recreate the experience of their childhood TV, others want to model a quirk of a specific tube or board rev. Lots of options!

If you haven't, check the libretro forums for "new-sonkun-crt-guest-advanced-presets-thread". I've only tried with RetroArch for management, but it's not limited to that.

Oh yes, for example https://docs.libretro.com/shader/crt/ and https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/CRT_shaders

One I remember is [0], mostly because of the excellent accompanying blogpost about how it works [1].

[0]: https://piratehearts.itch.io/supercrt [1]: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/crt-simulation-in-...

A bunch, I knew of some of these filters from using SNES9x over a decade ago: https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/NTSC_filters

  s/a decade/two decades/

Yeah, it's getting there.

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