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Comment by eigenvalue | Hacker News Reader

It's so weird how much better these games looked in my memory (e.g., Dune 2, C&C). I guess when the graphics were so primitive, your imagination filled in the rest. When I look at them now, I realize that units were just a handful of pixels. Then again, I'm looking at it on a 6k 30" LCD screen, when back then I had an 18" CRT.

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The CRT effect makes a night-and-day difference. The art was not designed with perfect, crisp square pixels in mind at all. You can reproduce the effect in Dosbox with Auto-CRT; if you're so inclined, eXoDOS just released v6 a few weeks ago which bundles CRT shader configurations for every single game in the collection. Or if you know how to use ReShade.

Ironically, you would need something like an 8K display at 144Hz+ to fully reproduce the visual effect of a CRT, which basically doesn't exist yet. But even with just 4K the filters make a huge, huge difference.

Cool, I’ll try that out.

This feels like a case where real-time upscaling would make a world of difference.

"Zoom. Enhance."

There is a device (for $750) that is probably worth buying - https://twitter.com/8bitesquire/status/1724518121174618281

Why buy a $750 FPGA that emulates a CRT when you can buy a $20 CRT?

Or a $0 pixel shader?

It depends on the customer :) - I agree with you both, especially on the shader, though I don't think you can find reliable CRT under $200 (maybe?) - I was lucky and found one for free dropped as garbage outside someones house. But it's rare to find such.

The main thing is portability (move to another studio, etc. - just carry the device). The customer - lol, kids nowadays want to make old effects.

You can still find a complete Pentium computer for even less.

My kids are playing Monkey Island 2 this week, and its the opposite. I remember it being pixelated (and it is) but the backdrops are astonishingly pretty, the colors vibrant, the animation quirky and fun.

(And no, I'm not playing the remastered version)

I remember playing Dune 2 and having a blast. Later played the c&c series and also had a blast.

Then went back to Dune 2, and oh boy those controls were terrible! You get used to new things so fast that you forget how it was before.

I remember that most with renegade x to renegade thinking it's basically the same graphics wise in my minds eye but nooo.

There are good shaders that emulate CRT. Without them, games look like horse*

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