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Comment by mlok | Hacker News Reader

This video has a lot of excellent examples as well : https://youtu.be/nw2QfPREu-Q

Especially transparency at 0:39 https://youtu.be/nw2QfPREu-Q?t=39 and 9:46 https://youtu.be/nw2QfPREu-Q?t=9m46s

Also the fan animation at 2:15 : https://youtu.be/nw2QfPREu-Q?t=2m15s

Having lived that era, I believe people these days romanticize too much the limitations of CRT. Simply adding a scan line / CRT grid filter isn't even how consumer-grade CRT TVs looked like: distortion, blurriness, color bleeding, static, cheap selector interference... it was fine when you looked at your TV from several feet, but even arcades preferred to use high-quality CRTs instead of exploiting its side effects because you would look at them up close, like we use monitors now.

Right now is a great time to appreciate the exquisiteness involved in pixel art, its perfect pixels and perfect colors, scaled to high resolution with sharpness. I agree some of the genius of working with CRT limitations is lost, but the overall majority of it became a pleasure to see.

Now, vector arcade games, those really are a sin to play on anything but a vector CRT :P

> Simply adding a scan line / CRT grid filter isn't even how consumer-grade CRT TVs looked like: distortion, blurriness, color bleeding, static, cheap selector interference...

This is why I find many "scanline filters" so jarring. My CRT experiences may have come from the last decade of CRTs, but I've never actually seen the dark, black grid hovering above the PS2 graphics from my youth. Yet, when I enable CRT emulation in many emulators, it looks like someone put a plastic grate in front of my screen.

The scanlines were there, but they didn't have the contrast a black overlay has on a modern flat screen.

I have seen some (GPU intensive) filters that do mimick CRTs more accurately, but to display them well, you need a 4K monitor or better, simply because the effects applied to the individual pixels involves multiple pixels of blend/distortion, often in a non-linear fashion to mimick the bulging screen. ShaderGlass was the first tool that actually allowed me to see some old games as I remembered them (after a bit of tweaking).

I think most people agree that the clarity of modern displays are a huge benefit, but when playing older games, a lot of nuance is lost. When (much younger) developers start emulating older pixel art styles without having ever seen the blurry, distorted CRT graphics, you get this weird anachronistic super-crisp pixel art that's supposed to be retro. Still looks good, but they're graphically off even if they copy directly off of old sprite sheets.

I think one factor is that the PS2 generally outputs 480i signals with scanlines shifting vertically every frame to fill gaps (so you don't see them unless you're tracking a vertically moving object), while many CRT shaders default to simulating a progressive signal with fixed scanline gaps.

> even arcades preferred to use high-quality CRTs instead of exploiting its side effects because you would look at them up close, like we use monitors now.

But even high-quality CRT's had gaussian blur. In no case when using CRT's would a pixel be represented as a tiny square, which is what you see in a lot of modern "retro" art. The "pixel" of native CRT displays is always a smoothly blurred point sample.

> The "pixel" of native CRT displays is always a smoothly blurred point sample.

And that's why CRTs were capable of displaying different resolutions in a way that was appealing.

When I bought my first LCD monitor for my computer I was hit with instant regret. The early LCDs were :

Horrible at anything other than native resolution. If your computer hardware wasn't good enough to run a new game at the highest resolution of your monitor, the game would look terrible. The scaling used to bring lower resolution pixels to fit the screen's native pixels was just terrible, terrible and terrible. I have no words that can describe just how bad the experience of playing games at a lower resolution than native was in that era.

CRT bluriness smoothed things around in a way that didn't actually look excessively blurry. LCDs running lower resolution games looked like you threw vaseline on them.

And they were also terrible in motion. Ghosting! Ghosting! Ghosting! Playing games like Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament didn't feel good on that stuff..

I played a lot of 320x200x256 games on high end PC CRT monitors in my life with no distortion, bluriness etc.

Trust me, they didn't look like the emulators show them.

PC monitors with RGB were a different ballgame, at least at that low resolution there was no distortion or bluriness as you say. Even PCs had games for composite video: https://youtu.be/niKblgZupOc?t=504

TVs though, especially on RF, were pretty darn blurry.

Oh, maybe i stopped before making a point. Even those high end CRT monitors still had free horizontal anti aliasing and pixel characteristics that made the image be perceived differently from how it looks on a LCD.

> Having lived that era, I believe people these days romanticize too much the limitations of CRT.

Yes, I do remember the colourful, blinky, not to say glamorous, 'white' of a VIC-20 or C64 connected via HF modulator to a TV. Still, coming from 'no computer, never encountered one' to such a device then it's difficult not to romanticize that time now. We were also at an very impressible age.

The transparency effects are NOT a byproduct of CRTs, but of the horrible artifacts of composite video.

How do I know? Because just yesterday I was playing with a Megadrive connected to a Trinitron PC monitor through a line doubler. It looks gorgeous, but there were no transparencies.

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