One thing I love to collect are tiny CRTs. I actually grew up watching Star Trek on a boom box with a television built in (what the hell happened to it, I dont know).
They are awesome! All the fun of a CRT without the pain of it being heavy and taking up a lot of space.
Hell yes! Those are endgame as far as I can tell. I will admit I also scored one! Where I used to live there was an electronic flea market, which was a genuine treasure trove for people like us. Alas, I have never powered it on. When I moved I wrapped up all my little TVs and stored them away. They are accessible now, but I need to procure the cables and adapters to make them work.
My goal is to make a shelf or some kind of bespoke table to display and use them as I please.
I also got a little Sony Trinitron and it is beautiful.
Also, I am a massive dumbass. My sister used to own one of the last produced Sony Trinitrons. Flatscreen, built in DVD and VCR player. That was the perfect television. I let it go because kid me was an idiot (not as dumb as adult me, unfortunately. damn).
Yeah, there’s a crazy amount of tricks they employed to bring the sprites to life in a way that just isn’t possible on modern displays. The sharp pixel look is actually an unfortunate byproduct of the transition to newer tech.
Abusing and exploiting slotmasks and such were what made games designed for CRTs look so much better on them. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work backwards, because newer games designed for LCDs and LEDs don’t look any better or worse on CRTs, outside of overscan and resolution issues.
For real though many modern pixel art titles use these same color techniques, and while they do not depend on crt blending them at all, they can often see slight visual benefits from the pixel blending that is possible with a modern shader adding that effect.
Fight n’ Rage has a built in set of shaders that do just this and it is beautiful. It is on by default, but still optional.
Running shredders revenge with a very mild crt effect also looks really good on a lot of the blended colors.
Sonic Mania has a very good built-in CRT shader. It’s not a perfect recreation, but it think it looks excellent! And I also think it looks really great on a CRT using a downscaler.
Personally I am shutting down my server in the midnights to make it relax for a bit. #MentallySupportingOurHomeServers Butt yes, I still agree with the comments above, even if theserver is not directly connected on Internet, upgrading is mandstory nowadays. Bots are everywhere, especially nowadays with all of these AI tools.
A lot of games depend on a CRT for color blending / smoothing / transparency effects. I actually don’t really like how nearly all 8 / 16bit games look on modern displays, filters generally don’t do a good enough job emulating the look.
Some games did transparency by alternating frames which on interlaced sets would draw every other line per frame or something along those lines.
Those effects do not appear in screenshots or generally on any progressive scan modern display without specific emulation
Some examples : m.youtube.com/watch?v=y6NLXga1i0M the first two look horrible but the third shows the blending more like how it would have originally appeared.
That’s so cool. I never considered the sort of analog nature of the frame being redrawn being used to create unique effects. If I understand the intent was that on older sets the previous frame would “fade” instead of turning instantly on or off it produced a transparency effect.
Yeah, you’re pretty much right. Interlacing complicates it a bit more because not only would the previous frame “fade” but half of the frame was drawn, every other line, and then the next half. So it didn’t look like a flicker because it was basically 60fps for half of the total screen, but an alternating 30 frames for each half of the image. This is why on early and terrible transcodes, you can get a “comb” effect, it’s not properly combining the image per frame and showing you half of the last frame and half of the next frame and the motion in the image shows in combs.
There's something very satisfying about it being actually pixel-perfect.
However, there's also something to be said for a/b comparing for each sperate game and deciding what you think looks best for it. Having options is always best.
I have a 19" CRT monitor and a larger CRT TV for retro purposes, but I’m not too fond of using filters on modern displays, most filters look ‘fake’ to me.
My old cat used to do this, because I’d feed her and then walk away. But once I started sitting with her she started to eat a lot more.
It’s not necessarily that your cat wants extra food: sometimes they just feel vulnerable while eating (especially as they get older) and want someone they trust watching over them.
Actually, I try to find a noise overlay that emotionally simulates the nostalgia effect, minimizes the looks-like-shit effect, but then also makes sure to impart the minimum amount of dither needed to technically have it look it's best.
Less is more, and even back in the day, a lot of these games on crappy CRTs looked like absolute trash. A lot of them were bright, colorful, and actually good, but a lot of them just looked like smeary poopoo.
If I can just squint my eyes and it looks better than your filter, you're doing it wrong. I think it takes a high nit display, vsync, with the right array of colors to hit the crt emulation just right.
Just go get an old tv at this point, damn. You'll get the buttons, the sound of it turning on, the high pitched whistle of it just being on, the smell of the burning dust, the ozone or whatever smell too, the brightness, the curve, the colors, the emotional risk of hitting the wrong channel and blasting yourself with full volume white noise and having to panic look for the volume buttons or the remote.... You can even use the in-tv speakers to output sound! Tv speakers were actually decent before flat screens.
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