It's been many years since I emulated the SNES with either Snes9x or ZSNES but I'm pretty sure they both had different rendering filters to make the screen more blurry. Whether you like that more or less is of course up to you, hence why it is good to have it as an option, but it of course won't help you if you're hooking up an actual SNES to a modern TV.
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.
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.
I am just reminded of that old pic that someone was taped to celling with their equipment and everything right now, they were playing some counter strike i think.
Ugh for the longest time the investment firm I use had one product locked away on their app. Thankfully I checked today and I can sign up and use it on the web!
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