If people like using them, more power to them, but as someone who grew up playing on CRTs, if I could have had crisp pixels instead back in the day, I would totally have chosen that.
this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2024
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I strongly disagree with the premise that there's a "wrong" way to play retro games. Don't gatekeep. Imagine if people told you not to listen to Pink Floyd unless it's on vinyl. It would be lost media.
That said, CRTs present images fundamentally differently than LCD displays, and a lot of developers took advantage of those idiosyncrasies. There are scanlines everywhere. CRT phosphors aren't square, and appear smaller when darker. Bright pixels can "bleed" into nearby pixels, particularly when using composite signals.
Before LCDs, many (not all) pixel artists used this to their advantage, basically harnessing the imperfections of analog TV to provide equivalents to anti-aliasing, bloom, extra color depth, and even transparency. Some particularly famous examples came from Sega Genesis games. This video goes into good depth on the whys and hows, and there are some solid examples of the outcomes here.
I've attached examples below (hopefully they upload). If you like the raw pixel art, then no harm done. Enjoy! But if you like the way CRTs interpreted and filtered those signals, you owe it to yourself to look up some shaders for your favorite emulator.
(Zero Tolerance, 1994, on the Genesis/Mega Drive)
(Sonic the Hedgehog 2, 1992, on the Genesis/Mega Drive)
Dracula's lips and teeth
Uh, he's not showing any teeth...
I strongly disagree with the premise that there’s a “wrong” way to play retro games.
I understand your sentiment here and you are right too. What I think is, that the wording on this title here is misunderstood. Emulating (old) games without Shaders is not faithful or accurate in the looks. It looks "vastly" different and thus means it looks "wrong". I interpret the "wrong" in the title as "not faithful", instead as "bad", like this: You're Probably Emulating Retro Games Not Faithful (you need CRT Shaders for the oldschool look)
Yeah, the video really isn't making the point its title suggests. I think we're all just primed to expect gatekeeping in video games at this point.
You'll never catch me using filters like these voluntarily. Inject those crisp pixels straight into my vein.
Square pixels are a filter just as much as CRT filters are. In fact, they distort the image even more. Even leaving aside all the things that just don't work right in square pixel land, turning every pixel into a square messes up the aspect ratio of a lot of old consoles. Everything ends up squished and stretched because it wasn't designed for square pixels. You can call that distorted funhouse mirror version of old video game art "crisp" if you want, but in reality it's just the cheapest and worst filter.
I was a crisp pixel diehard for like 20 years even despite growing up with CRT, because I remember in the 80s-00s trying hard to get the clearest picture (RF->SRGB->S-video->Composite) and it felt like, "what's clearer than exact pixels?"
And then I tried a good CRT filter that emulates not just scanlines and noise, but subpixel effects, and it really changed my mind. The graphics really were designed to be displayed with those analog "imperfections," and if you lived in that era, you kind of took for granted the things that worked well with the natural CRT blur while pursuing image clarity. Bringing back the CRT effects was a revelation.
Like, even handheld emulation filters that mimic how those particular LCD screens functioned often give a better experience since game designers took that into account.
I don't know if someone growing up with only emulated square LCD memories would feel the same, and I'll always take pixely LCD over bad CRT emulation, but I'd suggest to give it a try with good filters.
Honestly, I hate the CRT aesthetic. I grew up with CRTs. Leaving them behind for LCDs was one of the greatest transitions of growing up. By all means, enjoy them if you do, but I don't.
It's not just the look of it, but the art and games were designed with the limitations of CRT in mind. Not all games off course. An example is the transparency effect on Genesis / Mega Drive:
Shaders are not only useful for CRT emulation, but also to get the look of handhelds:
Ah jeez, this picture triggered the earworm! Now that song is in my head!
Does this shader also replicate the horrific motion blur that the display of the original GameBoy suffered from?
There are two variants, one with motion-blur and one without. Besides that, often shaders have additional settings. One can change settings and save it as a new Shader Preset and use that instead. I have described it here: https://thingsiplay.game.blog/2024/10/19/showcase-for-retroarch-shaders-2024/8/#learn-and-explore
Thanks. I shall avoid the motion blur variant as best as I can, because that's one of several aspects of this device I do not remember fondly.
I borrowed a friend's Game Boy for an afternoon when I was a kid and I was so disappointed by it (primarily the screen, but also poor ergonomics and the limited nature of its games) that I lost nearly all interest in gaming for a year.
Getting the settings right for video is critically important, too. Scaling needs to be done with the nearest neighbor pixel method, not more modern blend methods.
No, I don't need it.
Wow gatekeep much?
There is no world in which anyone ever designed a game for anything more powerful than a Gameboy where they expected people to see it as a seemless grid of squares so big you can see them from across the room. That's just not a real thing outside of badly designed modern "retro" graphics. There's a reason for that. Seemless square grid is ugly. Like, disgustingly hideous. I do not understand why anyone would ever want to subject their eyeballs to the atrocity that is giant square pixels. If you want to do that to yourself then I can't stop you. There's no accounting for taste and all that, but just know that I think less of you for it.
My aim was never to emulate but to play. Blur filters are something that I won't be using.
The good ones aren't "blur", they're "subpixel rearrange".
It takes about 4x4 square pixels to emulate the subpixels of a single round one... just like it takes about 4x4 round pixels to emulate the subpixels of a square one.
But do they still look like blur? That's the only thing that matters. Ray tracing is also cool but if my frames die because of it, it gets disbled.
All pixels are a "blur" of R, G, and B subpixels. Their arrangement is what makes a picture look either as designed, or messed up.
For rendering text, on modern OSs you can still pick whichever subpixel arrangement the screen uses to make them look crisper. Can't do the same with old games that use baked-in sprites for everything.
It gets even worse when the game uses high brightness pixels surrounded by low brightness ones because it expects the bright ones to spill over in some very specific way.
That's still some Vsauce level reaching that "we don't actually even see anything". The tech doesn't matter when playing and if it looks blurry, then it is blurry.
The tech changes things completely. There are practical examples in other comments.
I said that it doesn't matter. Only the end result does. There is no game I would play on a CRT simply because it looks worse. It's not an objective fact but my preference. I don't care how you are trying achieve the "CRT look" since it looks like shit and I don't want to see it.
Have you checked the examples...? I feel like we're going in circles. There are cases where the CRT looks objectively better, supporting examples have been provided, technical explanation has been provided... it's up to you to look at them or not.
If you wish to discusd some of the examples, or the tech, I'm open to that. Otherwise I'll leave it here. ✌️
There is no "looks objectively better" since it's a subjective thing. I've seen those examples multiple times and they look as blurry as ever.
What makes you push this tech to these limits?
The objective part is in whether it matches what the creator intended.
Sometimes they intended crisp contours, like in ClearType; sometimes they intended to add extra colors; sometimes they designed pixel perfect and it looked blurry on CRT; very rarely they used vector graphics or 3D that can be rendered at better quality by just throwing some extra resolution.
Many artists of the time pushed this tech to these limits, "objectively better" is to emulate that.
That's not better. That's more accurate. Is preference really this foreign of a concept to you?
If you call this "preference", then there's nothing to talk about. Like printing the Mona Lisa on toilet paper and calling it a "preference".
That looks bad sure but I wouldn't look at that closely anyway and the filtered one looks even worse. I have played that game without any filters and I didn't get any urges to use any. I have also played it on CRT but there wasn't any choice back then.
The benefit of CRTs is most apparent in pre-rendered backgrounds (See Final Fantasy, Resident Evil). These backgrounds look incredible with shaders, and, indeed, on real displays.
Good looks stay good.
If there was a good crt shader I'd love to use it. Haven't seen any good ones yet.
If you're using Retroarch, I've found this overview useful. https://thingsiplay.game.blog/2024/10/19/showcase-for-retroarch-shaders-2024/
I don't use retroarch. I've been idly looking for how to transfer shaders to other emulators, but so far no success.
Now I'm curious what your criteria are. Do none of the shaders shown in the video appeal to you? To me at least, they look remarkably close to several types of old CRT TVs that I remember.
I only know of filters in emulators I've used for nes, super nes, Genesis, gb advance, dolphan, duckstation, and whatever other emulators over the years.
None of them have had a crt shader that's good.
I'm currently toying around with ares (the only fully cycle-accurate SNES emulator) and it has a lovely selection of CRT shaders (that are also available for other emulators). Try out crt-maximus-royale (or the half-res-mode variant). At least to me, the latter looks perfect, with just the right amount of blur, distortion, bloom and scanlines - and it comes with lovely details, like the bezel reflecting the image in real time and speaker grills filling the rest of the screen.
Someone uploaded a gallery with various games to reddit that shows just how versatile this shader is:
https://old.reddit.com/r/RetroArch/comments/1ag834e/while_mega_bezels_is_great_and_all_i_think_the/
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No and no. Clickbait bullshit.
Clickbait would not include in the title that the secret is CRT shaders.
It's not telling me a secret, it's telling me that I'm doing something wrong and that I need to use CRT shaders, which are both wrong presumptions made to make me click on the video to find out why. Whether to use a CRT filter or other things like scanlines is completely subjective and up to a users preferences. There's nothing wrong with sharp pixels over blurry pixels.
The video shows an objective example where square pixels destroy the image, while rearranged subpixels restore it. There are more similar examples here around in the comments.
"You're emulating retro games wrong" is not the best title. For example, Dosbox Staging enabled the CRT filter by default at some point; there is no graphical interface, you need to open a file and change a line to revert it. Moreover, there was no indication that the black lines were not a bug but were a filter.
Playing DOS games on operating systems which do not support DOS programs natively is still emulation. However, the number of DOS games which utilised CRT effects are much fewer such that I primarily played DOS games in 2022–23 and none of them made use of CRT. However, the black lines were enabled till I figured it out (because there were no support requests surprisingly, and the default filter being changed was mentioned in an unrelated request regarding bad performance issues—where it was made known and the recommendation was made to change the setting).
The (slight) problem is with the title itself. It is not a big issue for me, but the statement made in the title is the problem because it is only in a comment that it was mentioned not all old games use CRT effects. Clickbait might not be the best word for describing the situation, but the title will be annoying for many who play old games which were not designed for CRT effects. But then, it is not a big problem and I more or less ignored it (to be clear, for being wrong as far as the title itself goes) before seeing this thread. It would've been better to state directly instead that many old console games and games of the adventure genre, among others, were designed with these filters in mind and for practical reasons (like actually having the graphics show what they were meant to show) because like in your other comment that specific scene does not show the background at all without the effect, and it will be a fairly common occurrence for games which were designed to use the CRT effect.
Edit: spelling
Up to a certain point in the early to mid 2000s, virtually all home console and PC games were designed for CRT displays. I'm not sure where you're getting the idea from that the type of display that was used by 99% of gamers on these systems was somehow not influencing the art design and technology of games.
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Real. Ever since I spent some time setting up good CRT shaders, playing retro games feels a lot cooler. They just give the best feeling and look pretty nice with them on. Sometimes for fun, I leave the shader on for regular Windows usage.
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