@nostupidquestions Why do people like crt shaders in the retroarch community. There’s so many videos about it. Is it a product of their time or are non-crt experiencers doing it?
Maybe it’s a way for their smoothening upscaling shaders to look more pixelated and retro?
Old games were designed for CRTs. The way lines were rendered on the screen led to blurring and bleeding of colours which made them less pixely and looking like they’re much more detailed.
It hurts me that the Castlevania screenshot does not match the pattern of the other screenshots with filter on the left and raw on the right.
EDIT: Thank you for fixing it.
As a kid that grew up in the NES / SNES era and played these games on a CRT television, I think the sharp pixels look better. This is just going to be one of those subjective things.
TV pixels were also generally not square. And if the device was a TV and not an actual video monitor (both were used with home computers), it was a little slow and blurry. And overscan existed. There’s a lot of things that will be a bit different when you look at an emulated display.
Same. I played a lot of the originals. I now emulate a lot on Steam Deck, and they always look better without the CRT stuff.
These actually look fantastic with the filter on. Another commenter’s examples were bad and I too thought it’s just nostalgia, since the filtered ones looked worse there. In particular, the skeleton you showed gains so much depth.
The other commentor’s comparisons showed literally the exact same concept, lol.
Lots of these games were designed on and for CRT screens and they look worse on a modern one without filtering.
This thread is full of insane people because all of the comments are saying the CRT ones look worse. I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone here. Unbelievable.
unbelievable
how can you just dismiss someone’s opinion? you don’t have to agree, it’s literally an opinion, not fact. let people do what they want with the filters and quit giving people shit over what they like. you don’t have their eyes.
I disagree. I emulate a lot, and the CRT stuff makes them look worse to me. Just adds noise to the image.
Either you are doing the shaders wrong and messing up the image, or you may need to have your vision checked…the CRT images are vastly superior to the non-crt ones. There really just isn’t any other possible take on this, I’m sorry.
There really just isn’t any other possible take on this
people can disagree on what they like better?
I disagree, and the second image (which is reversed vs the others) doesn’t look any better. It’s just as bad in it’s own way.
Its objectively more sharp
You’re absolutely right. I think everyone in this thread has glaucoma or something.
Shit, I better see a Doc. If only I could, but I have glaucoma or something.
Did you come up with that edgy reply all by yourself or did you utilize ChatGPT for that snarky comment?
Sorry to be dumb, but which ones are the crt ones?
Assuming the right ones, except for the middle pic, looks like the left one. The person who replied with these should have mentioned which was which…
The right ones.
CRT pixels weren’t perfect blocks, making them look better with special care. It actually made some processes much easier to calculate as they could rely on that method to “round out” the image.
Edit: Except the second image
It only looks better because of nostalgia. I think the filter-less ones look better.
Lol wut? Insane take. The CRT emulated ones look vastly superior. The non crt ones look pixelated as fuck.
The pixelated look is fashionable at the moment. I wonder if that’s the reason.
I think people maybe expect old games to be pixelated just because they’re old. (Because old = pixelated?) So when they see the CRT version look more blurred, they are confused and think it looks wrong. That’s my guess
I think people who played those games on CRTs originally remember the feel of the visuals. It is a rather nostalgic thing.
The filters aren’t the same, but they’re not a bad approximation. Mist of those games were not meant to be played on modern hardware and look worse for it too.
Then there will be a ton of folk who just do it because they see other people do it. That’s fine too, especially if they are enjoying themselves.
That’s the point. If the filter makes you feel happier, go for it. It’s an aesthetic choice.
Its more than nostalgia. The games actually look better because thats what they were designed with.
Nowadays people seem to use “nostalgia” as some hand waive to dismiss something as unnecessary or invalid. But in this case it is actually necessary, old games just do not look good on any display technology other than CRTs. Shaders come extremely close, and if you have an HDR compatible screen that gets bright and vibrant enough, shaders can be nearly comparable to real CRTs.
Now that I have a lovely HDR display, I kinda want to give this a bash. It also makes me wonder about CRT filters for non-emulated games. Fallout 2 looked amazing on a CRT, for example.
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Sorry, tactile response from a CRT?
Yeah, when you turned them on they frequently had push buttons with satisfying resistance and a click.
As an object they had their own tactility, often solid and heavy (as opposed to the sort of articulated physicality of most modern monitors). You could often feel the static electricity across the glass.
They even had their own sounds. The hum of warming up, the whine and clunk of being turned off.
When we talk about nostalgia it’s often the sensations adjacent to the activity that we are talking about.
You forgot the degaussing sound for those screens that had that feature. Like turning them on but louder.
*KLONK*
I remember I had a CRT as a kid that had the deepest button press to turn on. It felt like it was a whole 3 inches of travel- realistically I’m just remembering it like that cuz I was 8- but that was the best button. You could feel it actuate at the end, and even hear it. And CRTs had a presence about them. In hindsight, I was probably just hearing the whine and didn’t realize it.
Idk CRTs had their own vibe. Objectively, the crazy resolutions and crisp screens we have todays are better but in some less definable ways they feel lesser.
And I forgot the smell and the heat too. That warm ozone thing a lot of them had going on.
Oh, I did grow up before video games were a thing, so I am aware of how CRTs worked. You just made it sound like CRTs would somehow provide tactile feedback while gaming, which I couldn’t place at all, given the context.
That makes a lot of sense.
As far as I’m aware, if your TV did start to provide feedback as you played you were in for a bad time.
I guess I’m thinking more holistically. Gaming is often seen still as a visual medium, but you’ll know that the physical set up was part of the fun/not fun.
I suspect you might remember man parties and lugging gear around just to play with friends. In theory it wasn’t exactly easy, but somehow still enjoyable for it.
not to mention how you’d have to hit them to get them to work half the time. upper left corner.
Fuck yeah it is. I still remember playing ff6(3us), a defining gaming moment for me, and it was played on a crt. Yeah I can emulate it on my current console, but that does almost no justice to the nostalgia of having first learned turn-based rpg combat.
This from a person that remembers their Dad’s 2600 and playing Yar’s Revenge on it, and him taking me to the local arcade where his favorite game was without a doubt Ms. Pac-Man, while I tried to figure out what the fuck this “Super Street Fighter II Turbo” wizardry was.
Fuck yeah, nostalgia. All generations will have it, including those that succeed us, and those that succeed them.
People will knock nostalgia … They see it as a sort of softness, a yearning for the past…
But what they miss is the way that it can create intergenerational connections.
That’s a really lovely thing to hear about your relationship with your dad and Ms Pac-Man.
Wait, that sounds libellous.
Wait, that sounds libellous.
Made me actually laugh out loud
I love using CRT shaders on a game by game basis. As others commented, if it’s more detailed artwork, I’ll flip it on. Other times I don’t like how it looks with some classic games.
The only mod I do want is a way to replicate, on a modern monitor, the feeling of turning it off and putting your arm against the screen to get that sweet sweet static discharge that only CRTs could give you.
Edit: Removed my joke at the end of my original comment.
I did use CRT TVs and monitors, but only when very young. Man you just made me revisit a part of my brain long dormant! I loved the sweet static discharge as well, it was so f*ing rad!
Another commenter already gave a great example, I grew up using a crt for gaming and I turn the filter on on a game by game basis. It really does improve the quality of some games. Other games do not rely on it as much.
Mostly game with detailed art look better with it.
I got this on my front page and holy crap you used so many words I have no idea what they mean. Hope you get good answers to your question though!
I can explain a few terms, if you’re interested. I’m simplifying so nobody murder me:
Retroarch is basically a program that lets you emulate (basically make your computer mimic a console to play the games from it) a bunch of different videogame consoles. Mostly old ones, but some newer things like the Switch.
Shaders are complicated to ELI5 but it’s easiest to think of them as a filter you can apply to a videogame in real time, like you would apply a filter to a photo or something. You can get some absolutely crazy effects with filters- generally the simpler the game the more shaders will accomplish. Here’s a minecraft screenshot of the same thing with and without shaders.
And just in case, CRTs are those old school tube tvs.
He’s basically just asking if shaders for old games intended to make things look more like a CRT are just nostalgia bait or if they actually make things look better.
This is so you’ll know this question is not stupid.
I was just trying to wish them good luck on finding the answer…
