I love the current infatuation with modeling old CRT display systems. Old graphics and videos from the "time before" rely a bit on how those display systems and signals worked in order to make low-color and resolution artifacts look "better" in terms of smoother color gradients and softer edges and diagonals. The shift to modern displays mades everything form that era look blocky and chunky.
The thing that makes this all really "meta-interesting" is that everybody who remembers that time remembers it differently and so there's no "correct" way to do this. We all had different TVs, monitors, different manufactures from different time periods. Some of us played color 16-bit games on tiny black and white TVs, or remember the flicker of the Atari 2600 on a giant RGB front-projection TV.
As a result we have literally thousands of filters like this that try to reproduce or at least model how these old systems looked to give back some semblance of what we remember, even if it's all entirely wrong.
I found after experimenting with a bunch of this that what seems to be more important than all the phosphor glow, scan lines, and shadow mask stuff, is that the display has to be curved for it to finally click with me. And then having reflections of the screen in the bezel are chef's kiss. It's so subtle, but just those two effects alone seem to do more for me personally than the rest.
The Megabezel project is dedicated to what I'm talking about.
It's really striking in action, how the two things (the screen geometry and the bezel reflections) really make it feel like you're looking at a television. At times I completely forget the rest of the giant flat panel even exists.
I've played with Retro Emulators that add screen reflections and scratches and bezels that look like the original artwork on the arcade cabinets, and... I love it.
Notice how the physics of CRT ends up rendering the pixel art the way it was meant to appear. Pixel art was not the final image, the one appeared on the CRT was. You can not make up those details without CRT, shaders should get us there though. I wish this github repo had comparison images like that article.
I'd go a bit further with this claim. Most of what's being done in this space is about inventing new retro aesthetics, not about faithfully approximating how things worked in the 1980s and 1990s. For example, color TVs of that era didn't really have pronounced scanlines. They also didn't have thick, lightly-colored, reflective bezels.
I get that it looks cool and makes old games more aesthetically pleasing. But the reality is that we liked these visuals back then because we had much lower standards, not because CRTs had some magical properties that made the games look awesome.
I used my Atari computers on a black-&-white TV for years until I finally got a Commodore 1702 (JVC)... and it was like looking at candy.
The Atari and that monitor had separate luma & chroma ("S-video") so it was sharper than anything else most people could buy at the time. Most CRT simulators introduce too much degradation by comparison. This one looks pretty good.
> The thing that makes this all really "meta-interesting" is that everybody who remembers that time remembers it differently and so there's no "correct" way to do this.
I suspect it's also because the pictures weren't all that sharp to begin with, the brain filled in ('hallucinated') details. Perhaps more so with young observers.
One side-effect of this is that every time I fire up RetroArch to play a game I spend half an hour looking through every shader and still end up undecided…!
NTSC was also known for its poor colour reproducability compared to PAL due to how the color signal was modulated. PAL had automatic control where NTSC often required manual adjustment in case the hue was drifted. For that reason NTSC was often said to stand for 'Never Twice the Same Color' or 'Never The Same Color'.
I wonder if any of the shaders also has this behavior of randomly shifting the hue or an ability to change it by a give offset.
NTSC colors were bad - really bad - but wideband bayer filters + sRGB are the source of the mediocre colors we see today.
We could have beautiful Kodachrome quality colors If we used narrow-band RGB filters and a wide gamut (Rec.2020, or Rec.2100PQ) colorspace. If you look at the spectral sensitivity specs of Kodachrome film they are fairly narrow-band and closely matched the perceptual sensitivity of human vision (CIE 1931).
If you display an sRGB encoded image with Rec.2020 gamut (without colorspace conversion) the colors will appear very washed out. If you display a Rec.2020 encoded image on sRGB (without colorspace conversion) it will appear oversaturated. Separately, narrower and/or more widely spaced bandpass filters will increase color saturation. It turns out that narrow-band filters approximating the CIE1931 curves are a natural match for the Rec.2020 colorspace. Since CIE1931 approximates how humans perceive color the colors are also more accurate.
It was a "lucky" accident that the properties of CRT phosphors, from which sRGB is derived were a good match for the wideband color filters used in color video cameras.
A lot of home hardware had RGB as well. The variety of hardware in general was pretty high, to the point that many tricks pixel artists employed only worked on very specific hardware combinations. Case in point:
Notice the glass tubes at 0:47+. On the composite output, they look smooth and have that rainbow effect. This only worked on first revisions of the Megadrive; later ones had better quality output, mostly losing the effect.
The same applied to displays - crispness, scanlines, bleeding etc were all different.
I'd love to see an option to have the image pincushion and introduces a buzz in the audio from an video signal that was too strong? That was one of my favorite. Everyone focuses on the interlacing, giant pixels shapes, and the fun with chroma bleed, but some of the most bizarre things could happen when you pushed the analog signal too far. The 1 volt peak-to-peak was a rule for a reason, and going past was possible. Terms like whiter-than-white from pushing the video signal from a test pattern past 100ire on a scope could cause issues with the combined RF modulated audio/video signals. The most flagrant offender was white text. If you were competent at your job, you never used 8-bit 255,255,255 for white. That was out of bounds for NTSC, so 235,235,235 was typical instead for white.
The next filter would be the infamous "broadcast safe" filter that would clamp the video signal to video was not higher than 100ire. Allowing for chroma clamping separate from video clamping would be a bonus. Hell, just give the basic functions of a TBC to the users. They don't need to understand what they are doing to the signal so much as just a few knobs to get creative!
At the end of my day at one of the post houses I was at around this time, I had to ensure all of the monitors were off. I could do it in the dark just by listening for this noise and know if any where on or not. Some of the reference monitors were never turned off though, and I had to ensure they had the correct signal routed to them to avoid burn-in.
I had an Atari ST in the living room and sometimes I would forget to turn the monitor off when I went to bed... but I was always reminded by the high pitch noise I could hear all the way in my bedroom.
Audio buzz emulation has been done already with a Gameboy emulator and from what I could recall when trying it, it was pretty dead-on. I wished I could remember which one it was but indeed, it's a rarity that emulators emulate some of the more esoteric, some might say 'unwanted', faults of the system.
Also, while the representation of the pixel grid is fairly accurate, it's missing the chromatic aberration from the fact that they were individual electron emitters of red, green, and blue phosphor dots. Pushing the red channel 0.05f and the blue channel -0.05f on the x axis should do the trick.
There's a fun technique in After Effects to separate the image by channels, and then apply an effect turning the image into grids of small circles. Nudge the red a couple of pixels left, the blue a couple of pixels right, and then the green a couple of pixels up. When these are merged back, you get that very look you've described.
Thanks! I once read this article and could never find it again.
The screenshots here are second to none for showing why the quest to reproduce CRT rendering is so important for preservation efforts. Without it graphics from this era simply don't look even remotely as intended.
Windows ClearType text rendering exploits subpixel artifacts to increase horizontal text resolution.
Any kind of subpixels will result in some sort of artifacts. Tne higher the resolution, the less visible it will be, but it probably requires around 300 DPI to become imperceptible.
I'm really excited by the current appreciation of CRTs. There is something so nostalgic about them that matches the warmth of listening to my favorite vinyl. I have had much more fun playing SNES and Genesis via my MiSTer on a PVM than I have had playing most modern games on an OLED display (although OLED is unquestionably beautiful, and I'm looking forward to the OLED Steam Deck).
My biggest concern with my current setup is what will happen when my PVM dies? Will there be anyone around to fix it? Will I trust myself to safely open it up and fix it? The PVM I have isn't _too_ large, but it's certainly more heavy and inconvenient than a modern display. I'm really excited by the excellent work towards recreating how good CRTs look to preserve this bit of history and also provide another artistic option for future games to consider.
My son (15) got hooked up on using old-"tv" effects, but he was not happy with existing shaders, Adobe Premiere / After Effects / etc, so by pure luck one day driving home saw an old Cathode TV/VHS combo boxset left outside for someone to pick up - and I've got it - the VHS does not work, but he's now happy with doing the effects he wants (plus old Hi8 camera for others).
The shadow mask is overly represented. This may work better on a yet even higher resolution display, or perhaps there's an option to reduce the shadow mask effect. The other thing that this emulation can't get right is that phosphor-based displays had more vibrant colors (at lower intensities) than currently popular (IPS) LCD panels. VA panels are better for this.
Is it? When I look up "CRT macro lens" on Google Images [1] the shadow mask is extremely pronounced -- possibly even more than here.
I've just tried looking at the screenshots on both a Retina and non-Retina display, and they seem pretty faithful to what I remember growing up. I'm really quite impressed.
Also -- what do you mean by "more vibrant colors"? If you mean (presumably) greater color saturation = wider color gamut, I can't find any source supporting the idea that CRT's had a wider gamut than modern IPS panels -- to the contrary, IPS seems to be at least as good if not better (although early LCD displays weren't). And P3 IPS displays like Apple's certainly blow CRT color gamuts out of the water.
The vertical RGB shadow mask specifically wasn't unconsciously visible at normal viewing distance--usually only the raster lines were. On these screenshots, I can see and almost count horizontal pixels. This could also be because most shadow masks weren't the RGB stripes like most LCDs--the Trinitron was with a cylindrical CRT. The shadow mask was usually also more fine than the max resolution so there was no 1:1 (or 3:1) mapping to pixels as there is in this simulated display.
I don't mean wider color gamut, I mean that for lower intensities, the saturation can remain high. Most current IPS panels at lower intensities, the color saturation gets washed out (think DLP projector). This correlates with having deep AND distinguishable blacks. IPS has high brightness, VA has higher contrast ratios.
Because of this, I probably won't buy an IPS panel except for 'business' text use.
The LG/Dell Nano IPS Black (aka IPS Black and different than Nano IPS) is reported as being better--I haven't seen it in person so can't comment.
Mind that CRTs had a viewing distance, much like the subject point in classic painting. E.g., at this distance, dithering tended to blend into a solid tint on common consumer CRTs. (The granularity of a shadow mask is generally smaller than that of a pixel/PEL, so there are actually two kinds of rasterization involved, which helps blending. The effect also depends on the shape of the mask, as in round, oval, square holes, or even a Trinitron-style wire mesh.) Also, the expectation to actually perceive CRT colors when reproduced on a modern panel may be overly optimistic.
I'm generally impressed by these shaders (they are about the best, I've seen), but I also think that colors are too muted and that the mask is overrepresented.
Edit: Regarding CRT intensities, mind that a CRT set up for daylight viewing would give you headaches when viewed in the dark, which is hard to achieve with a modern display panel.
Were you looking at color or black-and-white? I always felt Apple II graphics were pretty meh due to all the color artifacts/fringing on composite monitors (IIgs being the exception, those generally had RGB monitors.)
Readit News
The thing that makes this all really "meta-interesting" is that everybody who remembers that time remembers it differently and so there's no "correct" way to do this. We all had different TVs, monitors, different manufactures from different time periods. Some of us played color 16-bit games on tiny black and white TVs, or remember the flicker of the Atari 2600 on a giant RGB front-projection TV.
As a result we have literally thousands of filters like this that try to reproduce or at least model how these old systems looked to give back some semblance of what we remember, even if it's all entirely wrong.
I found after experimenting with a bunch of this that what seems to be more important than all the phosphor glow, scan lines, and shadow mask stuff, is that the display has to be curved for it to finally click with me. And then having reflections of the screen in the bezel are chef's kiss. It's so subtle, but just those two effects alone seem to do more for me personally than the rest.
The Megabezel project is dedicated to what I'm talking about.
http://www.megabezel.com/
At first I thought this was a strange thing to ask for, but then I saw the image in the link and suddenly I agree 100%. This is beautiful!
I've played with Retro Emulators that add screen reflections and scratches and bezels that look like the original artwork on the arcade cabinets, and... I love it.
Notice how the physics of CRT ends up rendering the pixel art the way it was meant to appear. Pixel art was not the final image, the one appeared on the CRT was. You can not make up those details without CRT, shaders should get us there though. I wish this github repo had comparison images like that article.
I get that it looks cool and makes old games more aesthetically pleasing. But the reality is that we liked these visuals back then because we had much lower standards, not because CRTs had some magical properties that made the games look awesome.
The Atari and that monitor had separate luma & chroma ("S-video") so it was sharper than anything else most people could buy at the time. Most CRT simulators introduce too much degradation by comparison. This one looks pretty good.
I suspect it's also because the pictures weren't all that sharp to begin with, the brain filled in ('hallucinated') details. Perhaps more so with young observers.
Original : https://ibb.co/VjwKkb8
With CRT shader : https://ibb.co/s6RgswK
Just zoom into the details like the Mario icon, the text, the guardrails, the edges of the polygons …
I know it looks blurry in the screenshot but this is totally unnoticeable once the game is in motion.
More interesting pictures :
https://wackoid.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/CRT-vs-LCD.jp...
https://wackoid.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Final-Fantasy...
The point is that those games were made on CRT monitors so the CRT artifacts were in fact heavily used by the artists to render more precise images.
Original post from the two last pictures : https://wackoid.com/game/10-pictures-that-show-why-crt-tvs-a...
Deleted Comment
I wonder if any of the shaders also has this behavior of randomly shifting the hue or an ability to change it by a give offset.
We could have beautiful Kodachrome quality colors If we used narrow-band RGB filters and a wide gamut (Rec.2020, or Rec.2100PQ) colorspace. If you look at the spectral sensitivity specs of Kodachrome film they are fairly narrow-band and closely matched the perceptual sensitivity of human vision (CIE 1931).
If you display an sRGB encoded image with Rec.2020 gamut (without colorspace conversion) the colors will appear very washed out. If you display a Rec.2020 encoded image on sRGB (without colorspace conversion) it will appear oversaturated. Separately, narrower and/or more widely spaced bandpass filters will increase color saturation. It turns out that narrow-band filters approximating the CIE1931 curves are a natural match for the Rec.2020 colorspace. Since CIE1931 approximates how humans perceive color the colors are also more accurate.
It was a "lucky" accident that the properties of CRT phosphors, from which sRGB is derived were a good match for the wideband color filters used in color video cameras.
https://www.christiedigital.com/about/display-technology/las...
https://www.barco.com/en/inspiration/news-insights/barco-res...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-G02cjXpZ0
Notice the glass tubes at 0:47+. On the composite output, they look smooth and have that rainbow effect. This only worked on first revisions of the Megadrive; later ones had better quality output, mostly losing the effect.
The same applied to displays - crispness, scanlines, bleeding etc were all different.
The next filter would be the infamous "broadcast safe" filter that would clamp the video signal to video was not higher than 100ire. Allowing for chroma clamping separate from video clamping would be a bonus. Hell, just give the basic functions of a TBC to the users. They don't need to understand what they are doing to the signal so much as just a few knobs to get creative!
Additionally, LCD and OLED have their own subpixel artifacts, so I wonder if that has to/can be compensated for when displaying a CRT emulation.
The screenshots here are second to none for showing why the quest to reproduce CRT rendering is so important for preservation efforts. Without it graphics from this era simply don't look even remotely as intended.
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/a/167807
Can you elaborate? I've never heard anything about that, regarding a regular grid of R/G/B stripes.
Or are you talking specifically about the weird PenTile layouts?
Windows ClearType text rendering exploits subpixel artifacts to increase horizontal text resolution.
Any kind of subpixels will result in some sort of artifacts. Tne higher the resolution, the less visible it will be, but it probably requires around 300 DPI to become imperceptible.
Cool Retro Terminal is a nice accessory for when doing recording or screenshots - cause it looks cool. Can't use it as my daily driver tho.
And enough settings in there you can make it look like your favourite old one.
jupyterlab_miami_nights is real nice, too https://anaconda.org/conda-forge/jupyterlab_miami_nights
DI's Synthwave station somewhat matches the decade: https://www.di.fm/synthwave
Lighter almost solarized red for terminal text is also a decent terminal experience IMHO
I actually daily drive it, if you set things up just right it is absurdly readable, more so than a regular terminal IMHO.
My biggest concern with my current setup is what will happen when my PVM dies? Will there be anyone around to fix it? Will I trust myself to safely open it up and fix it? The PVM I have isn't _too_ large, but it's certainly more heavy and inconvenient than a modern display. I'm really excited by the excellent work towards recreating how good CRTs look to preserve this bit of history and also provide another artistic option for future games to consider.
Is it? When I look up "CRT macro lens" on Google Images [1] the shadow mask is extremely pronounced -- possibly even more than here.
I've just tried looking at the screenshots on both a Retina and non-Retina display, and they seem pretty faithful to what I remember growing up. I'm really quite impressed.
Also -- what do you mean by "more vibrant colors"? If you mean (presumably) greater color saturation = wider color gamut, I can't find any source supporting the idea that CRT's had a wider gamut than modern IPS panels -- to the contrary, IPS seems to be at least as good if not better (although early LCD displays weren't). And P3 IPS displays like Apple's certainly blow CRT color gamuts out of the water.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=crt+macro+lens&tbm=isch
I don't mean wider color gamut, I mean that for lower intensities, the saturation can remain high. Most current IPS panels at lower intensities, the color saturation gets washed out (think DLP projector). This correlates with having deep AND distinguishable blacks. IPS has high brightness, VA has higher contrast ratios.
Because of this, I probably won't buy an IPS panel except for 'business' text use.
The LG/Dell Nano IPS Black (aka IPS Black and different than Nano IPS) is reported as being better--I haven't seen it in person so can't comment.
I'm generally impressed by these shaders (they are about the best, I've seen), but I also think that colors are too muted and that the mask is overrepresented.
Edit: Regarding CRT intensities, mind that a CRT set up for daylight viewing would give you headaches when viewed in the dark, which is hard to achieve with a modern display panel.