alt Hacker NewsI’ve never seen good CRT physical emulation. But I also suspect it’s been long enough, that I just wouldn’t be able to tell the difference unless I had my old childhood bedroom Sanyo CRT to compare it to.
I’m not sure these come close because there’s some sort of physical element that would be hard to replicate unless you mapped the DPI of a screen to the “DPI” of a CRT.
Otherwise you’re just creating a weird facsimile in the same way that a lot of indie artists don’t produce pixel art that is actually pixel aligned. It’s ugly.
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> I’ve never seen good CRT physical emulation.
Same. Because they all try way too hard.
I have a fully working vintage arcade cab from the mid eighties which I still play on. I know. Most of these shaders and techniques exaggerate way too much what things really looked like. There's a tiny blur and there are tiny scanlines (or whatever these little black lines are called) but things... Mostly looks pixelated.
And that's an old, used, CRT I have: probably one of the blurriest one. Back in the nineties we already had fancy Sony Trinitron CRTs and these were flawless. Pixels just looked like pixels, not like all these blurred things nor like all these exaggerated shaders. Many CRTs were really crisp.
Do games from the eighties look better on a CRT? Definitely. But it was subtle.
Pixel art is pixel art and it's not pixel art because it was shown on a CRT and suddenly it wouldn't be pixel art anymore because it's shown on a modern monitor.
Things were really just "blocky" and pixelized. That's really how things looked.
Quite tangential, but it is sort of funny that we’re still doing this nostalgic pixel art thing. I mean, no complaints at all, good pixel art looks nice. But the snes came out a long time ago.
I wonder if we will ever get a nostalgic style that emulates all those flash games. Reasonably high resolution components, but only 10 or so pieces per character. Geometric shapes with gradients.
Have you seen some of the display options offered by the RetroTink scaler? I think some of them look pretty good, but I'm not a hardcore CRT enthusiast, so maybe my standards are just lower than yours :P
This is pretty good:
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4dlyWX
But more practical are:
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XsjSzR
If you want to emulate a CRT you have to emulate a specific CRT with a specific input. You can't have a general CRT emulation because they all look a bit different.
Shader based CRT emulation works well on 2K+ screens. Much more convincing than the crude scanline emulation with mask images.
> there’s some sort of physical element that would be hard to replicate
For a truly authentic CRT experience you need a faint smell of ozone, the crackle of a static charge on the screen and a high-pitched screaming/whining noise right on the edge of perception.