I appreciate the CRT modeling in emulators, but a hardware device that passes thru a display signal and provided sub-frame CRT artifacting and phosphor modeling (particularly if it supported 240P) would be bitchin'.
Hooked up my spare PS2 and got a light gun for it. Wish i had a way to play duck hunt though.
We have roku, which at some point in the last 4 years, it went rogue and auto updated itself for who knows what telemetry . We almost never use it now.
I plug my laptop via HDMI and the possibilities are still there.
(I even programmed an old Sony remote to kludge sending theequivalent of the PS5 controller logo button, for the PS5 that the TV is plugged into, for streaming and gaming. And found the trick to get the TV to go to standby when the PS5's HDMI signal disappears, which isn't a standard feature, though waking is.)
I'll probably only upgrade if I relocate cross-country, and have Bay Area levels of money to spend on a much more expensive non-'smart' setup.
For instance, long-term storage. It would stand to reason that we'd invent some kind of big electrical array, and that's the best we could hope for. But hard drive technology (which relies on crazy materials technology for the platter and magnets, crazy high-precision encoders, and crazy physics like floating a tiny spring over the air bubble created by the spinning platter) came in and blew all other technology away.
And, likewise, we had liquid crystal technology since the 70s, and probably could have invented it sooner, but no need, because Cathode Ray Tube technology appeared (a mini particle accelerator in your home! Plus the advanced materials science to bore the precision electron beam holes in the screen grid, the phosphor coating, the unusual deflection coil winding topology, and leaded glass to reduce x-ray expose for the viewers) and made all other forms of display unattractive by comparison.
It's amazing how far CRT technology got, given its disconnect from other technologies. The sophistication of the factories that created late-model "flat-screen" CRTs is truly impressive.
The switch to LCDs/LEDs was in a lot of ways a step back. Sure, we don't have huge 40lb boxes on our desks, but we lost the ultra-fast refresh rate enabled by the electron beam, not to mention the internal glow that made computers magical (maybe I'm just an old fuddy-duddy, like people in the 80s who swore that vinyl records "sounded better").
Someday, maybe given advances in robotics and automation, I hope to start a retro CRT manufacturing company. The problems, such as the unavailability of the entire supply chain (can't even buy an electron gun, it would have to be made from scratch) and environmental restrictions (lead glass probably makes the EPA perk up and notice).
trenchpilgrim•3d ago
https://x.com/ruuupu1
https://old.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/owdtpu/thats_why...
https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/anwgxf/here_is_an_e...
Modern emulators have post-processing filters to simulate the look, which is great. But it's not quite the same as the real thing.
nomel•3d ago
To be fair, with modern "retina" HDR displays, it should be very very close.
mrob•3d ago
https://blurbusters.com/crt-simulation-in-a-gpu-shader-looks...
hulitu•2d ago
It should. It isn't. For some obscure reason, VGA colours look different on every modern LCD.
nomel•2d ago
nomel•2d ago
dangson•3d ago
majormajor•1h ago
Back when I first started playing things on emulators we were using 12" to 20" CRTs or LCDs with much higher resolution than a TV, so whether CRT or LCD the pixels were chunkier.
None of the nostalgia is how I remember it at all.
The average CRT TV had crap color and poor brightness and going from that and the flicker of 1-to-1 size NTSC on a 20-something TV to an emulated "chunkier pixel" rendition on a progressize-scan 72+hz 1024x768-or-higher CRT or an LCD looked way better.
Take the side by side pictures and zoom WAY out on a high-res screen or go stand several feet away from your monitor so that they're the size they were designed and expected to be seen at, and the vast majority of the perceived improvement from making the CRT subpixels visible goes away. And then put them into motion - especially vertical motion - and those lines in between, and losing half on each frame becomes more noticable and distracting.
The 4th image there of the yellow monster is a good example. Even zooming to 50% on my high-res display makes the "bad" version suddenly look way sharper and detailed as the size starts to show how frequently "rounded dots with gaps between it" just looks like fuzziness instead of "better".
And these comparisons tend to cherry-pick and not show examples of things that lose clarity as a result of the subpixels and scanlines instead of gain clarity.
thaeli•1m ago