The Peach Meme: on Crts, Pixels and Signal Quality (again)

He seemed to test it on a bunch of computer monitors, and not a standard 480i consumer television set? The different shadow masks phosphor patterns change how things look

> I'm curious what sort of CRT produced the meme image.

The article mentions later that it's a PVM-20L2MD [1]. This is a professional CRT monitor for medical devices. It uses the same signals as a consumer TV, but comes with a higher quality tube that has a sharper picture.

[1] https://crtdatabase.com/crts/sony/sony-pvm-20l2md

Apologies for the off-topic question, but I'm so curious: How is this useful for VHS transfer?

I started playing Policenauts recently, and when I first booted the game I was straining my eyes trying to read the blocky pixelated text. I only recently started using RetroArch, but I did some digging and figured out how to enable a CRT filter and immediately it was 1000% easier on my eyes.

The anime art and FMV sequences looked way better too.

An OLED with a great filter is good enough for most gamers other than archivists and hardcore collectors, yeah.

I do something like this for my old game consoles, except that I pipe them trough an old analog video capture card that supports 240p60 and use the video processing module in Retroarch to do the capture with minimal lag. After adding some fancy CRT shaders and other image adjustment carefully tailored for this, the image comes out looking great! I sometimes toggle the shaders off and wince at the "raw" digital capture. I actually bought this capture card back in 2008 for this purpose but detested using it until around 2018 when I started using it in conjunction with retroarch and CRT shaders.

For that period it even shaped my perception that analog video and specially n64 graphics were always bad, but all that was vindicated by those shaders, it really does make a big difference, and made me find a new appreciation for n64 graphics in particular.

There is some internet misconception that the inherently "blurry" output of an n64 is bad (And sure, some games are just ugly/bad from an artistic standpoint), but it's actually the smoothest image any analog console will ever produce when hooked up to a proper CRT or CRT shader, and it's consistent across all games because of "forced" high quality AA in all games. Even the next generation of consoles seldomly used AA.

Maybe you should turn off the motion smoothing and show the movies in their proper 24 fps?

Playing something like The Dark Knight Rises from an UHD Blu-ray on a good OLED looks incredible!

I really wish ShaderGlass supported Linux. If there's a good(ish) alternative that anyone knows about, I'd love to try it out.

Using an OLED display? I've found that's the only type of display that can even come close to reproducing the CRT look

I grew up playing Atari, NES, SNES, and PS1 games on old TVs most of the time, sometimes not the best quality. I also remember that often in 80's arcades, it was guaranteed for at least one or two machines to have CRT issues; colors not aligned, skew at the top/bottom, burn-in (common), screen too bright, etc. All part of the experience and quite nostalgic for me.

The NES had a particular quirk with its NTSC output that I always thought was very characteristic of NES. I found this article a few years ago, and was fascinated that work was done to really figure it out - https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/NTSC_video - and it's awesome at at least some emulators (FCEUX) seem to use this info to generate an experience quite similar to what I remember the NES being when I grew up. But I don't think any NES game graphics really depended on this for any visual output. All NES games had jagged vertical lines, for example.

With enough lines, enough brightness, and a high-enough refresh rate, it may become possible have a display that can artificially emulate the features of a CRT -- including phosphor persistence and blooming and focus issues and power supply sag and everything else, with interlacing. AFAICT, we aren't there yet.

If/when this happens, we may be able to again view things as close as they were in broadcast, but with a modern display instead of an an old CRT.

If we can find any content to play that way, anyhow. A lot of it is cheerfully being ruined.

Aside from the dozens of us who are interested in that, most of the rest of the folks seems convinced that television looked just as terrible as a blurry SLP VHS tape does after being played through a $12 composite-to-USB frame grabber, using a 3.5mm "aux cable" jammed in between the RCA jacks of the VCR and the converter, and ultimately delivered by an awful 360p30 codec on YouTube, before being scaled in the blurriest way possible...and draw from this the conclusion that there's no details that have any value worth preserving.

Even though television was never actually like that. It had limits, but things could be quite a lot better than that awful mess I just described.

(For those here who don't know: Towards the end of the run, the quality of a good broadcast with a good receiver would often be in the same ballpark as the composite output of a DVD player is today (but with zero data compression artifacts instead of >0), including the presentation of 50 or 60 independent display updates per second.)

People are nostalgic for the pixel art made specifically to look good on CRTs.

It’s like sometimes preferring 24 fps cinema or oil paints over photography.

It depends on what’s being displayed.

Your answer is right in the article, it shouldn't be that baffling.

No one is campaigning to get rid of the beautiful modern 4k OLED displays and return to CRTs for everything. But for low resolution content (retro games and computers) it looks better on a CRT.

There's pretty good modern emulation of the look, but at the end of the day it's a different technology and they do look different.

Not to mention the feel of playing through a near-zero latency analogue signal is noticeable if you've played enough of certain games. There's a reason speedrunners of retro games all play on console with a CRT.

There was a long period (15-20 years) where LCDs were quite a downgrade from CRTs. Poor contrast ratio (gray blacks), backlight bleed, low resolution, poor color gamut (they're still putting 45% NTSC screens in budget laptops!), stuck at 60Hz refresh rates.

Those gaps have finally started closing in the last few years, now that 4K 240Hz 99% DCI-P3 OLED monitors are readily available and relatively affordable.

No, CRTs are still much better than sample-and-hold screens (OLED or LCD) with regards to motion clarity.

Short version: Our eyes are constantly tracking objects on screen ("smooth pursuit"), which leads to visible smearing on OLED and LCD screens, because they hold their frame for the entire frame time rather than just flashing them for a short fraction of that time. Especially fast paced and side scrolling games like Sonic look much better on CRT screens. (But CRTs have much lower brightness and hence contrast than modern screens.)

Full explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42604613

CRT's were better for a long time, LCD's did eventually catch up.

I held on to my 21" Trinitron for a long time into the LCD era, because it had better contrast, resolution and sharpness. Eventually affordable LCD's did catch up.

> It genuinely baffles me that people are nostalgic about CRTs.

I don't get nostalgic about any technologies - and certainly wouldn't get nostalgic about cathode ray tubes which were big, heavy and had innate limitations. However, I am serious about vintage game preservation and I care about seeing classic game art which was created on and for CRTs accurately presented as the original developers and artists saw it. These days that's as easy as playing games from the CRT era with a good CRT-emulation pixel shader.

What frustrates me is when I see classic 80s games on popular retro YouTube channels objectively looking far worse than they actually did in the 80s. That happens because some of that artwork was painstakingly hand-crafted to exploit the unique traits of both the analog video format and CRTs. When presented without a pixel shader, some of those titles simply look wrong - and in some cases, egregiously so. I know because I'm old enough to have been there, worked with and learned from some now-legendary 80s game developers and artists.

The hard-edged, square pixel blocks many young people (who've never seen a CRT) think a retro game like Pac-Man or Joust should have, is a strange historical anomaly. When I show them what the games actually looked like either via a good pixel shader or on my arcade emulation cabinet's 25-inch analog RGB, quad-sync CRT (which was made for high-end arcade cabinets), they're often shocked. I hear things like "Wow, I thought retro was cool because it looked so janky but it was actually softly beautiful." To me, the importance of CRTs (and CRT shaders) isn't about injecting analog degradation to recreate some childhood nostalgia for the crappy RCA TV your parents had in the living room (with rolling hum bars from the unshielded RF modulator), it's about making games like Pac-Man and Joust look as good as they really did on the industrial CRT in their arcade cabinet (which could be better than the best TV many consumers ever owned). Or alternatively, making console games look as good as they did to the original developers and artists, who usually used the highest-quality CRTs they could because they were after the best-possible image for the same reasons recording studios have always used reference-grade audio speakers.

So yeah, it's not honoring those historic games when retro YouTubers show them in a degraded form that looks far worse than they ever did in the day - especially when it's now so easy to present them accurately by turning on a CRT shader that's already built into many retro emulators. As others in this thread point out, even the best pixel shaders aren't completely perfect, but as a retro-purist (and video engineer whose career spanned the analog and digital video eras) I concede today's best pixel shaders are 'accurate enough' and certainly far better than hard-edged block pixels. It's weirdly tragic because what some people think 'retro' games looked like isn't worse than a bad consumer TV was - or better than a good analog RGB CRT was - it's just wrong on some bizarre third-axis of digital jank which never existed in the CRT era.

One of the best examples of this are the first two GBA Castlevania games, Circle of the Moon and Harmony of Dissonance. The former was developed without consideration of the actual screen and was extremely dark and hard to see. The latter did consider the GBA screen and is far too colorful and bright on anything else.