I never realized how much the CRT gave a more natural look the the images, and how much my mind made up for the rest. This is why remember these worlds looking smoother as a kid, and I thought it was just all rose tinted glasses.
It's not your mind tricking you, my friend. CRT are masking low resolution very well. LCD/LED and other modern displays are very accurate and they make the low-res pixel art to fall apart, breaking the dithering effect used to achieve more colors. Slight blur of CRT display makes old games look smoother. There very good shaders and filters built-into emulators that are made to resemble CRT image. They need some processing power though so on low-end hardware it'll make your emulation run slower. Mednafen emulator has built in simple scanline effect that helps a bit and it's not as CPU intensive as full blown shaders.
not only that , the game devs worked on sprites/pixels around CRTs so they knew how it would look at consumers homes. it’s crazy but when i played some old school games for the first time in a long time i was thinking “these games looked better from what i remember than this” and it’s just the older games weren’t made for modern tvs obviously.
A lot of people remember N64 games looking better, but maybe it really did. I played the virtual console on the Wii of a lot of n64 games on an old CRT because we didnt have a flatscreen yet; really helped out a lot.
It really did. The advent of the HDTV was the bait and switch. We all moved on because of TV and HD gaming, along with new consoles to match the new medium, and our minds collectively gas-lit society into believing old tech was that much worse because it doesn't play with the only tech most people know today.
@@gamefreektv The problem with HDTV was... Well who wants to deal with the hunky and power consuming nature of CRT's. I think the true good of CRT's is due to their primitive nature was worked around, but the average folk would rather have ease of use than to deal with the annoyance of picking up a CRT. A recreation of the CRT should be brought back.
CRTs add: Texturing Shading Blending Lighting Transparency An AO effect So many things it took decades to get back in 3d. CRTs were the perfect tech for the time.
CRT hunting sucks, they won’t make them anymore and most of them have some kind of problem, I have a professional PVM with a dying tube (low contrast, yellowish tint.), and another with pin cushion issues. I don’t know anybody who has the tools to do a tube rejuvenation and can fix pin cushion.
@@chronology556 That sucks, Two Sony Crt's from the era died on me during winter (the screen exploded when I tried to turn them on, no joke). Have two nowadays which don't display wear and tear as long as I used them daily or really often. The Tantus sometimes magnetizes the screen and screeches, and the Sony Wega sometimes resets the service mode options to display awful contrast and the dreaded Red push. Both can be (and were) fixed by running a service mode menu and by manually running a magnet over the screen. I hope you can save your PVM's.
It may not look at good as it does here. The artists would go between making their art and seeing it on a CRT TV, and they'd do things with the knowledge that pixels blend a certain way. When you were making your art, you weren't doing it with the understanding of a particular blending that will take place afterward. If you want to emulate the old look directly, all you have to do is use more pixels, because that's more or less what is happening. Each pixel turns into perhaps 4 pixels, and their color relies on neighboring pixels. In this video, Scorpion from Mortal Combat and Dracula are great examples of them tactically choosing pixels to blend well. Scorpion's vest has this weird bright streak on it in the pixel art, but blended, that solid streak turns into multiple shades. They likely went back and forth with trial and error multiple times to get that look (or they were experienced with the technology and developed intuition for it, not needing as much trial and error). Dracula's eyes in the pixel art is a single dot that turns into regular red eyes. It's unlikely you would ever have made that same pixel art with such a bold, ridiculous-looking single dot of sharp red, and if they were working with high resolution LCDs, they wouldn't either. They'd likely make a blocky version of the eyes with more than 1 dot of red + different shades. But through trial and error, they found 1 sharp dot blended perfectly on a CRT to make red eyes of multiple shades.
This is exactly why I won't play retro games on a modern screen without emulating through Retroarch. While it's not a replacement for an actual CRT, their shaders do the best approximation outside of the real thing.
I read that oled and 4k is very close to a crt look with the correct shaders. I also emulate for retroarchachivements :) however I have some adapters so I can use my b&o 28" crt. Looks VERY nice!
@@vinnievincent85 Well yes, you can get it to look fairly similar to an actual CRT on an OLED, but you won't get the same kind of judder free scrolling depending on the game. On top of that, while I actually have an OLED, I would absolutely NEVER use one of the shaders on it, especially if I was wanting to spend a lot of time with that shader. Instead I just use my 1440p desktop monitor for retro games, with shaders that were designed for 1440p. The shaders add hundreds, if not thousands of tiny dots, or lines all over the screen, and having something like that remain static on an OLED for an extended period is a no-no.
People always forget another thing. Back in the day most of us had 14"-21" CRTs and now people are plugging their original hardware and emulators to huge TVs that are bigger than 40". You're stretching a postage stamp size image into a freaking living room window size. It's better to use a smaller displays for old stuff.
@@Neonmirrorblack considering that the scan lines are darker it is not going to cause burn in. burn in is not caused by dark static images, it is caused by very bright static images. a CRT shader will not cause burn in on an OLED TV.
The original art can be seen as an inverse transform of what the CRT does to the image. They used dithering to create new colors from a limited color palette, because a CRT would blend the pixels(I remember MS paint used dithering for custom colors). And they purposely increased contrast to counteract some blurring to make colors stand out. They were able to create sub-pixel details with these techniques. Looking at the unfiltered pixels is like looking at the brush movements of a painter instead of looking at the canvas where all the layers of paint interact and mix. I would love to replay Kings Quest V and VI with some filter enabled.
Also, generally with a CRT TV, you weren't sitting so close to the screen that you could easily see the black lines from the mask like that. In pictures like the one at 4:59 where they have to zoom out a little to get the full ED 209 in you can better see that it would have looked like back in the day.
The problem with pixels is that we imagine it as a box with one random color. while in reality it's a box with three fixed colored lights harmonizing. And light isn't square.
i tried playing some doom mods on my 1080p monitor and the pixels were eating my eyes, i added a CRT filter with a bit of film grain with reshade and it gave it new life, tried the same with Cultic and oh my god it became creepier and better
It's a pretty unfair comparison to say that indies do it wrong. Considering the user don't use the same hardware anymore. Indies use new approaches for newer hardware. I would say the style you see today is a new subgenre of an old method.
They might be misguided in their approach to the style they want to imitate. The 8bit-16bit era artists did not went for blocky images as a stylistic choice, we weren't even supposed to see that.
@@catlerbatty the block pixel art games people call now a days is a result of high def emulators that took away the dither from crts imo. anyone that actually grew up playing these old games remember them being smooth sprites with color blending not the new modern blocky sharp pixels. it is what it is though, i don’t think it’s fair to compare both since they’re both two different things.
its not about the tools they use. The tools are actually better today for pixel art. Its about CRTs enhancing and making even current day pixel art games look better lol.
people have been using CRT scanline shaders for years and they've gotten pretty advanced to where now you can make it look like a low quality CRT with excessive bloom or you can simulate a crappy composite cable hookup or you can make it look like the brst broadcast reference CRT monitor that was ever made (particularly if you have an OLED screen) you can simulate the look of many different CRT monitors, even crappy ones if that's your thing. Some people want that really grungy 80 dollar 13" Daewoo from 1997 look. i like the BVM/PVM look.
What you said is true. Most good emulators have CRT shaders and while it can be a mixed bag to get right, but the results are great. One thing people forget is that CRT's had a 'natural' upscale and while people say it was 'blurring' it's kinda true but the CRT still had sharpness, it also handled various resolutions beautifully, where as a LCD is strict to the native res and looks rubbish otherwise. - One other point is CRT's back then were mostly 14 - 15 inches for monitors and TV's were 21 - 24 inches but with those you sat back further.
@@blahmeh242with the high resolutions of today's display the scaling imperfections are practically not noticeable, like scaling a retro 240p game to 4k is no issue at all, and even if you really are a purist about it then a integer scale will fill up most of the screen too with no scaling artifacts
@@doc8125 Yeah but these games were never designed to be sharp pixels. This is some "new" thing or some obsession in a different way. I suppose the thing is, good shaders get the best of both worlds, the game still looks sharp but! they essentially simulate/emulate what these games were displayed on. Like if you play Final Fight or something on MAME, if you play perfect pixel it's no way how it was supposed to be, looses the whole point. - But add a CRT shader and it really brings out what it was actually like, back then, but not loosing detail either. - the art in that game (series) was like many games back then, really awesome. Anyway I don't know what my point is or what you were trying to make either ;) but bad scale on these games is horrible.
@@KirikkSiSq What? - Final Fight (not just that, but games from then onwards) was from 1989. Okk I think I get your point, sure they had LCD's back then - just. The reality back then was, the CRT was much better for the visual experience at the time. The art was designed for them. If you look at the Game Boy back then too, yeah it was cool, they worked with the strict pixel screen. Those screens were horrible. Yes the screen was "pixel perfect" from that point of view, but the sloppy and sluggish LCD that got worse by the ~hour as the pack of batteries started to drain wasn't ideal. Plus don't forget these things were mono in colour, ie black and "~greenish". Funny enough there are fans who use emulators to get this exact thing!
i feel like saying "make it look shitty on purpose" is kinda stupid because modern pixel art the way we make it for clearer LED screens and pixel art made for CRT have kinda developed into their own seperate art forms. Like if you put the art at 2:52 on a CRT it might look nice but some things would be off because it wasn't made to be played on a CRT. Some people fail to understand how extremely important *intent* is in how art is made and how it looks.
This makes me value the HD-2D aesthetic of games like Octopath Traveller and Star Ocean: Second Story R much more. Instead of just trying to recreate something that used to work well in the past, they are trying to rescue the vibe and general look, while making use of technological advancements of our era. A strong art direction move IMO.
Playing Octopath Traveler 2 nowadays since it's recently released on game pass. It makes a huge impact playing the game on pc with crt filter (I use ShaderGlass to apply crt-geom filter) to the point that although my Xbox connected to bigger 4k tv, I exclusively play the game on my 16" laptop. I think it's a crime to release any game with pixel art without any crt filter 😅
I believe as another pixel artist myself, that you are wrong about something right on 3:12 is not "modern indie pixel art" and "actual good pixel art" a valid comparison, I believe I do "actual good pixel art" but I don't own a CRT tv to ensure my pieces work just as good, there are many great "actual good pixel artists" but also crappy pixel artists, and indie games with crappy pixel art, so you might wanna compare 2 indie pixel art pieces by "good looking and bad looking" criteria through a CRT screen to have a valid answer. Any old pixel art game will look crappy in your PC screen or look fantastic over a CRT tv, and vice-versa, a "well made pixel art indie game" will look fantastic (without CRT post processing filters of course) on a CRT tv and normal on a HD screen.
I wouldn't call modern pixel artists and pixel artists back then the same. Back then they manipulated the raw pixel art input to acquire the desired look on the CRT output, which blends the pixels together to create a more hand drawn look (for example 11:00) Whereas modern pixel artists are inspired by only the unintended raw pixelated look that we're used to from emulators. My point is, if you want to create that old school crt look from snes games you'd need to create it on an actual crt with the intention of making it look hand drawn. Good luck!
I recognized this at the beginning of the retro art wave, which is why I never got into it. It’s not supposed to look blocky like that, so either give me a scanline filter or I don’t want it. People have the right to like it though but it’s really a barrier for me
This is the same principle why many museums in Italy that hold Renaissance art spend upwards of billions to simulate true muted daylight as if bouncing from a thick opening.
go look at castlevania 1's opening. the fence (on composite) has a rusted and aged appearance (on CRT of course). also on CRT, using s-vid or component/RGB removes this detail (despite getting a crisper image). so it's not only a matter of CRT vs Panel technology, it's composite that allows for a desired dot crawl that creates these blends of color that the devs intended for you to see. choose wisely.. composite for a detailed, but not very crisp image... or, RGB for a less detailed, but very crisp image.
@@djangofett4879 It's funny hear. Because back then composite is primary method of connecting display device for many many consoles of time. And it is primary target for development. So actually using RGB connection with broadcast grade PWM CRT display is way to garbage intended quality of image.
r/crtgaming convinced me to get RGB cables for all my systems and I've regretted it ever since, feels like I'm just playing an emulator with a scanlines filter, instead of the original system on a crt, I did keep my composite cables so I could just hook them up again, but I unfortunately have some physical damage to my body that makes moving the CRT around difficult, it's why I splurged almost $500 (after import taxes) on a big scart hub so I would only have to do it once, one day I'll manage to "fix" the problem again...
Genesis and Saturn were meant to be played on the CRT TV, because of the dithering. Now, we play those games on the emulator with the Composite setting on the emulator...
Dracula portrait from SotN is one of the best to prove the point, especially his eyes, but really, just how dithering was meant to look and why its used. Modern pixel art that packs a lot of detail is fine on pixel perfect displays since the smallest elements of detail are just too small and they can be shaded with modern engines easily - but for anyone looking to replicate times past, you cannot do that without a CRT or a filter that ACTUALLY makes it look like that (which nearly none of them do IME).
I love this, this has bothered me for years and it's why I bought a Sony KV-20FS100 that lasted for several years and now I believe it has bad caps, and I don't want to electrocute myself trying to solder new ones. Ultimately I've realized to get a decent setup with what's available and within a reasonable budget you need at least 2 CRTs/monitors to cover all retro gaming eras. I just ordered a Commodore 64 monitor which is perfect for 240p content and it can do S-video as well for N64. For 480p content I think the most realistic option is a quality old PC monitor for consoles like Dreamcast, Gamecube/Wii and etc. and of course a modern TV or monitor for modern stuff. Happy hunting!
9:30 - This happens because CRT doesn't use pixels, so each 'block' of triads is slightly rectangular. It's not 'stretching' anything - the artists calculate for the 'stretch' when creating the art. The stretch is the intended outcome. The 'pixel' version is in fact compressed from how it SHOULD look. CRT version is correct version.
Yes. Many today forgot about little fact - that input signal for CRT can be anamorphic. And TV stretches anything to it's own 4:3 aspect ratio. Because CRT does not had horizontal resolution concept, it's just continuous line.
7:34 mortal combat is probably the best example of a game that will just look ass if you dont play it on CRT. the photorealistic PA was made for that tech.
Playing retro games on a CRT is much more like looking at a cartoon through very fine window blinds rather than blocks. The N64 looks really good on a CRT, even through composite.
Hi. I feel the same way and try to capture this look in recordings for youtube, by directly comparing to a set of Sony consumer Trinitron CRT televisions while tuning filters in MiSTer FPGA. I've gotten to the point where it's close enough that I will not mourn the loss of these beasts when they no longer function. They're probably never going to be made again so I feel preserving this look is important. Cheers!
Today many says that PS1 hardware dithering is shit. And yea - on LCD it looks like shit pattern, but PS1 never intended to use with LCD, on CRT that dithering pattern gives amazing filtering to picture and sometimes imitate bilinear filtering without actually using it. And overal increase quality of 3D PSX games.
i think people that grew up with emulators like me are the ones that enjoy the unfiltered look of pixel art, when i see luna nights for example what comes to mind its not "oh i see, this guy is making it /look shitty/ to look like an old game" (that was a pretty blunt line tbh), i see it more as someone that appreciates the aesthetic and craftsmanship of good pixel art and went for that route for their art direction. I think the same about cave story for example, its not someone copying snes/gba graphics. Just like if you decide to paint in monet style in 2022 its not painting an "outdated" art style, instead its an evolution of that art style. What gets outdated is technology, the art made with it is immortal and always evolving, in its many ways of expression. Not to say CRT doesnt look fantastic, just adressing that its not the "right way of seeing pixel art". art is more than this :b
This surely is an eye-opener considering I don't have a CRT anymore to compare. The blocky pixels turn into smooth lineart, colors blend and highlights pop! The dark areas on Samus's suit actually look like shadows. The sprites lose their aliased edges and have actual depth show through. Not to mention scrolling texts and fast moving objects are actually clear on a CRT. Love this video!
i didnt really like all the gradient text so many of the retro games i've played (eg. street fighter, sonic, etc.) used but when looking at it on CRT and seeing how it was intended to be blended and how much better it looks i can understand why every damn game was doing it 💀💀
all this is true. my old ps2 looks amazing on crt tv. but technology not standing in one point and you can emulate this effect by enableing software dithering in some emulators. have a fun!))
The real reason to still go for CRT's nowadays is no motion blur and zero input lag for retro games, something software emulation will not have even if it gets close
Pixel only exist on LCD screens, CRT don`t, so pixel art now days are done right. You have to make the art thinking where it will be shown, doesn`t make sense to do a Pixel Art based on CRT to be shown on a LCD, you have to adjust the art to fit on LCD, we can see that in the android version of FFV and FFVI.
Today's crt filters look better than the best crts when using a 4k oled, the only thing crt has at this point is motion clarity, the crt will be done when 8k oled panels run at 240hz
It depends. For me, pixels were always sharp and square. Even in 1997 on a crt pc monitor. I think pc monitors are just too high resolution compared to tvs then
Your PC being on DVI is why it doesn't run retro pixel art games (till PS1 era) at their native 240p resolution but 480i/480p, 240p on a CRT is what creates the scanlines.
@@islandboy9381 I hope you realize that the games were 240p, but the screens that were used were 480i. You did not play an 8-bit or 16-bit game on a "240p" screen, because TVs were 480i until later on. 240p games did not "create" scan lines, the scan lines were intrinsic to the TV itself, which is what the art was designed around in the first place.
Sony PVM and BVM monitors were professional/broadcast level monitors, and they absolutely did not make games "sharp and square". You weren't getting a better monitor for console games than those screens back then either. Do some research...
its so cool, the whole vibe is different. i wish i could buy some crt tv just for playing old games, since i saw that you can connect a laptop on a crt tv. its been my dream for a while now haha
something else witch crt which is hard to explain but even on my LG C2 oled it doesn't have that depth or feel of 3d...its hard to explain how modern games have so much depth and life like representation. see if you can find a Sony Fw900 through electronic recycle companies. they get them from old schools and university's. got mine for 375 shipped. online they sell for $3700 without shipping
I used it for a little bit, meh. I've been using emulators for 25+ years. At this point it's retro and more nostalgic for me to not use it. I like pixel art, I don't need to obscure it. I completely disagree, what's charming is being able to see the individual pixels. The crt just looks blurry to me and it strains my eyes.
So thats why some memories of some games could be a better quality than today as how the difference in monitor is and how they made them for ctr or other types but that vladermir ctr did look awsome compared so as reselotion is bigger there probably need bigger pixel counts to give the same look and then be even better as there is not the same limit as before
There has to be a way to simulate this on a LCD/OLED TV with and even improve to improve every benefit of a CRT. 4K resolution is more than enough for great CRT filters that would look exactly like a CRT. The emulation community just has to focus more on perfecting filters / CRT simulation HDMI boxes and take it seriously. There are some pretty good filters now but they still need to improve a ton. There's nothing impossible about a perfect CRT filter and it wouldn't even cause games to lag on modern PCs. I think the problem is that creators who could do it are satisfied with what we have and there's a real lack of direction too because everyone has different ideas of what a CRT filter should be like. Someone should lead a serious project in emulating the best Sony CRT and a Nanao MS9 arcade monitor as accurately as possible and it would be promble solved.
the current set of filters are fantastic and can simulate many different looks of crt. the current selection of shaders imo makes it pointless to even own a CRT. I'm not sure what exactly is that you're looking for that you don't think is satisfied by the current selection...
@@djangofett4879 I am pretty well satisfied and i'm aware that ReShade is highly customizable but there is still room to improve. If you look at an arcade monitor on cabinets on Taito Egret 3, Astro City, Blast City closely and spend time with them, there's no filter that looks exactly that good or looks exactly like the pixels on those monitors. There's almost a 3d effect to arcade monitor pixels and they look amazing and they make the game's pixel arts pretty much perfect they way they project the pixels and blend the pixel art together. So it's not an absolute necessity but it would be even more awesome if there was something that compared to arcade monitors well enough or actually emulated all aspects of different monitors. Also motion looks smoother on CRT monitors still compared to LCD/OLED/QLED, but one day there will be "perfect" modern panels that have perfect colors and black and brightness and movement and low latency and matching that with "perfectly emulated" crt filters is my dream.
That's what I've always disliked about games made nowadays that are aiming for a retro look, that is fine and all that if they actually went for the retro look, which is how it looks on a CRT or on a flat panel with a CRT filter. Most of the games made nowadays with a retro look, look like crap to me, and it's not even retro, it's actually worse than how games retro is actually supposed to look. Now if modern games going for that retro look actually had the option of a good CRT filter, that would be far closer to the retro feel that they are supposed to be aiming for, but what they actually offer is actually worse than how we used to play games decades ago and doesn't make any sense with how they emphasise the retro look, or to put it another way, get a game from the early 90's, give it a good CRT filter that makes it look as it's supposed to look at the time, and I bet that will look better than most retro looking games that have been made over the last decade, and that surprises me how they seem to miss the point of what the retro look is supposed to look like, which isn't the raw pixel look on an LCD display, which quite frankly, looks like crap, it's supposed to look how a retro game looked on a CRT, which to get that effect on an LCD display, you need a CRT filter. Come to think of it, I wonder if there are any overlay filters you can use for those games made today that try to give a retro look but get it so wrong, they might actually look more in line with what the retro look is supposed to look like lol. As for the ones doing pixel art games, if they do it correctly and offer the option of having a good CRT filter, I bet those games would sell better than not having the option, I know of many gamers that look at pixel art games and simply say no to buying it because of the pixel nature, but with a good CRT filter, it would look much better and much more accurate to what pixel art is all about, that would likely boost game sales of those games, and from an artist perspective, it wouldn't need any more work, it's all been done with the filter giving it the look that's much closer to how it would look on a CRT display, that for me is true retro, whereas the retro we get nowadays is just cheap crap that isn't even retro in the true sense. As for CRT filters, they are actually quite good and come real close to replicating the CRT look on an LCD display, many of which you can test out on emulators and they seem to work best on a 4k display.
I just discovered ShaderGlass very recently due to Octopath Traveler 2 released on Game Pass. If you haven't heard of it, check it out. I use it on OT2, Vampire Survivor and Dead Cells and I can honestly say I would not play those games except on pc if there's no built in crt filter.
I respectfully disagree that retro games look better on crt. Now if we are going to debate about if they were meant for crt that's a a other story. First pixels are there because of limitations but I would argue most 2d gamed wouldn't exist if it weren't for limitations. Heck 2d to 3d the opposite is true with games that took a while or never moved to 3d. Like castlevania metroid kirby and contra were stuck in 2d or struggled in 3d. Because the limitations of 2d were built so well around it that they never thought how the 2d mechanics apply in 3d. So pixel art to me is a creation of limitations but it's built around them at the same time. Now crt made things smoother bit at the same time it also made details harder to see and details which were always intended to be seen are now gone. Plus And ultimately when games moved to higher resolution. While pixel art faded away it didn't disappear because people always knew that they were starring at flat blocks and didn't care becusse it was part of the art style and whether it became it or always was or not games like kirby super star ultra on the ds. And castlevainia adventure wii ware was still using it. The idea it's wrong is more so this idea that they never wanted people to see the blocky look which never had any effort to hide. It I mean I could Stull see the pixels it just made it look messier. Ultimately this is just my opinion
wrong. The developers clearly intended those games to look like how it does on CRT. The perfect example would be SNK games on arcade, or Comix Zone for a more specific checking. The character shadows on those games, when running it on a raw LCD, doesn't even look like shadows. They're straight black lines and dots that flicker like mad and look completely out of place when displayed on a raw display. Now when you plug in those games on a CRT with NTSC filter and interlacing, you will see those straight black likes and dots blending together to form a solid black aura with transparency below the character and, just like magic, they don't flash or flicker anymore. They now look like shadows below your playable character. This is proof that the developers back in the 80's and early 90's were 100% conscient of the nature of the NTSC/PAL and Interlacing features of those tube displays and how they would positively affect the nature of raw pixels. Another great example is how waterfall water look transparent in Sonic The Hedgehog (1991) when running CRTs but then they don't look transparent on a raw LCD image, they just look like sharp white pixels in rectangular form falling down. This is the NTSC feature taking place to blend pixels and create the illusion of water transparency.
this is an extremely good comparison and demonstration, but i still prefer indie pixel art (carrion is my favourite example of pixel art), but its probably just based on what we played growing up.
"Modern indie pixel art, and actual good pixel art" such a bad and uneducated take. Just because it's not the same as the old ones, doesn't mean it's not "actually good".
wrong. Not every game has motion blur and CA. And if you turn those off the game basically looks the same. Back in the days every pixel art game was getting "fixed" by CRTs.
'Pixel Art' is just a concept that the newer gen has never made a grasp of. Sadly many of our re-releases are getting this treatment as well on digital stores. Great way to kill the nostalgia.
Pixel art actually was intended to look more like it did on the left since most of the devs were working on PC Monitors and PVMs with far more accurate and dense colour phosphors. Not to mention the thousands of games released on the Gameboy, Gameboy Colour, Gameboy Advance, Nintendo DS, Gamegear, etc which all use sharp, low-res LCD screens which were absolutely the intended viewing experience. This video is the fruit of ignorance more than anything else.
Oh boy. Devs may have worked with sharp pixel art on PC monitors at the time, but given that literally no customer back then could view the games that way, the game's were very obviously made with a CRT's translation of the image in mind. This is evident through commonly employed techniques such as dithering, and pixel art that actually benefited from the dated technology (see: the countless examples in this very video. A group of squares in Richter's hair now become thin lines. Slightly different shades of a color turn into a smooth gradient at many points) Your point about handheld screens is not a fair comparison. They just reflect a changing landscape. We now have the luxury of sharp displays, but even despite that countless games in pixel art made today employ a CRT filter to mimic that effect. TLDR: Retro games were made with a CRT in mind. The screens of the handhelds you mentioned were made with their own screen in mind. Its wild that this needed to be explained, but irony of you rudely calling him ignorant as well may be even wilder.
"pixel art" as we know it today, is a modern invention of indie people who played everything on emulators on much higher res screen and have no idea how 2d games were made or even looked back then. It wasnt pixelated and never was because litterally no one was able to play these games with an unaltered signal on a digital monitor. And games on hanheld were trying to be as smooth as possible, with some games like sword of mana or kingdom hearts chain of memories trying super hard to be drawing like on a limited hardware and be the least pixellated possible. No dev in their right mind was trying to make it look "pixel like" like those modern 2d games. Even the first pokemon game on an original game boy looks less pixellated than almost any "pixel art" modern indie game. Even games on famicom, which was basically pixels and squares, were trying extremely hard to not show the pixels. Some games manage to be ok looking and a few pull it off, but in general I tend to find this modern style absolutely horrendous and very tacky.
Games on the handhelds were intended to be sharp. But the ones on home consoles were made with crt TV's in mind. One on the right is absolutely the intended experience. These are not handheld games.
@@KDZen GBA had such a small 240X160p screen that you really didn't need to take advantage of thick scanlines, just the LCD grid. Indeed developers took advantage of the small size and low resolution. A game like Donkey Kong Country 3 still gives the illusion of a 3D model on your handheld. If you play the SNES version on 3DS (which is similar in resolution to the SNES with an SD screen), it also has a very similar effect. Also, GBA had a different color profile from modern smartphones. Only thing you don't get is the blending effect of Composite/S Video, but again, screen is already so small it's not essential.
![Noob To Max With DRAGON REWORK In Blox Fruits [FULL MOVIE]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/LnBMOinoOvA/mqdefault.jpg)
I never realized how much the CRT gave a more natural look the the images, and how much my mind made up for the rest. This is why remember these worlds looking smoother as a kid, and I thought it was just all rose tinted glasses.
I use CRT Royale shader for old games. It's a must.
It's not your mind tricking you, my friend. CRT are masking low resolution very well. LCD/LED and other modern displays are very accurate and they make the low-res pixel art to fall apart, breaking the dithering effect used to achieve more colors. Slight blur of CRT display makes old games look smoother. There very good shaders and filters built-into emulators that are made to resemble CRT image. They need some processing power though so on low-end hardware it'll make your emulation run slower. Mednafen emulator has built in simple scanline effect that helps a bit and it's not as CPU intensive as full blown shaders.
not only that , the game devs worked on sprites/pixels around CRTs so they knew how it would look at consumers homes. it’s crazy but when i played some old school games for the first time in a long time i was thinking “these games looked better from what i remember than this” and it’s just the older games weren’t made for modern tvs obviously.
A lot of people remember N64 games looking better, but maybe it really did. I played the virtual console on the Wii of a lot of n64 games on an old CRT because we didnt have a flatscreen yet; really helped out a lot.
It really did.
The advent of the HDTV was the bait and switch. We all moved on because of TV and HD gaming, along with new consoles to match the new medium, and our minds collectively gas-lit society into believing old tech was that much worse because it doesn't play with the only tech most people know today.
@@gamefreektv The problem with HDTV was... Well who wants to deal with the hunky and power consuming nature of CRT's. I think the true good of CRT's is due to their primitive nature was worked around, but the average folk would rather have ease of use than to deal with the annoyance of picking up a CRT. A recreation of the CRT should be brought back.
CRTs add:
Texturing
Shading
Blending
Lighting
Transparency
An AO effect
So many things it took decades to get back in 3d. CRTs were the perfect tech for the time.
As a pixel artist myself, I'm getting an hdmi to rca adapter soon to see how my stuff looks on an actual crt
CRT hunting sucks, they won’t make them anymore and most of them have some kind of problem, I have a professional PVM with a dying tube (low contrast, yellowish tint.), and another with pin cushion issues.
I don’t know anybody who has the tools to do a tube rejuvenation and can fix pin cushion.
@@chronology556 i know a discord server that helps people to repair crts
@@chronology556 That sucks, Two Sony Crt's from the era died on me during winter (the screen exploded when I tried to turn them on, no joke). Have two nowadays which don't display wear and tear as long as I used them daily or really often. The Tantus sometimes magnetizes the screen and screeches, and the Sony Wega sometimes resets the service mode options to display awful contrast and the dreaded Red push. Both can be (and were) fixed by running a service mode menu and by manually running a magnet over the screen. I hope you can save your PVM's.
It may not look at good as it does here. The artists would go between making their art and seeing it on a CRT TV, and they'd do things with the knowledge that pixels blend a certain way. When you were making your art, you weren't doing it with the understanding of a particular blending that will take place afterward. If you want to emulate the old look directly, all you have to do is use more pixels, because that's more or less what is happening. Each pixel turns into perhaps 4 pixels, and their color relies on neighboring pixels.
In this video, Scorpion from Mortal Combat and Dracula are great examples of them tactically choosing pixels to blend well. Scorpion's vest has this weird bright streak on it in the pixel art, but blended, that solid streak turns into multiple shades. They likely went back and forth with trial and error multiple times to get that look (or they were experienced with the technology and developed intuition for it, not needing as much trial and error). Dracula's eyes in the pixel art is a single dot that turns into regular red eyes. It's unlikely you would ever have made that same pixel art with such a bold, ridiculous-looking single dot of sharp red, and if they were working with high resolution LCDs, they wouldn't either. They'd likely make a blocky version of the eyes with more than 1 dot of red + different shades. But through trial and error, they found 1 sharp dot blended perfectly on a CRT to make red eyes of multiple shades.
You can try to find a 480p Plasma TV. It will look exactly like CRT's. I have one from LG and it looks great.
This is exactly why I won't play retro games on a modern screen without emulating through Retroarch. While it's not a replacement for an actual CRT, their shaders do the best approximation outside of the real thing.
I read that oled and 4k is very close to a crt look with the correct shaders. I also emulate for retroarchachivements :) however I have some adapters so I can use my b&o 28" crt. Looks VERY nice!
@@vinnievincent85 Well yes, you can get it to look fairly similar to an actual CRT on an OLED, but you won't get the same kind of judder free scrolling depending on the game.
On top of that, while I actually have an OLED, I would absolutely NEVER use one of the shaders on it, especially if I was wanting to spend a lot of time with that shader. Instead I just use my 1440p desktop monitor for retro games, with shaders that were designed for 1440p.
The shaders add hundreds, if not thousands of tiny dots, or lines all over the screen, and having something like that remain static on an OLED for an extended period is a no-no.
People always forget another thing. Back in the day most of us had 14"-21" CRTs and now people are plugging their original hardware and emulators to huge TVs that are bigger than 40". You're stretching a postage stamp size image into a freaking living room window size. It's better to use a smaller displays for old stuff.
at this point, with newer shaders and a 4k OLED, it is better than an actual CRT
@@Neonmirrorblack considering that the scan lines are darker it is not going to cause burn in. burn in is not caused by dark static images, it is caused by very bright static images. a CRT shader will not cause burn in on an OLED TV.
The original art can be seen as an inverse transform of what the CRT does to the image. They used dithering to create new colors from a limited color palette, because a CRT would blend the pixels(I remember MS paint used dithering for custom colors). And they purposely increased contrast to counteract some blurring to make colors stand out. They were able to create sub-pixel details with these techniques. Looking at the unfiltered pixels is like looking at the brush movements of a painter instead of looking at the canvas where all the layers of paint interact and mix.
I would love to replay Kings Quest V and VI with some filter enabled.
Also, generally with a CRT TV, you weren't sitting so close to the screen that you could easily see the black lines from the mask like that. In pictures like the one at 4:59 where they have to zoom out a little to get the full ED 209 in you can better see that it would have looked like back in the day.
I was def sitting way too close to the TV. I'm sure everyone else was too.
Also, PAL has a higher resolution compared to NTSC. You don't usually see scanlines in PAL TV screens.
Yes, ahora todos usan lentes :v,. 🤓😵💫, si dañaba la vista 😅
The problem with pixels is that we imagine it as a box with one random color.
while in reality it's a box with three fixed colored lights harmonizing.
And light isn't square.
i tried playing some doom mods on my 1080p monitor and the pixels were eating my eyes, i added a CRT filter with a bit of film grain with reshade and it gave it new life, tried the same with Cultic and oh my god it became creepier and better
It's a pretty unfair comparison to say that indies do it wrong. Considering the user don't use the same hardware anymore. Indies use new approaches for newer hardware. I would say the style you see today is a new subgenre of an old method.
Agreed
They might be misguided in their approach to the style they want to imitate. The 8bit-16bit era artists did not went for blocky images as a stylistic choice, we weren't even supposed to see that.
@@catlerbatty the block pixel art games people call now a days is a result of high def emulators that took away the dither from crts imo. anyone that actually grew up playing these old games remember them being smooth sprites with color blending not the new modern blocky sharp pixels. it is what it is though, i don’t think it’s fair to compare both since they’re both two different things.
its not about the tools they use. The tools are actually better today for pixel art.
Its about CRTs enhancing and making even current day pixel art games look better lol.
My thoughts exactly. It's not "wrong"; it's just a new take on pixel art that's meant to be viewed on a different type of screen.
CRT TV's are made for the old school games. I am glad i found one again.
people have been using CRT scanline shaders for years and they've gotten pretty advanced to where now you can make it look like a low quality CRT with excessive bloom or you can simulate a crappy composite cable hookup or you can make it look like the brst broadcast reference CRT monitor that was ever made (particularly if you have an OLED screen)
you can simulate the look of many different CRT monitors, even crappy ones if that's your thing. Some people want that really grungy 80 dollar 13" Daewoo from 1997 look. i like the BVM/PVM look.
What you said is true. Most good emulators have CRT shaders and while it can be a mixed bag to get right, but the results are great. One thing people forget is that CRT's had a 'natural' upscale and while people say it was 'blurring' it's kinda true but the CRT still had sharpness, it also handled various resolutions beautifully, where as a LCD is strict to the native res and looks rubbish otherwise. - One other point is CRT's back then were mostly 14 - 15 inches for monitors and TV's were 21 - 24 inches but with those you sat back further.
@@blahmeh242with the high resolutions of today's display the scaling imperfections are practically not noticeable, like scaling a retro 240p game to 4k is no issue at all, and even if you really are a purist about it then a integer scale will fill up most of the screen too with no scaling artifacts
@@doc8125 Yeah but these games were never designed to be sharp pixels. This is some "new" thing or some obsession in a different way. I suppose the thing is, good shaders get the best of both worlds, the game still looks sharp but! they essentially simulate/emulate what these games were displayed on.
Like if you play Final Fight or something on MAME, if you play perfect pixel it's no way how it was supposed to be, looses the whole point. - But add a CRT shader and it really brings out what it was actually like, back then, but not loosing detail either. - the art in that game (series) was like many games back then, really awesome.
Anyway I don't know what my point is or what you were trying to make either ;) but bad scale on these games is horrible.
@@blahmeh242 not really that new - gameboy appeared in 1989
@@KirikkSiSq What? - Final Fight (not just that, but games from then onwards) was from 1989.
Okk I think I get your point, sure they had LCD's back then - just.
The reality back then was, the CRT was much better for the visual experience at the time. The art was designed for them.
If you look at the Game Boy back then too, yeah it was cool, they worked with the strict pixel screen. Those screens were horrible. Yes the screen was "pixel perfect" from that point of view, but the sloppy and sluggish LCD that got worse by the ~hour as the pack of batteries started to drain wasn't ideal. Plus don't forget these things were mono in colour, ie black and "~greenish".
Funny enough there are fans who use emulators to get this exact thing!
i feel like saying "make it look shitty on purpose" is kinda stupid because modern pixel art the way we make it for clearer LED screens and pixel art made for CRT have kinda developed into their own seperate art forms. Like if you put the art at 2:52 on a CRT it might look nice but some things would be off because it wasn't made to be played on a CRT. Some people fail to understand how extremely important *intent* is in how art is made and how it looks.
This makes me value the HD-2D aesthetic of games like Octopath Traveller and Star Ocean: Second Story R much more. Instead of just trying to recreate something that used to work well in the past, they are trying to rescue the vibe and general look, while making use of technological advancements of our era. A strong art direction move IMO.
when the Mandela Effect I had when revisiting retro games was actually the real deal
Playing Octopath Traveler 2 nowadays since it's recently released on game pass. It makes a huge impact playing the game on pc with crt filter (I use ShaderGlass to apply crt-geom filter) to the point that although my Xbox connected to bigger 4k tv, I exclusively play the game on my 16" laptop.
I think it's a crime to release any game with pixel art without any crt filter 😅
I believe as another pixel artist myself, that you are wrong about something right on 3:12 is not "modern indie pixel art" and "actual good pixel art" a valid comparison, I believe I do "actual good pixel art" but I don't own a CRT tv to ensure my pieces work just as good, there are many great "actual good pixel artists" but also crappy pixel artists, and indie games with crappy pixel art, so you might wanna compare 2 indie pixel art pieces by "good looking and bad looking" criteria through a CRT screen to have a valid answer. Any old pixel art game will look crappy in your PC screen or look fantastic over a CRT tv, and vice-versa, a "well made pixel art indie game" will look fantastic (without CRT post processing filters of course) on a CRT tv and normal on a HD screen.
I wouldn't call modern pixel artists and pixel artists back then the same. Back then they manipulated the raw pixel art input to acquire the desired look on the CRT output, which blends the pixels together to create a more hand drawn look (for example 11:00) Whereas modern pixel artists are inspired by only the unintended raw pixelated look that we're used to from emulators.
My point is, if you want to create that old school crt look from snes games you'd need to create it on an actual crt with the intention of making it look hand drawn. Good luck!
I ALWAYS add CTR effects whenever I play old games, our current display isn't the one those old games were designed for
I recognized this at the beginning of the retro art wave, which is why I never got into it. It’s not supposed to look blocky like that, so either give me a scanline filter or I don’t want it.
People have the right to like it though but it’s really a barrier for me
This is the same principle why many museums in Italy that hold Renaissance art spend upwards of billions to simulate true muted daylight as if bouncing from a thick opening.
So this is why the Genesis games looked shit when I booted them up on an emulator on my phone.....
go look at castlevania 1's opening. the fence (on composite) has a rusted and aged appearance (on CRT of course). also on CRT, using s-vid or component/RGB removes this detail (despite getting a crisper image). so it's not only a matter of CRT vs Panel technology, it's composite that allows for a desired dot crawl that creates these blends of color that the devs intended for you to see. choose wisely.. composite for a detailed, but not very crisp image... or, RGB for a less detailed, but very crisp image.
too bad composite is absolute garbage image quality
@@djangofett4879 It's funny hear. Because back then composite is primary method of connecting display device for many many consoles of time. And it is primary target for development. So actually using RGB connection with broadcast grade PWM CRT display is way to garbage intended quality of image.
r/crtgaming convinced me to get RGB cables for all my systems and I've regretted it ever since, feels like I'm just playing an emulator with a scanlines filter, instead of the original system on a crt, I did keep my composite cables so I could just hook them up again, but I unfortunately have some physical damage to my body that makes moving the CRT around difficult, it's why I splurged almost $500 (after import taxes) on a big scart hub so I would only have to do it once, one day I'll manage to "fix" the problem again...
Thank you! With this, I feel more comfortable playing my 3DS console!
Genesis and Saturn were meant to be played on the CRT TV, because of the dithering.
Now, we play those games on the emulator with the Composite setting on the emulator...
fun fact: one of the design things behind the gameboy was that they wanted devs to be forced to show bare pixels to the world.
Hmm, ok...
But... then, why does the hdmi2av converter sort of work for some emulated gba games?
Is it bc of Game Boy Player for Gamecube?
Dracula portrait from SotN is one of the best to prove the point, especially his eyes, but really, just how dithering was meant to look and why its used. Modern pixel art that packs a lot of detail is fine on pixel perfect displays since the smallest elements of detail are just too small and they can be shaded with modern engines easily - but for anyone looking to replicate times past, you cannot do that without a CRT or a filter that ACTUALLY makes it look like that (which nearly none of them do IME).
I love this, this has bothered me for years and it's why I bought a Sony KV-20FS100 that lasted for several years and now I believe it has bad caps, and I don't want to electrocute myself trying to solder new ones. Ultimately I've realized to get a decent setup with what's available and within a reasonable budget you need at least 2 CRTs/monitors to cover all retro gaming eras. I just ordered a Commodore 64 monitor which is perfect for 240p content and it can do S-video as well for N64. For 480p content I think the most realistic option is a quality old PC monitor for consoles like Dreamcast, Gamecube/Wii and etc. and of course a modern TV or monitor for modern stuff. Happy hunting!
9:30 - This happens because CRT doesn't use pixels, so each 'block' of triads is slightly rectangular. It's not 'stretching' anything - the artists calculate for the 'stretch' when creating the art. The stretch is the intended outcome.
The 'pixel' version is in fact compressed from how it SHOULD look. CRT version is correct version.
Yes. Many today forgot about little fact - that input signal for CRT can be anamorphic. And TV stretches anything to it's own 4:3 aspect ratio. Because CRT does not had horizontal resolution concept, it's just continuous line.
@@LeonmitchelliGalette I think because many people today werent alive to experience it.
This is why I use ReShape on pretty much every pixel art games today.
What is that? Can you provide a link?
Applying a filter to modern pixel art games doesn’t work though, if the original art wasn’t intended for viewing on a CRT it’ll look even worse.
@@__vha It works on all pixel art games for some degree, depending on the CRT filter. Reshape has many filters to try.
Why does the sharp pixels version have a greenish yellow hue?
7:34 mortal combat is probably the best example of a game that will just look ass if you dont play it on CRT. the photorealistic PA was made for that tech.
Playing retro games on a CRT is much more like looking at a cartoon through very fine window blinds rather than blocks. The N64 looks really good on a CRT, even through composite.
This dude seems like the kinda guy that would have a CRT under his LEGO table. lol
Hi. I feel the same way and try to capture this look in recordings for youtube, by directly comparing to a set of Sony consumer Trinitron CRT televisions while tuning filters in MiSTer FPGA. I've gotten to the point where it's close enough that I will not mourn the loss of these beasts when they no longer function. They're probably never going to be made again so I feel preserving this look is important. Cheers!
the wave of pixel indie games made to look like so called older games is fairly clueless and I'm glad people point it out on channels such as this
Today many says that PS1 hardware dithering is shit. And yea - on LCD it looks like shit pattern, but PS1 never intended to use with LCD, on CRT that dithering pattern gives amazing filtering to picture and sometimes imitate bilinear filtering without actually using it. And overal increase quality of 3D PSX games.
Tell me which shaders I‘ll need in RetroArch to make it look like that pls
i think people that grew up with emulators like me are the ones that enjoy the unfiltered look of pixel art, when i see luna nights for example what comes to mind its not "oh i see, this guy is making it /look shitty/ to look like an old game" (that was a pretty blunt line tbh), i see it more as someone that appreciates the aesthetic and craftsmanship of good pixel art and went for that route for their art direction. I think the same about cave story for example, its not someone copying snes/gba graphics. Just like if you decide to paint in monet style in 2022 its not painting an "outdated" art style, instead its an evolution of that art style. What gets outdated is technology, the art made with it is immortal and always evolving, in its many ways of expression. Not to say CRT doesnt look fantastic, just adressing that its not the "right way of seeing pixel art". art is more than this :b
Using shaders on an emulator with retro games is great. Can play old games in 4k. They look good.
9:07 both look really good
This surely is an eye-opener considering I don't have a CRT anymore to compare. The blocky pixels turn into smooth lineart, colors blend and highlights pop! The dark areas on Samus's suit actually look like shadows. The sprites lose their aliased edges and have actual depth show through. Not to mention scrolling texts and fast moving objects are actually clear on a CRT. Love this video!
Oh my god, a million times this! Why has this been so lost to time!
i didnt really like all the gradient text so many of the retro games i've played (eg. street fighter, sonic, etc.) used but when looking at it on CRT and seeing how it was intended to be blended and how much better it looks i can understand why every damn game was doing it 💀💀
0:35 Yes!
7:29...thank god
all this is true. my old ps2 looks amazing on crt tv. but technology not standing in one point and you can emulate this effect by enableing software dithering in some emulators. have a fun!))
The real reason to still go for CRT's nowadays is no motion blur and zero input lag for retro games, something software emulation will not have even if it gets close
Great video. You can take a look at CyberLab Mega Bezel Death To Pixels Shader Preset Pack and Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor.
cyberlab does good work 👍
that's why I always use filter on emulators
Signalis the video game has a CRT option in the settings and gah dayum its good
That's why I play old console games on Sony PVM.
Pixel only exist on LCD screens, CRT don`t, so pixel art now days are done right.
You have to make the art thinking where it will be shown, doesn`t make sense to do a Pixel Art based on CRT to be shown on a LCD, you have to adjust the art to fit on LCD, we can see that in the android version of FFV and FFVI.
11:13 thems dragon ball eyes
1:38 no it does not???????????
Today's crt filters look better than the best crts when using a 4k oled, the only thing crt has at this point is motion clarity, the crt will be done when 8k oled panels run at 240hz
It depends. For me, pixels were always sharp and square. Even in 1997 on a crt pc monitor. I think pc monitors are just too high resolution compared to tvs then
Your PC being on DVI is why it doesn't run retro pixel art games (till PS1 era) at their native 240p resolution but 480i/480p, 240p on a CRT is what creates the scanlines.
@@islandboy9381 No. That’s not true. Vga is the same. Pc crt monitors are just better than crt tvs
Yeah, you need 240p for scanlines
@@islandboy9381 I hope you realize that the games were 240p, but the screens that were used were 480i. You did not play an 8-bit or 16-bit game on a "240p" screen, because TVs were 480i until later on. 240p games did not "create" scan lines, the scan lines were intrinsic to the TV itself, which is what the art was designed around in the first place.
Sony PVM and BVM monitors were professional/broadcast level monitors, and they absolutely did not make games "sharp and square". You weren't getting a better monitor for console games than those screens back then either. Do some research...
When I play old games in emulator I always turn on Scanlines. And that's it.
not enough. CRT-Royale or Consumer shaders.
Surely an welcome improvement when available!@@crust5909
This is why we have scanlines option in emulators
its so cool, the whole vibe is different. i wish i could buy some crt tv just for playing old games, since i saw that you can connect a laptop on a crt tv. its been my dream for a while now haha
you explained exactly why i was sooo disappointed in "chained echo's" whish it was real pixel art. looks like crap even on crt
Yes exactly. I really think that current so called 'Pixel Art' is lazy game developer's poor excuse of 'I can't make game look good'.
No, scanlines and pixels are meant for each other. Doesn't matter what TV you use
something else witch crt which is hard to explain but even on my LG C2 oled it doesn't have that depth or feel of 3d...its hard to explain how modern games have so much depth and life like representation. see if you can find a Sony Fw900 through electronic recycle companies. they get them from old schools and university's. got mine for 375 shipped. online they sell for $3700 without shipping
have a fw900 I'm in haven 3000x1600 so goooood
I used it for a little bit, meh. I've been using emulators for 25+ years. At this point it's retro and more nostalgic for me to not use it. I like pixel art, I don't need to obscure it.
I completely disagree, what's charming is being able to see the individual pixels. The crt just looks blurry to me and it strains my eyes.
ow twitter set to bright light bulb mode isn’t helping
So thats why some memories of some games could be a better quality than today
as how the difference in monitor is and how they made them for ctr or other types but that vladermir ctr did look awsome compared so as reselotion is bigger there probably need bigger pixel counts to give the same look and then be even better as there is not the same limit as before
Bacon’s reactions every time - 😮😮😮
purists are such weirdos just use the kreed super eagle filter to smooth it out like this
There has to be a way to simulate this on a LCD/OLED TV with and even improve to improve every benefit of a CRT.
4K resolution is more than enough for great CRT filters that would look exactly like a CRT.
The emulation community just has to focus more on perfecting filters / CRT simulation HDMI boxes and take it seriously.
There are some pretty good filters now but they still need to improve a ton. There's nothing impossible about a perfect CRT filter and it wouldn't even cause games to lag on modern PCs.
I think the problem is that creators who could do it are satisfied with what we have and there's a real lack of direction too because everyone has different ideas of what a CRT filter should be like.
Someone should lead a serious project in emulating the best Sony CRT and a Nanao MS9 arcade monitor as accurately as possible and it would be promble solved.
the current set of filters are fantastic and can simulate many different looks of crt. the current selection of shaders imo makes it pointless to even own a CRT.
I'm not sure what exactly is that you're looking for that you don't think is satisfied by the current selection...
@@djangofett4879 I am pretty well satisfied and i'm aware that ReShade is highly customizable but there is still room to improve.
If you look at an arcade monitor on cabinets on Taito Egret 3, Astro City, Blast City closely and spend time with them, there's no filter that looks exactly that good or looks exactly like the pixels on those monitors. There's almost a 3d effect to arcade monitor pixels and they look amazing and they make the game's pixel arts pretty much perfect they way they project the pixels and blend the pixel art together.
So it's not an absolute necessity but it would be even more awesome if there was something that compared to arcade monitors well enough or actually emulated all aspects of different monitors.
Also motion looks smoother on CRT monitors still compared to LCD/OLED/QLED, but one day there will be "perfect" modern panels that have perfect colors and black and brightness and movement and low latency and matching that with "perfectly emulated" crt filters is my dream.
I use an ossc, but I also turn the horizontal sharpness on my tv to down to create the blending effect.
That's what I've always disliked about games made nowadays that are aiming for a retro look, that is fine and all that if they actually went for the retro look, which is how it looks on a CRT or on a flat panel with a CRT filter.
Most of the games made nowadays with a retro look, look like crap to me, and it's not even retro, it's actually worse than how games retro is actually supposed to look.
Now if modern games going for that retro look actually had the option of a good CRT filter, that would be far closer to the retro feel that they are supposed to be aiming for, but what they actually offer is actually worse than how we used to play games decades ago and doesn't make any sense with how they emphasise the retro look, or to put it another way, get a game from the early 90's, give it a good CRT filter that makes it look as it's supposed to look at the time, and I bet that will look better than most retro looking games that have been made over the last decade, and that surprises me how they seem to miss the point of what the retro look is supposed to look like, which isn't the raw pixel look on an LCD display, which quite frankly, looks like crap, it's supposed to look how a retro game looked on a CRT, which to get that effect on an LCD display, you need a CRT filter.
Come to think of it, I wonder if there are any overlay filters you can use for those games made today that try to give a retro look but get it so wrong, they might actually look more in line with what the retro look is supposed to look like lol.
As for the ones doing pixel art games, if they do it correctly and offer the option of having a good CRT filter, I bet those games would sell better than not having the option, I know of many gamers that look at pixel art games and simply say no to buying it because of the pixel nature, but with a good CRT filter, it would look much better and much more accurate to what pixel art is all about, that would likely boost game sales of those games, and from an artist perspective, it wouldn't need any more work, it's all been done with the filter giving it the look that's much closer to how it would look on a CRT display, that for me is true retro, whereas the retro we get nowadays is just cheap crap that isn't even retro in the true sense.
As for CRT filters, they are actually quite good and come real close to replicating the CRT look on an LCD display, many of which you can test out on emulators and they seem to work best on a 4k display.
I just discovered ShaderGlass very recently due to Octopath Traveler 2 released on Game Pass. If you haven't heard of it, check it out. I use it on OT2, Vampire Survivor and Dead Cells and I can honestly say I would not play those games except on pc if there's no built in crt filter.
I respectfully disagree that retro games look better on crt.
Now if we are going to debate about if they were meant for crt that's a a other story.
First pixels are there because of limitations but I would argue most 2d gamed wouldn't exist if it weren't for limitations. Heck 2d to 3d the opposite is true with games that took a while or never moved to 3d. Like castlevania metroid kirby and contra were stuck in 2d or struggled in 3d. Because the limitations of 2d were built so well around it that they never thought how the 2d mechanics apply in 3d.
So pixel art to me is a creation of limitations but it's built around them at the same time.
Now crt made things smoother bit at the same time it also made details harder to see and details which were always intended to be seen are now gone. Plus And ultimately when games moved to higher resolution. While pixel art faded away it didn't disappear because people always knew that they were starring at flat blocks and didn't care becusse it was part of the art style and whether it became it or always was or not games like kirby super star ultra on the ds. And castlevainia adventure wii ware was still using it.
The idea it's wrong is more so this idea that they never wanted people to see the blocky look which never had any effort to hide. It I mean I could Stull see the pixels it just made it look messier.
Ultimately this is just my opinion
wrong. The developers clearly intended those games to look like how it does on CRT. The perfect example would be SNK games on arcade, or Comix Zone for a more specific checking. The character shadows on those games, when running it on a raw LCD, doesn't even look like shadows. They're straight black lines and dots that flicker like mad and look completely out of place when displayed on a raw display. Now when you plug in those games on a CRT with NTSC filter and interlacing, you will see those straight black likes and dots blending together to form a solid black aura with transparency below the character and, just like magic, they don't flash or flicker anymore. They now look like shadows below your playable character.
This is proof that the developers back in the 80's and early 90's were 100% conscient of the nature of the NTSC/PAL and Interlacing features of those tube displays and how they would positively affect the nature of raw pixels. Another great example is how waterfall water look transparent in Sonic The Hedgehog (1991) when running CRTs but then they don't look transparent on a raw LCD image, they just look like sharp white pixels in rectangular form falling down. This is the NTSC feature taking place to blend pixels and create the illusion of water transparency.
this is an extremely good comparison and demonstration, but i still prefer indie pixel art (carrion is my favourite example of pixel art), but its probably just based on what we played growing up.
As a pixel art artist i would appreciate next time you make a video you turn the fucking music down
"Modern indie pixel art, and actual good pixel art" such a bad and uneducated take. Just because it's not the same as the old ones, doesn't mean it's not "actually good".
problem is How you get CRT in 2022? xD
craigslist
This demented line of thought is akin to saying that modern graphics are better off with heavy motion blur and extreme chromatic abberation.
wrong. Not every game has motion blur and CA. And if you turn those off the game basically looks the same. Back in the days every pixel art game was getting "fixed" by CRTs.
I disagree, every time this guy says "this looks good" I go "this looks bad"
'Pixel Art' is just a concept that the newer gen has never made a grasp of. Sadly many of our re-releases are getting this treatment as well on digital stores. Great way to kill the nostalgia.
Pixel art sucks
Pixel art actually was intended to look more like it did on the left since most of the devs were working on PC Monitors and PVMs with far more accurate and dense colour phosphors. Not to mention the thousands of games released on the Gameboy, Gameboy Colour, Gameboy Advance, Nintendo DS, Gamegear, etc which all use sharp, low-res LCD screens which were absolutely the intended viewing experience. This video is the fruit of ignorance more than anything else.
Oh boy.
Devs may have worked with sharp pixel art on PC monitors at the time, but given that literally no customer back then could view the games that way, the game's were very obviously made with a CRT's translation of the image in mind. This is evident through commonly employed techniques such as dithering, and pixel art that actually benefited from the dated technology (see: the countless examples in this very video. A group of squares in Richter's hair now become thin lines. Slightly different shades of a color turn into a smooth gradient at many points)
Your point about handheld screens is not a fair comparison. They just reflect a changing landscape. We now have the luxury of sharp displays, but even despite that countless games in pixel art made today employ a CRT filter to mimic that effect.
TLDR: Retro games were made with a CRT in mind. The screens of the handhelds you mentioned were made with their own screen in mind. Its wild that this needed to be explained, but irony of you rudely calling him ignorant as well may be even wilder.
"pixel art" as we know it today, is a modern invention of indie people who played everything on emulators on much higher res screen and have no idea how 2d games were made or even looked back then. It wasnt pixelated and never was because litterally no one was able to play these games with an unaltered signal on a digital monitor. And games on hanheld were trying to be as smooth as possible, with some games like sword of mana or kingdom hearts chain of memories trying super hard to be drawing like on a limited hardware and be the least pixellated possible. No dev in their right mind was trying to make it look "pixel like" like those modern 2d games. Even the first pokemon game on an original game boy looks less pixellated than almost any "pixel art" modern indie game. Even games on famicom, which was basically pixels and squares, were trying extremely hard to not show the pixels.
Some games manage to be ok looking and a few pull it off, but in general I tend to find this modern style absolutely horrendous and very tacky.
Games on the handhelds were intended to be sharp. But the ones on home consoles were made with crt TV's in mind. One on the right is absolutely the intended experience. These are not handheld games.
@@RandomUser-tj3mg a significant number of gba games were rereleases of snes and genesis titles though with the same graphics
@@KDZen GBA had such a small 240X160p screen that you really didn't need to take advantage of thick scanlines, just the LCD grid. Indeed developers took advantage of the small size and low resolution. A game like Donkey Kong Country 3 still gives the illusion of a 3D model on your handheld. If you play the SNES version on 3DS (which is similar in resolution to the SNES with an SD screen), it also has a very similar effect. Also, GBA had a different color profile from modern smartphones. Only thing you don't get is the blending effect of Composite/S Video, but again, screen is already so small it's not essential.