When Worse Graphics Are Actually BETTER
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- Опубликовано: 20 фев 2023
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Here's why retro video games looked better on old CRT displays!
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One way to think about it is thinking of the developers using the CRT as part of the rendering process instead of simply a display meant to display the game as-is.
That is perfect. I never thought to word it like that.
Agree OP comment is perfect. I even screenshoted it.
CRTs act as post-processing
Exactly. Kinda like how some artists prefer to use canvas instead of paper because it allows and/or forces them to draw (Paint, Oil Pastels etc) a certain way to intentionally and/or intentionally make there piece.
I have been filming games on ps1, ps2, megadrive, snes, saturn, dreamcast etc on my CRTs if anybody would like a look, they are not an easy thing to record and I am struggling a little to capture the sound but honestly to the naked eye they are so much better than emulators those tvs really do something to the games that an emulator cant in my opinion even with the filters etc.
I had gone thrifting trying to find a CRT TV a while back, to no avail. Was on the way home and on the side of the road next to someones driveway was a 27" Sharp for free. Nearly gave myself a hernia trying to get it into the car, but totally worth it!
XD yes heavy but worth it :D
I'm exactly on the same quest right now, I've to start looking at the road too
Where you from if you don’t mind? My dad recently put on by the road and I’m kind of curious lol
@@luhgarlicbread lol this was a year or two ago
@@microbuilder
oh lol
Thank you for getting someone from the retro scene to actually do the appropriate research for this video.
And the second they try to explain that BLURRING ADDS DETAIL, I hope you tuned right out.
@@MyNameIsBucket They explained quite clearly how and why blurring gives the perception of depth and detail where solid non-blended blocks of color would not. Why would one tune out?
@@Ragnorok64 I can explain in great detail how I'm a millionaire; doesn't make it true. Name a single other instance where a blurry picture has more fidelity than a clear one.
@@MyNameIsBucket Literally newsprint, half-tones, and pointillism all rely on the same principle of adjacent points or colors blending together to create the perception of depth and detail.
@@MyNameIsBucket I remember playing PC games back in the day at 720x1280 with AA as opposed to at 1080 with no AA. The softer appearance was way more realistic and also more pleasing generally. Real life isn't super sharp but thinking about it now however, my eyes are pretty blurry these days so everything looks pretty damn good ;) *Edited for typo.
I remember getting an N64 about 10 years ago at a flea market and coming back home and plugging it in to a 55 inch Vizio TV and noticing how weird it looked. Then I took out a Philips CRT TV from the garage and hooked it up to that and was amazed at how better the picture looked.
I've played Mario 64 many times on modern displays and it had been a really, really long time since I last played it on a CRT, but seeing even a few seconds of gameplay of it on a CRT in this video hit me with a burst of good-feeling nostalgia that just can't be put into words
Any well functioning shitty CRT is better at the job than those LCD panels. Hands. Down.
Memory burn.
@@RottenMuLoT
I dont think the problem is the price, the vast majority of crt were affordable low end models, and those can be gotten for today when people are just trying to get rid of them.
The biggest issue is that houses and rooms these days are made with flat panels in mind, few people got the space for a big old crt.
But you are 100% right, specially when viewing 5th and 6th gen games, ANY crt will be better than all flat panels.
I actually had two TVs for gaming, and LCD and a crt. I played GameCube games PlayStation 2 games PlayStation 1 games on it. I did know this some differences but thought that overall they look better on the lcd. But that's just me it comes down to taste. I am sure that there are a lot of different flaws that passed away over my head. In the end these are just for entertainment though so if it bothers you do something about it, if it doesn't be happy with what you have. Personally I choose to just be happy with what I have instead of spending $200 and an upscaler. And of course there is always emulation, wish you could do legally through things like the Sega Genesis collection that gives you unlocked ROMs to use in the emulator of your choice.
"Which you can do legally"
The side-by-side comparisons were really helpfull. Before seeing this, I never understood the desire to use CRTs these days.
Other benefits are motion clarity. There also ways of immitating it with CRT Filters
CRTs also have practically zero input lag.
I use one so i can use my old consoles the way i remember them, i tried emulation but it's just not the same feeling.
For computing or movies, OLED and LCD's are way better in my opinion because of the zero flickering.
Never tried computer CRT's but the consumer CRT has noticeable flicker as it is 50Hz.
@@atmatey Modern flat monitors also have minimal lag (unlike those from years ago). You will have noticeable lag though if you use a TV (instead of a monitor) and don't disable all kinds of picture processing.
@@BilisNegra yeah but a sub-milisecond response time 165 Hz LCD monitors start at like $120, but my instant-response 165 Hz CRT was free, has superior colors and viewing angles. I don't get people who pay thousands of dollars for a CRT but in the "please take it away from me" price range they're still hard to beat
I really wish new CRT's were a thing. less and less people are able to experience these retro games the way the were meant to be played. Let's also not forget that CRT's have the best motion clarity which really helps in fast paced games
don't you mean response times?
@@youtubeshadowbannedme Nope but that’s also another benefit of CRT’s though I think modern displays caught up to the point where difference is barely noticeable
The flickering in crt's makes games like donkey Kong country scroll smoothly. Try playing it on a modern display and it is very likely that you will notice some blurr as you scroll. For a long time I thought it had to do with refresh rate but turns out it was because of the way the screen refreshes. In modern displays the entire frame is updated at once while in crt's it was done line by line with and with a blank period after the last line, so it was like turning on and off the screen and our brains did some motion interpolation that made the movement appear continuous.
Newer games with good stories are far better than old retro games which most are about getting high points or collecting thing aimlessly.
@@ugur3527 Ok, but some of the older games were really good too, even better than some of the newer games. Like Donkey Kong Country and Zelda: A Link to the Past. It felt good to beat those games as a kid.
The most iconic example I can think of is the pipe in the orignal Mario Bros. It has two shades of green: light green and dark green, both sandwiching a strip of checkerboard pattern of both light and dark green. A crt display blurs the checkerboard pattern into a single new colour: medium green. So the pipe gets a gradiated colouring from light to dark green. This makes the pipe look like it's curved. On a modern display, all you see is a flat shape with an inexplicable checkerboad pattern on it.
This is the perfect example. 👏
Great video, love the retro content. At 1:16, when they are talking about how you had to screw in RF connectors, they show a BNC connector, which is a professional video standard. It usually replaces an RCA plug for audio, composite, or component, but also has other uses. The image before is an RF cable.
I chuckled at that as well.
Actually, the BNC connector is quite common in RF aswell. Even though they is today more and more replaced by SMA connectors. Have you ever looked at a oscilloscope or a signal generator?
They both use BNC connector for connecting the signals.
What you call a RF connector is actually one type of RF connector called F-connector. Commonly used in the Americas for VHF and UHF TV.
Here in Europe we use the Belling-Lee connector for the same purpose.
There is a lot of different RF connectors. All with their strengths and weaknesses.
EDIT: The RF connector you spotted is specifically an SMA connector. Those have never been used on TV's to my knowledge.
@@PlaceholderforBjorn The image after shows an SDI cable plugged in
A BNC connector is a type of RF connector. The difference between it and an F-type connector used in consumer TV sets is just the locking mechanism.
And there is no such thing as an RF cable. It's called a coaxial cable.
Came here to say this. Some other old timers in here.
I had this exact same argument long time ago on firingsquad forums. I had claimed that the graphics on the old interlaced CRT looked better than the one on a modern monitor (at that time). Thank you Techquickie for finally setting it straight for after 20 years!
Firingsquad? Man that is old school!
That's why I never threw away my 1998 sony trinitron. nothing like playing retro games on an actual CRT
The effects of the CRT were especially considered with the PS2, as that console was designed with everything discussed here in mind.
Old CRTs didn't really have a horizontal resolution. The beam would spread the pixels and they would kind of meld into each other in a natural way. This made things look nice and smooth but not in a vaseline-spread way.
What are you talking about? This is not how CRTs worked at all.
Crts don't have pixels at all
They have a screen covered in an array red, blue and green phosphors that light up depending on the electron guns
They don't have a proper resolution, but they do have a limit
The key point is that there were no pixel boundaries. You could feed it a signal with say 300 pixels across, or with 301 pixels across, and there would be no scaling issues (technically you could get some aliasing if you put a really high resolution on a PC CRT, such that the pixels were narrower than the RGB triads, but for normal displays the bandwidth was significantly less than the RGB triad width). In this digital age it's weird that you could have limited bandwidth but within that no restrictions on pixel boundaries.
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@@KokoroKatsura queer
I have the same problem with movies and TV series. It was easier to hide the imperfections of CGI and props which made them more believable. Now you can see every detail of a costume which breaks the immersion and suspension of disbelief.
I just moved across country and as such decided to just get rid of my furniture and buy new, as that was a lot cheaper.
When I went to throw out my furniture, I saw an old Bang & Olufsen CRT, complete with built in sound, that was completely smashed to bits.
It broke my heart a little.
I would not have been able to take something like that with me, but the fact that someone would purposefully destroy such a gorgeous piece of tech was heartbreaking.
You saw $100+ worth of retro gaming fun, amazing audio and timeless design, the person that got there before you saw $5 worth of copper. Sadly the second type of people is much more common, not to mention the people who throw out retro tech without even checking its value.
Like farming
I bet those speakers could be salvaged!
As someone who has two of them in the house, it hurt to read that
Good video but one other aspect not mentioned in it is the fact that the "pixels" of a crt were not necessarily square, retro games came in a huge variety of resolutions that all had to fit the same screen. Playing them today without taking this into account can result in squished or stretched output compared to the originals on a CRT.
While all this is true, I remember when I first got a TV that supported S-Video, and ran Gran Turismo 2 on it. For the first time I could actually read the text descriptions of cars. There always seem to be trade offs.
That seems more like a fault of the developer. The PS1 by default came with composite cables, so that's what they should have been aiming for in the first place, since that's what most people ended up using. Just make the text larger.
This is because of composite signal itself. Component or s video resolves the image better and they are more accurate in terms of image quality. But composite blends and distort the signal so desired effects like transparency were shown on this video can be achieved, but this is coming with major problems like poor and unreadable texts.
Composite blending was also used on Old CGA graphics which was capable of only 4 colors and if you connect your cga card with a composite cable to your screen, you could see more than 4 colors with much different shades which cga could not support normally (on frame buffer of card, only cga colors present with dithered patterns like Shown on this video). But this cause bad texts on screen.
I remember S video. It was pretty awesome for a short period of time before things changed again
There's a few different variables to this. Smaller CRTs usually are pretty blurry which make it hard to read small text. The PS1 has a soft video output compared to something like the SNES or N64 so small text can be hard to read even on a large CRT through composite. Running PS1 games on a PS2 gives a sharper composite signal.
There's a reason why I keep my mammoth 32 inch CRT around. It was the first TV that I bought for myself after I moved out of my parent's house.
i got one of similar size it stopped working, opened it up blew some canned air on it and it started working again
heh you might be holding onto it due to perhaps the sheer investment! I'm sure its nice!
@@udance4ever More like he doesn't want to ever move it from where it is sitting. A 32" CRT is pretty heavy.
These games and old pieces of hardware are only getting rarer and more difficult to preserve over time. I think everyone that has the ability should do everything possible to keep them around!
Indeed! We have an old Phillips that still worked but was having rollover so we bought and replaced the capacitors and it's just like new!
I disagree. Let them go. These games were designed for a specific era. Some games are better kept in our memories. It's okay to let old tech die. Don't let FOMO drive your life. But that's my humble opinion.
Use a CRT filter along with 4:3 resolution in an emulator and it accomplishes nearly the same effect of improving the graphics like running on a CRT tv itself would.
Yeah can't let CERN win by erasing all the CRTs
@@alexmendez3681 You shouldn't let fear of missing out (FOMO) drive your life. That's certainly true, but it's different than wanting to preserve something for its own sake. --- I say if you want to preserve it and /can/ then go for it. If you can't, either learn how or accept it and move on.
Man I miss the good ol' days
Same here.
Some important bits missing: CRTs are low-persistence display, LCDs are sample-and-hold, meaning CRTs only flash the image and are black the rest of the time, LCD hold the image until the next frame is ready. This creates substantial amounts of motion blur on the LCD when you try to track a moving object with your eyes, which you don't get on a CRT, which is why they have much better motion clarity. Modern LCDs have lightboost or blackframe insertion to emulate that. CRTs also have much better contrast ratio, your average LCD used to just looks really dull compared to a CRT, again modern devices might improve on that with HDR and stuff. Another factor that used to be hugely important is the uneven pixel scaling you get on LCDs, LCD can only their native resolution well and multiple there of, CRTs can display all resolutions well, as their display isn't limited to a pixel grid. With 4k devices that becomes less of an issue, but it was a major problem in the early LCD days. Finally there are scanlines, every second line being black on an LCD just makes the image half as bright, on a CRT that's not the case, in a native 240p mode every line gets traced twice by the electron beam, thus the brightness remains the same.
how does an LCD remember analog pixel values? So in a reflective display you could remove the batteries suddenly and the Gameboy or GBA would show the last image forever? In my experience the Gamboy went light-green just like a CRT went dark gray.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt Normal LCD don't remember the values forever, just for the duration of a frame until the next update comes along. The difference is that CRTs and analog tech in general do not remember anything at all, there is never a complete image shown on a CRT, just a single dot is lit up at any point in time. You get a little phosphor afterglow, but even that fades after a few lines. The only reason you see a complete image on a CRT is because it updates fast enough for your brains flicker fusion to kick in, which makes you see any quickly blinking light as constantly lit. This is also why you can't film or photograph CRTs with a fast shutter without most of the CRTs image disappearing. Slowmoguys have some high speed footage of this in action.
PS: Memory LCDs that can keep the image for a long time without power exist as well, I think Sharp made some, but very rare on not relevant to this effect.
@@grumbel45 but when I switch off a Gameboy mechanically, no next frame comes. Still the LCD loses its memory. The size of magnetic domains can serve as an analog memory. Charge stored in EEProm is analog. If you store a whole row at once, you could have some full and empty cells and compensate for leakage over time (on out of the row ). Now, LCDs use charge to create an electric field, which separates charge inside the molecules.
I don't care about "motion clarity" as long as flickering exists. Fluctuating brightness, even on high refresh rates is immediately obvious and causes eye fatigue and headaches. Modern high refresh rate LCDs have acceptable motion clarity and most of the are flicker-free.
@@dat_21 PC monitors have been flicker free for a long long while, that's really only a problem with 50Hz PAL or 60Hz NTSC, everything past 72Hz or so has no noticeable flicker for humans, and old CRT monitors could often go up to 120Hz. But yes, with modern gaming monitors, the difference is starting to get pretty tiny, if it exists at all, though still plenty of old LCDs around stuck with 60hz and full persistence.
It's taken 20 years to get a refresh rate comparable to a good old CRT, and they still aren't quite there yet. I do not miss the bulkiness, but I do miss some of the features of the CRT.
And the brightness. And the non existent input lag. And most of time you get one for free.
OLED will have to be around a couple of decades to top that 😅
@@RottenMuLoT The colors on CRT could be incredible. They really popped and brought things to life. LCD is so dull looking in comparison.
@Okabe Rintaro The problem with CRTs is that the larger the diagonal the more glass you need which becomes extremely heavy. Consumers choose cheap & convenience (LCD) over quality & weight (CRT).
OLED is better for “true blacks” but still doesn’t have the quality of “infinite” horizontal resolution.
And how did we improve the refresh rate? It is still molecules which rotate mechanically .. driven by diffusion. We still don't have active electric push, pull as with e-ink.
@@cattysplat LCD uses colored glass. Every time I visit a church, I am impressed by the colored glass. I cannot understand how phosphor can have these saturated colors.
You can also see this on 1960 sci-fi TV shows. A fake bolder looked convincing on old tv’s and broadcasts. But remove the smoothing of the old broadcast and it is obviously a painted block of styrofoam.
Yes.
Another striking example: the jet crash scene in 'Air Force One.' (1997)
See it on CRT, then on LCD. Played back on tube or reel, the film effects are passable to suspend disbelief. It was designed with analog in mind.
How about on a modern panel tho?
No.
I like upscalers and line multipliers but it's just not the same as a nice CRT, plus you have sync issues sometimes. Keep in mind this also mainly applies to games between the 1970s and early 2000s. Mid-2000s and later supported HD natively. 2000s games were also almost exclusively in 480i and 240p was technically just the image spaced out to save on scanlines and fit a CRT screen as well as a way to have progressive scan rather than interlacing.
A few of my C64 games rely on image persistence of old CRTs to blend colours together by alternating them at 60fps, and on an emulator or flat panel just appears as flashing, seizure inducing colours.
I also find that most flat panels, even mine, which has every input imaginable, output all standard def signals as 576i, so when you're using an Amiga(or almost anything prior to the Dreamcast), which outputs at 288p(the max possible progressive scan for standard def), you still get deinterlacing flicker which shouldn't be there and wouldn't be there on a CRT.
I like to use openemu with the Mame filter on for older games. Makes them look like your playing on an arcade cabinet.
You can't... stretch a resolution to fit a crt screen
It's a projection with physical hardware determining the geometry
480i and 240p are the same thing, the devs chose to make half the scanlines lines blank to save on processing power
"Older game consoles didn't have the technical capabilities of generating a full 480 line picture. The solution is to assume that a standard interlaced half picture (480 divided by 2 = 240) is a full picture, and simply display this picture at a normal field-rate of 60 times per second. This means that the other field and its entire set of lines are completely ignored. To accomplish this, the "special timing signal" mentioned above is slightly changed to tell the CRT to not alternate between its odd and even lines. Nintendo's name for this type of scanning is "double-strike", because the same set of lines are drawn twice within one scanning cycle while the lines that would normally be drawn in-between them are absent (or not "struck" at all). The more common term used for this type of signaling is "240p" (p = progressive). Another name for progressive is "non-interlaced"."
@@MrDrewseph My Amiga outputs at 288p(672x288, with rectangular pixels) when non-interlaced on a standard def TV. When interlaced(which looks horrid) it gives 576i(672x576).
@@MrDrewseph That's what I meant. I just worded it poorly. It's also a common misconception that the blank lines are scanlines when the actual lines of information are scanlines.
There are a number of things CRTs just do better than modern displays aside from just being a bit blurry (the stuff about sonics water falls etc doesn't apply to CRTs in general but more the Composite video standard,) I Use RGB Scart so I don't see those effects, however the best thing about CRTs that even OLED can't replace is image retention in movement and latancy, CRTs are just instant,
The GBA classic feel filter + small screen size on NSO is a pretty nice combo
I still have the same CRT since the SNES days, I'm glad it still works just fine over 30 years later.
I fired up my old Gamecube a few days ago and loaded up Windwaker..a small tear formed as everybody still remembered my name (memory card still works!)..Back when tech was built to last. The only downside is the machine has gone brown! I'm in the process of 'sun briting' the front port panel in the hope I can avoid doing a 'retrobrite' using Hydrogen Peroxide..On a side note - damn those Gamecube controllers are perfect!
yeah that was when Nintendo still gave a damn about durability and longevity
@@youtubeshadowbannedme Do you mean the Switch? My most recent Nintendo machine is a Wii U and that is still going like a champ..I may dip my toe in the Switch world but not really too fussed at the mo..
gamecube, when tech was built to last? The gamecube era isn't that long ago and Tech in the game cube era didn't really last long. Even back then people would say that tech lasted longer before. Also, those old CRT tvs didn't last long as they also used cheap capacitors that would break down. My father always repaired those old TVs.
I used to collect CRTs that I found on the streets back in high school when I was super into Melee, and I'm glad I did because they are much harder to come across these days
1:05 WOW This here is all you need to know the blending makes it look incredible while still being awesome pixel art. Our tech is to good return to monke! How they predict the dark spots being more shaded the further they are from the bright spots **chefs kiss**.
5:00 I actually didn't know you could do this, good to know I will get to experience these old games somewhat like the original as I don't think I'll ever get to play them on the actual consoles and a CRT themselves.
something else CRT's have that modern tv's dont: Native Resolution.
CRT's didnt have pixels, it had scanlines and it could put the beam of light* anywhere on the screen. You could go from 240p to 1080p and back with no degradation of quality. Modern TVs can kinda simulate the same thing but since the pixels are in a fixed spot, you'll end up with multiple pixels acting as one.
Also the refresh rate of CRT works a bit different than modern. so different that some retro games are barely to nonplayable on modern tvs. Like Duck Hunt. NES Zapper doesnt work with modern lcd tvs for reasons you can google
*technically it's a beam of electrons that interact with phosphors to produce a light.
The Zapper’s issue, as I understand it, mostly has to do with screen lag. CRTs display the signal as fast as it comes in, but LCDs need to process it first. It’s only a few milliseconds of lag, but the NES expects to be able to read the Zapper as soon as it lights up the targets and LCD lag means it can’t.
You have to watch out for CRTs that do 480p and HD resolutions. Many of those basically ran at a fixed HD resolution, then digitized analog signals, so you get poor quality and bad handling of 240p content from older consoles, and lag.
@@Dave01Rhodes
It's more of a thing about refresh rate.
Modern TVs are barely catching up to CRTs which refreshed at like 140Hz or even 200Hz, as 144Hz LED screens are still new to the market while 60Hz is still quite dominant.
Maybe you could build an arcade setup with 3 monochrome CRTs to get of the native shadow mask resolution. It seems that dichromatic mirrors are quite expensive though.
@@LudiusQuassas 100 and 120 Hz is only available on HDMI. I'd really like to see your CRT setup.
I feel like this is also inadvertently a good primer for starting to explore why it's not just "this company GPU not good" when developing a game for a specific company's cards plays a role in how well the game actually plays
What does that have to do with retro games and CRTs?
@@flameshana9 technically nothing, just a correlation between gpus and the games made for them has with said retro games and crts
If you consider retro PC games from early 3D era (win95/98 era) you have to deal with games made for early versions of DirectX and OpenGL (which are not an issue for majority of cards) but in this time there were also proprietary APIs like Glide which are incompatible with card not from 3dfx (unless you are willing to use a wrapper which not always work correctly and additionally encumber the CPU resulting in worse performance).
This is exactly why I still have an old school rear projection TV in my bedroom for retro gaming
Not all rear projection TVs are CRT. Some are but others are DLP or LCD.
Good video, glad you showed the dither/transparency patterns as these are the ones that translate the worst when going pixel perfect. There's also flashing, often used with shadows, where every other frame shows it / hides it, thanks to persistence of vision, our brain ends up blending the frames together showing a fake soft shadow effect.
Personally the thing I miss the most was how CRT timings made home light guns viable, these days, outside of something like the Sinden, I don't think there's many options that I'm aware of, plus the way the Sinden works (assuming it's still the same as I remember), you wouldn't be able to do the old school duck hunt cheat... of jamming the gun right up agains the TV and firing.
let's not forget R.O.B. and Gyromite! 🤖
Yup. That's why I've kept my trusty old CRT TV all these years.
not to mention input lag! crts are so much better in terms of latency than modern monitors and tvs that pro players of old games (speedrunners and ssbm players mostly) still have them not because the games look better but they feel considerably more responsive in competitive settings
You can get a laser scanner for this. Less weight. I mean, if you have a dark room to play.
Pro players of old games is an oxymoron of itself. These days LCDs aren't what they are used to be in early 2000s. You can get like an extra 5ms compared to CRT, which is absolutely negligible. On top of that you can buy a 240 and 360hz panels, which are superior to any CRT input lag wise.
This blending effects look correct on composite video. If you use RGB or composite video on a crt it still looks better than lcd but you lose blending effects which were intended with composite video artifacts.
"Better in almost every way" Yeah right. Except for better input lag and lack of motion blur that makes the moving picture only 100 times sharper and clearer in motion than the best LCD.
Also resolution agnostic, meaning having no native resolution which means you can play at all the resolutions your CRT supports, especially important for PC CRTs.
@@AJ-po6up They do have a "native" resolution. Usually it's the one that looks best and all others kinda suck. Maybe it's not as pronounced but it is a thing.
Already watched the video after a minute of posting. I consume Riley containing content at an alarming rate
Also in some ways CRTs actually are closer to OLED how they work optically then they are to LCD (or those "pretend" OLED panels that LG makes that are actually LCDs with an array of OLED backlights) in that they can (almost) turn pixels off for much better blacks and generate colour through additive emission (red+blue+green) insead of subtractive filtration from a white backlight source (making the colours more pure). So playing on an OLED (as well as all the tricks in this video) will make the experience of retro gaming much more authentic.
Fairly decent video, couple of things though:
When showing the sonic waterfalls and dithered lighting effects, it would have been good to have a side by side with the actual CRT image over composite, rather than what looks like a bilinear filter on an lcd still. A minor point on this also is that it’s not the CRT introducing blur that causes it, its actually caused by colour interference over composite. RGB over scart on a CRT is sharp enough that you can easily see the dithering and non-transparent waterfall lines.
Also you note towards the end that older consoles are 240p whereas modern TVs are made for 480i and up. This is technically true in the sense that modern TVs support 480i but not 240p, but in reality they actually cant display 480i properly and have to deinterlace to 480p, which always ruins the results. CRTs actually only display at 480i, 240p is essentially a “hack” by game devs to produce a progressive image on an inherently interlaced technology. So it’s actually because modern TV’s CAN’T display 480i properly that they dont support 240p - because it is technically a 480i signal still.
Finally I’d say you can’t really do a video on CRT advantages without mentioning black levels and input lag. Blacks are at near OLED levels of darkness, whilst input lag is still the fastest available to this day. The faster response time also causes motion clarity to be better than even an OLED with black frame insertion.
Good job on speaking to Mike from retrotink, the guy’s a legend in the community and his products are game changers.
This is what I do with emulators on my pc to simulate a crt. I run the hdmi out from my pc to a hdmi to vga adapter back to my monitor’s vga port. Then play with the scan line filters on the emulator. It looks so good it makes games pop in color shapes are more define and sharp. Freeze frame your favorite retro scene and run some scan line filters through it. It will blow your mind.
To me not the same as my Sony 29" PVM. Just a different feel for me.
Games on CRT looked so good, that it actually made sense to play every game on them until consoles could manage HD. A nice CRT monitor from the 90's or 00's was able to give photos from the internet a better look, because of the brighter screen and the deeper blacks.
Funny how this makes fuse bead sprite art more accurate than most official "retro" gaming merchandise, since the latter kind of pretends that we've always been able to see the clean pixels. The former is more like how CRTs used to show those games back in their day, because it _quite literally_ melts the pixels together into a blended image.
ReShade lets you add CRT filters (and tons of other effects) to many PC games, even under DOSbox. Huge improvement.
its pretty cool, i used reshade crt filter on duckstation and pretty happy with the result! then i bought a crt tv to compare between the two just to realize its just much better on the actual tv and not even close 😅 they cant emulate phosphor light with led screen
The problem with those filters is that you can't have them on if you also want to record your gameplay as the recording will pick them up and ruin the video.
They are neat but still far from perfect. Unless filters will start emulating each dot pitch of crt screen. For this I guess 8k screens will be required.
@@MistyKathrine I screenshot & record them with no problem. >_> If I'm playing an emulated game at 4K resolution with shaders and filters to emulate a CRT style because I think it looks better, why would I have an issue with it being recorded? Even when it's not an old game being emulated, but a modern game played natively, where I'm using shaders to give it more saturation, better lighting, etc., I can screenshot/stream/record just fine.
@@Unregistered.HyperCam.2 Scanlines will look different at different resolutions. If a viewer is using a different resolution than you, the scanlines could look really bad.
I think modern games in standard definition somehow look more realistic by this same concept
I tried that one time as well. Old tv's have an interesting effect.
One thing to note is that a lot of these artifacts aren't necessarily because of the tube itself, like they say in the video, but are actually only composite video artifacts. If you use component or RGB assembling the signal on the other end is much easier as color and brightness information is split apart. With this the signal is very, very clear. Analog signals aren't necessarily dirty. Speakers, for example always have an analog input once it reaches the speaker. That isn't "dirty" or inaccurate, its the same for video. For component video-Luma (brightness for each pixel, essentially black and white) is carried on the green cable and red and blue on the red and blue cables. Funny that the green cable doesn't actually carry a green signal. It is basically figured out what the green value SHOULD have been, based on the other 2 colors once the tv processes the signal. Some sets need a bit of a green boost using component for this reason, not much of one though. Maybe +1/2. Most sets already boost the greens a little relative to the other colors when using component by default! RGB+sync is the ideal setup as each signal gets its own cable. You can even use 2 syncs for horizontal and vertical, which basically dictates the resolution to the display. Many consoles can actually output this natively. This results in an extremely sharp image, even though it is analog. Pixel by pixel clarity if the set is working correctly. It will be displayed perfectly and with clean sharp edges as the gun knows exactly where to turn on and off etc. You can expect No color drifting, blur, or anything like that and effects like the waterfall won't work due to the clean signal, and for this reason some prefer composite. Many in the retro community use RGB or component exclusively. I'd argue a majority, and especially if using a professional CRT monitor RGB is a must have to see the true potential of the monitor. It still has a "glow" to it but no actual artifacts if that makes sense. Anything above composite will break the blur effects mentioned in the video. S video can have color bleed on blue mostly. You can also RGB mod a lot of consumer sets fairly easily because the image must always be converted to RGB before being displayed. Be it a composite, S video or component source. You can solder input wires to, and tap into the point on the PCB after all this conversion would have taken place and the signal would now be RGB. You can essentially "inject" it there. It would then be displayed as analog RGB skipping the processing usually as the tube hardware requires an RGB input as I said earlier, and it would become it no matter the source quality in normal operation. The source being a big factor in the end result.
S-video is basically a composite video signal with RGB composite on one cable and Luma on another. With the regular yellow composite luma is mixed in as well on a single cable line. S video is far better than composite as even just splitting the luma (brightness) info makes a big difference. It is widely regarded as the biggest leap in video quality for consumers of video. Even up till now. That's just how dirty composite is. Especially with the type of artifacts they kept talking about in this video.
In Europe we had a SCART connector even on the most basic tv set (as it was mandatory to sell them since 1979 in France)
And that's why any European console from nes/genesis have true RVB output. SCART is just like a VGA port, with R G B separate line, but with a "composite sync H+V" where VGA have a separate H and V wire for sync, so the game at the time was to build an adder to generate the composite sync from a VGA computer output, tweak the driver to have the good timing and "voila" a huge 27 inch 4/3 sharp clear screen to watch your favourite DivX !
Fun fact as TV mainboards are "worldwide" since a long time, most TV set sold in US have an "hidden" RVB port ruclips.net/video/DLz6pgvsZ_I/видео.html
@@lapub. Yeah I am aware of all of that. I was just trying to explain it for everyone who might not know how much stuff secretly supports RGB! Like I mentioned no matter the source it must always be converted to RGB by the set to be displayed on a CRT-so tapping into the RVB parts on the board is how most mods are done. I've seen a few with the ports intact on the board but don't have plugs and the section that would be cut out of the case is still there. (like lets say the EU model had scart, maybe component on a higher tier set was offered and they used the same parts for the lower tier and higher tier)
Many of the examples shown in this video were shots from a RF signal conected to a CRT.
I used to like RGB more, thinking more sharpness = better image, but that RF signal blending the pixels and creating new colors has grown on me.
I was really into RGB for DVDs. One day a friend of mine bought a new TV, and I thought the image looked really great. It was connected via composite video.
Programmers were also well aware of the aspect ratio and "stretching" that would be done on a CRT, this is why a lot of emulators look off when you have them at a 1:1 aspect ratio instead of 4:3 (or better 8:7).
The game riven had some amazing dithering methods used to make far more complex color palettes then were possible at the time
It's like the sentiment that electric guitars sound clearer with a DI but "better" through a tube amplifier, or even digital versus analog tape.
I love my CRTs, you didn't touch on all the benefits of CRTs but that's okay we CRT enthusiasts know them very well. I have multiple CRT TVs and PC monitors, they all look great! I love hoarding them, since I'm afraid some will die in the future so at least I have backups. For playing anything 6th gen or 2006 and below CRTs are a must!
Yup, I'm suffering from that very same curse 😂 🤞
It’s the same with old VHS tapes. Yes, I still have those. Some movies were never released on DVD let alone BluRay because they were too obscure. Fortunately I still have a CRT TV for the old VHS player. It’s also more satisfying to put a VHS tape in a player than to watch something streaming. And you can’t duplicate the joy of rewinding on modern gear. 🙃
and the joy of pressing forward and back to get to the point in the movie you were on because somebody rewinded the tapes or unpaused it when you were away
oh, and finding out someone taped over your copy of the little mermaid with evil dead...
VCR (not “vhs player”)
@@chfgn technically not incorrect, just like how a cd/dvd drive is an optical disc drive
@@fabianlaibin6956 Or overwriting all my favorite A-team episodes because my sisters preferred to record Princess Diana's funeral. I about flipped on them!
I love CRTs so much, I could completely forget that LCDs exist.
I have a Dell CRT that is great for older games but crap for new ones. OLED and HDR has spoiled me.
@@CasepbX You don't have it set up right. It should look better than an OLED for video games under the right conditions
Most importantly, you have to match your game's frame rate to your monitors refresh rate. The best way is the zero-lag vsync options like Scanline Sync in RTSS and Latent Sync in Special K. You can also just combine a frame cap with standard vsync and that usually give some low input latency. Combine with Nvidia ULL or Radeon antilag.
Also, you gotta make custom resolutions. The standard installed modes with Windows usually don't take full advantage of people's CRT's max refresh rates and resolutions.
Another example from Sonic 2 is that the shields abused the natural interlacing CRTs did for make shields look transparent. The shield was made of two sprites that alternated every frame, on modern displays you just see it flashing between an outer ring and inner circle in a rather jarring way. When interlaced though, it blended the two sprites together to make them appear transparent.
LOL, you have no idea what you're talking about. Sonic 2 only used interlacing when in 2 player mode. Otherwise it didn't use interlacing, but 240p.
@@fungo6631 Then explain when getting rid of the interlacing from the analog input the shield looks wrong as demonstrated in this video: ruclips.net/video/y6NLXga1i0M/видео.html
@@rust454 Because it's at 30 FPS you imbecile! The game runs at 60 FPS!
@@fungo6631 I know for a fact that the shields only look right on CRTs and I'm pretty damn sure it's because of the TV itself interlacing the output, not the console. Since NTSC TVs achieve 60hz by cheating with interlacing.
I always figured the reason why was simply because something older is having its pixels stretched on newer bigger screens. I noticed over a decade ago if I recorded something in 480p and while editing it, I exported the video as 1080p and stretched the video out to fit the added pixels it would become more blurry and pixelated. It wouldn't look terrible or unwatchable, but it was noticeable.
Yeah I'd love to see a video on that. I've got a pretty old monitor and I've noticed that all the new games look the same as the old ones to me, but people say they can't stand the old graphics. Watching Mandalore's Dead Space remake review I couldn't actually tell which game the footage was from
That's why you need a proper dedicated upscaler for it to look good on modern high resolutions. Unfortunately they kinda expensive since only retro enthusiasts buy them.
wish there were newly made tube CRT TVs
I hated this so much that I liked it! 🙂
I'm a retro guy too, born in the late 70's, so this was beautifully done.
Riley, your quiet mumbling towards the end was so good for what you were saying.
the crt also made games look clean while having rounded edges.
i have yet to find a filter that can replicate what a crt can do
Component has a certain look to it that I like more than composite or HDMI for older games. Component on Xbox 360 looks really good.
RF < Composite < s-video < component < RGB
But thing is, the biggest leap is between Composite and s-video, hands down. S-video has a dedicated signal for black and white compared to composite.
Component looks better because it as basically a dedicated signal for every color on screen. You can witness it with red colors on s-video vs component.
But component destroys any dithering effect because of that. Even on good triple decombe, composite is loosing it too.
The CRT shaders in Retroarch have been my go to when playing older games, with Integer scaling, a monitor with a decent resolution (mine is a 1440p)
and sticking to the native resolution of the expecific console you are emulating you can get awesome results.
Right now I'm playing Chrono Cross and looks great, way better than the remaster. You'll probably need to remove overscan to look right, plus using the core Beetle HW you can play at a stable framerate and reduce the wooble in the 3D
Oh the more hz your monitor can handle the better, I wish mine have trumontion, in theory can make scrolling better
Super Mario world on a small crt is more fun than halo infinite on an 80" 8k tv
i still have a RCA CRT TV havent play it in six years,besides my retro consoles stop working a while now,those old tv were the kings
Someone needs to produce a modern CRT. I wonder if modern manufacturing and components can help shrink the size and lighten the weight. Unfortunately the demand would likely not be very high.
Not really possible. This is due to physics so making them smaller wouldn't help. This is because the slimmer the tube is the more you have to angle the beam meaning geometry is going to be worse. There was a reason why slim fit CRTs by companies like Samsung were not liked. They had some of the worst geometry. Plus there are manufacuring issues like using Led in the tube which is preventing them from being made again
@@crestofhonor2349 thanks for the info, that's interesting. I was looking it up and yeah the EPA banned manufacturing because as you said lead. That would need to be solved as well.
I still own CRTs for this reason. I have both PC CRTs and SD CRTs and yes retro games look much better. Even modern retro style games benefit from the effect CRTs produce. Even using RGB over a CRT will look better than an LCD using HDMI. This is why if I'm going to use a modern display I'll use a CRT filter that can immitate scanline bloom.
Also the point about the blending of the waterfall in Sonic. That was more due to the Genesis/Mega Drive's especially poor composite signal. On a Wii or any other system with a better composite signal, the water fall would not have that transparent effect. I have tested this myself on my Wii where the waterfall does not have the transparency effect on my CRT over composite
Hence why rgb scart or component isn’t holly grail of retro gaming as people make it. Many systems and consoles rely on dithering and it’s perfectly blended through composite. Look at Sonic. Many ps1 games look better in my opinion over composite too.
Arcade games didn't use composite they used RGB monitors so the blurring you saw on a home game console weren't really a thing in the arcades but the scanlines certainly were.
ah thanks for demystifying this - I knew something was different!
@@udance4ever Basically they were the same thing used by CRTs on home computers that had dedicated monitors (e.g. Amiga, Atari ST, and VGA monitors on PCs) Separate signals for red green and blue so pixels weren't blurred together but the scanlines still has an effect on perception of the image as your brain seems to fill in detail that's not really there.
I remember rounding up all the family CRTs and recycling them a long time ago. Kind of wish I didn't do that now.
I was a teenager when HDTV started becoming the standard, and like a dummy I got my family to toss all of our CRTs for new flatscreens with 720 and 1080p. We didn't keep a single one. Rest in pieces, old friends.
It’s hard to hang onto everything. I got rid of my Sega Genesis and games because they were just sitting in a closet unused. Don’t feel bad about it.
I have a relatively new Sony Trinitron TV "flatscreen" saved for this exact reason, when I make some space in my room I'm gonna have a way better retro gaming experience.
100%
I thought it was just nostalgia but after playing a game like Metal Slug on a CRT I realized it wasn't just nostalgia, games truly looked better back then because they were obviously not made with a high definition modern monitor in mind.
Also at the time of release those 'Old blurry images' were state of the art and were the very best anyone had seen at the time, just as the HD Images we are watching now will seem 'old and blurry' twenty years from now.
I just recently learned of a really accurate CRT shader called CRT-Royale. Useful for emulators.
Yup but it's best on 4K TVs, especially OLEDs
That's only what they call it in europe. Here they call it a CRT-quarter pounder
I always feel grateful every time I saw Riley in here after NCIX closed down. Sometimes opportunity comes from nowhere.
just a heads up old VGA monitors can also display 240p and make use of retroarch's crt switchres in order to help mitigate scaling artifacts or workaround hdmi- or DP-to-analog limitations. i just restored the voltage on an old dell trinitron vga monitor i got for 10 bucks years ago and have been fiddling around with switchres the past week. all this time it sat on my desk and i thought it was just total trash and was fixed with a 12 dollar serial cable.
Related: I play the original Xbox with component cables. Most games, especially the ones I like, could only put out 480p. Everything still looked kind of blurry on my 42" TV. Then I realized I had a setting called "Just Scan" on my TV and the image shrank to what I measured diagonally to be about 13". It looked fantastic at that size/scale.
The few 720p games are larger (27"?), and there are only about 5 games on the original Xbox that go full 1080p that can fill out the screen.
I feel like I watched 6 videos from LTT on this topic for the past year already...
2D games aged well compared to first 3d games.
If you want to play retro games , a CRT monitor is the best way to have the best image quality. And If you can use RGB signal instead of composite wich is not that great.
In Europe we have scart connector (or péritel), it is compatible with RGB, S-Video and provide the best quality for retro systems
first 3d games with good emulation run at 4k 16xssaa 16x anisotropy and look killer
@@tsartomato you don't even need anti-aliasing or 4k. Many games will look the same at 720 and higher.
@@tsartomato Down scaling is all you need. No need to do AA when running at 240p
@@crestofhonor2349 yeah run at 1x1 pixel that's cool
Thank you. 😊 I enjoyed it and learned a little bit about the game systems I grew up on.
But it is also the reason why our eyes started to hurt so quickly and why some people's diopters worsened. CRTs emitted radiation + the blurred effect created for the eyes was unnatural, you probably know the feeling when you look at a low resolution for a long time, then you look to the side and realize how sharp everything is compared to the monitor.
i have been literally saying t for years that using a composite cable can have some benefits for 3d era games (ps1-wii) when it comes to anti aliasing. depending on the console/game overall picture might be worse, but some look better.. and people have said i'm and idiot for pointing this out.
PS2-Wii I would argue is best in component. Those games didn't quite have the color limitations of the PS1 so that kind of blending wasn't necessary. But they do belong on CRTs
All the more reasons to keep old hardware alive and working
you people should stop living in the past. nostalgia is blinding you.
@@maythesciencebewithyou Nope. CRTs/BVMs/PVMs is where it's at.
While I grew up with old consoles on CRT's (I didn't have an LCD TV until the early 2010's), I honestly dont mind the sharp pixelated look of older games so long as the scaling is able to produce a decent sharp image on a 1080p display.
very good and informative video, learned some cool things. I would like to see more videos like this, maybe a video for tips on reaparing old consoles?
Crt = perfect motion. I have a few ! I can push some at 2048 x 1536 80Hz and it's glorious for modern gaming. I also enjoy SD CRTs, they all cool tbh.
not 144hz?
@@youtubeshadowbannedme Much harder to push that high plus it's not a huge benefit. CRT motion clarity is on another level when compared to any modern display
@@youtubeshadowbannedme Can do 160Hz+ but not at such high res.
The phosphors do stay kind of glowy actually hah. I just played a Super Metroid romhack on a Trinitron tonight and it was noticable.
@@Controllerhead Ho yeah definitely it's easy to notice glow and after-glow on dark background ! Plus they don't deal with light pollution very well. But damn I have an LCD with all the technologies it takes to reduce the motion blur greatly, sitting right next to a CRT and WOW the crt is just something else. I recommend trying smoothfrog :)
retroarch crt shaders to the rescue
Glad I'm the not only one to do this lol.
Fun fact is that you can't really see the quality of a CRT TV playing a pixel art game by watching a video like this and many others, Even pictures can't accurately capture it. You really need to play the game on a CRT TV to see it. I have a modern TV and a CRT TV in my bedroom and tried other day to play Alundra in both of them. For the modern TV I used retroarch with various crt filters and for the CRT I used my old fat ps2. I can guarantee there is no Shader available, or hardware to upscale , filters etc that can match the quality of a CRT TV playing a pixel art game.
I remember growing up, my family had this HUGE TV in the living room. Was easily 60". Honestly, didn't know much about how it even worked. I thought it was just a big TV like any other. Then my sister broke the protective screen on it, and after replacing it I found out that it was in fact a Rear-Projection TV. Since it took analog inputs (even had ports in the front for easy access), made retro games look amazing.
I kind of know why people don't use them, they're big and bulky. That TV was almost as heavy as me at my heaviest, and I was like 325 lbs (150 kg) at the time, and moving it would've been horrible if it didn't have built-in wheels. But imagine having a big TV like that to play retro games and stuff.
I like the sharper image in most cases, but the blending missing does mess up a lot of pictures, wish there was a way to get the intended picture from blending but still sharper
Thankfully, there are still people who understand that the old 2D games were not meant to be modern PixelArt games. Many of these games look terrible with large sharp pixels.
Modern pixel games also benefit from being on a CRT. You'd be surprised
@@crestofhonor2349 Of course, the physical realities of CRTs affect other games as well. However, the point is that the pixel aesthetics of modern pixel art games are intentional on the part of the creators. These games were developed on high-resolution modern screens for just such screens, while retro games were developed for CRT screens. Modern pixel games, for example, typically use much higher color resolutions and use dithering, if at all, at most as a stylistic device rather than a necessity. So with modern games on a CRT, you're rather moving away from the aesthetics intended by the developer.
@@yasminesteinbauer8565 Using RGB on a PC CRT doesn't have that blending effect so it looks the same but you get that super sharp look on there with the slightly rounded edges and scan line bloom CRTs have. You'd love it if you saw it and it doens't take away from that original vision
@@crestofhonor2349 We were talking about typical CRT TVs from the 80s and 90s, not PC monitors. By the way, I know exactly how the output images of these devices look like. You can play your games however you like. I personally prefer to experience the artists' vision as they created it.
@@yasminesteinbauer8565 CRTs were dominent into the 2000s. PS2, Dreamcast, Gamecube, Wii, and Xbox were all built for CRTs. Xbox 360, Wii U, and PS3 all had the ability to connect to Standard definintion CRTs via composite and s-video. Besides many owned PC CRTs so how are they not a factor?
some CRT filters make them look worse, because it over saturates the effect you're trying to go for, and if you're streaming it to people to watch online, it'll also screw with the compression bitrate as it gets more fuzzier to watch.
Great vid! Now do a follow up on how to get the best retro experience from modern tools (Pc/TV). Which settings are "best" for instance.
Prepare for a 20 hour series of videos.
Aka it'll never be good, and everyone has a different opinion on what is best.
Ocarina of Time was a good one, they used dithering to make 240p look like 480p but it only worked on CRT televisions where the pixels (light rays) where offset every other line, now on modern TV's the pixels are lined up in a grid making them much more noticeable at low resolutions, this is why you simply can't upscale a retro game unless you use an emulator to run it at a higher resolution. You can use an hdmi modification on an original N64 but it will never quite look like the original without some kind of filter applied.
Not only that but those N64 games relied heavily on 2D sprites for anything from backgrounds to close objects, so the dithering, low resolution and heavy Antialiasing of the Nintendo 64 coupled with a CRT helps to create a much more cohesive picture. Play it on an emulator and you'll see very jagging edges and blocky polygons sticking out of the pixelated backdrops.
They didn't try to make 240p look like 480p. They used AA to help smooth the image but that wouldn't make it look like 480p
I guess this depends a lot on preferences as well as the Game itself .... Even though I did have every single Nintendo Console I still used lots of Emulators withouth simulated Scan lines and I "often" liked it better then the original.
ah I'm glad someone is also part of what seems like the minority here!
I've been recently going thru my collection & just appreciate the sharpness is saving my eyes while going down memory lane! 🤓
true for so many things, it's akin to the knowledge about widescreen vs. pan 'n' scan, colorization vs. black and white and framerates in silent films.. in the world of movies. games deserve to to be presented the way the designers intended.
The Gameboy Advance consoles took advantage of its limitations in similar ways. The old screens, particularly the AGS-101, had a lot of ghosting/motion blur. The game devs knew this and made certain sprites flicker on/off at a high frame rate, to make them seem transparent on screen. They did this on the minimap in F-Zero: Maximum Velocity.
Well, motion clarity is simply way better on CRT than LCD for shooters which is what I miss. We're only now getting that motion clarity back with todays best monitors and strobe.
But still finally OLED taking off in monitor space.
OLED but missing black frame insertion… smh.
The transparency effect is by far the most obvious advantage running these games on CRT has
Sprite sizes of older arcade games were created to match with the scanlines on a monitor to help soften the edges. The same was with consoles and television pixel sizes. That's why many emulators feature overlays to recreate the effect generated by CRT monitors and televisions.
I'm reminded of a few classic sayings...
"Less is more".
"Keep it simple, stupid".
"Limitations breed creativity".