About the artist back then being aware about scan lines. As one of those artists I would say it’s reverse. There was nothing else than CRT. We did not have the concept of sharp square pixels. Because, well they did not exist yet :) We even fell that later generation CRT monitors made pixel look sharp compared to earlier output depending on cables or sometimes using RF output. Actually if there was something we needed to check was joe artwork drawn on real CRT monitors would look on a lot blurrier home tv display. So yes the artwork was designed to look good on CRT solely as we drew it there. And yes the blurring / interpolating effects of scanlines / CRT created more detail and sub pixels and we placed our pixels and colors in such way to make the art look amazing on a CRT. And sometimes we needed to compromise and draw so it looked ok on both a CRT and a home TV. And finally yes because the art was designed around that viewing it on a modern LCD gives a different visual appearance that not always but often do not work as well as on CRT.
Retro Bird sure. Assisted a little of fuzz ball for amiga and made graphics for combat cars for mega drive. Still most pixels was done for fun in the amiga demo scene.
Also, often modern screens "rescale" the pixels so it looks HORRIBLE!!! so it's not even pixel perfect, say it's just the worst thing ever, and a tear of sadness rolls down my cheek, and I drink when it gets to my mouth :-( it's important to stay hydrated
Me too. Many British people didn't grow up with scanlines at home due to PAL picture being compressed. Only when a game had a 60hz mode you could see it. But as a kid I always thought they made games look far better. I saw them in Arcade games because they had scanlines.
@@alexojideagu PAL had more scanlines in the same space plus at home people were typically about 8 feet away from the TV while in an arcade you'd be about a foot from the screen
Every time I use a scanline overlay, I get some weird stupid "imperfection" effects like black flickering etc that try way too hard to "look old". Same thing also happens with VHS overlays - those overlays always have a million lines wandering across the screen, or appearing and reapparing on a specific part of the screen. I hope that I will some day be able to find some overlays like this that actually look like "back in the 90s", instead of "today on old worn-out televisions that were made way back in the 90s".
As someone who did pixel art in the 90s, I never thought much about scanlines. I did think about CRT's unique look when dithering and placing colors next to each other. It wasn't quite a blur so it's very hard to simulate effectively. The scanline filters do help a bit, but images don't look lustrous as on the real thing.
Just a heads up, nothing was designed with screen curvature in mind because all screens were different and the LESS curve on TV, the more expensive it was, later CRTs were flat. Oh and also I never seen scanlines outside of emulation, maybe lower res bad American TVs had some, but PAL image through SCART NEVER had that scanline thingy.
I love scanline on an actual CRT. My Panasonic Quintrix looks fantastic and vibrant! The way the bright lines bloom over the dark lines makes the image look organic and allows 240p games to somehow look more alive. But I kinda hate most artificial scanline filters. They often just make the image dimmer and they lack all of the qualities that makes actual scanlines so appealing. Good artificial scanlines aren't just about making every other line dark and then call it a day. You really have to simulate all of the aspects of an actual CRT, like the line bloom.
@@RetroBirdGaming I hate the bad scanline filters that put horizontal banding blocks. I've found some filters that don't if you tweak the settings. However even many commercial games with scanline filter options have this nasty banding instead of clean scanlines.
There are 3 things I know of that will get you thicker scanlines. 1: a large TV. 2: high tvl count monitor i.e. Broadcast monitor. 3: quality video output, for example, rgb/component video will get you thicker scanlines than composite. The vertical black lines you refer to in this video is the mask of the tube. Crt screens have a literal screen behind the glass which causes the, "screen door" pattern. Large TVs suffer from this. Low tvl count tvs, in particular, have a terrible screen door pattern. Also, the screen door pattern is more visible when using quality output, like component video, and less visible with composite video. The flatscreen Sony crt in this video is shar. Probably sharp enough to not have a screen door pattern when viewed from a practical distance however when zoomed in super close it will be visible. It's good to be aware of these things when picking out crts and choosing what kind of video output you are going to use. Personally I try to get the thickest scanlines I can while still avoiding the screen door pattern. Edit: there is actually a lot more to it. Liike how brightness effects scanlines and how the mask of the tube affects scanlines... and how tate scanlines look... I think I am going to do a video on it
"Personally I try to get the thickest scanlines I can" LMAO why would you get the "crappy emulator filter" look on a real CRT when most of them never, EVER had anything that looks like scanlines?
While not about tell someone that they have to play on a CRT, I just can’t really immerse myself in game with pixel art without scan-lines. While I love that more indie games are embracing pixel art these days it bums me out that a lot of them don’t use scan-lines.
What 2D games are you guys playing? Owlboy and Blasphemous have lots of scanline options, for example. That being said, as a PC gamer I always associated scanlines with excessively low resolutions and I much prefer integer scaling. I would assume many indie developers were also PC gamers as kids.
Well glad you weren't around when people played them because scanlines are a modern thing created with bad emulator filters, they weren't a thing on TVs people actually played in 1990s and early 2000s lmao.
i dont know how to explain it, but scanlines make the image pop out more. I can seperate the foreground from background more easilly when there are scanlines.
Bought a retrotink 2x Pro and honestly I prefer scanlines for composite consoles such as the Nintendo NES and Sega Genesis. It helps mask the artifacts and makes it look more ascetically pleasing to my eye. Though it is much more darker that way.
Yeah, there is an argument to be made for composite video. The waterfalls in Sonic are probably the most famous argument but it goes much deeper than that. I may cover it in a future video.
Some thoughts. Apparently consideration of the final output varied by developer. For example, some developers compensated for the widening effect of stretching an 8:7 image to 4:3 and some didn't, resulting in some games having proper circles on CRTs and aspect corrected emulators and other games having stretched circles in the original format but proper circles in emulators without aspect correction. Developers of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive depended heavily on the interpolation effect provided by lower quality home TVs to smooth out color dithering and to produce the pseudo-transparency effect seen in the Sonic games. The waterfalls look especially awful with raw output, and Mega Drive games in general look far grainier on high resolution displays than they did on 80s and early 90s CRTs.
I'm a pixel artist that also worked on effects shaders including scanlines. I used to always prefer games without the scanlines because it lets me appreciate the pixel art better... but then I played Loop Hero and it convinced me that scanlines are absolutely amazing at creating a certain mood. To me it's a matter of vibes rather than one being better than the other. Darker and nostalgic games are a perfect fit for scanlines! For bright and colorful games... I think I'd rather keep them off.
Scanlines seem to round pixels out a bit on LCDs. That makes stuff like interfaces look much better, even if you are already running emulators that render at higher resolutions. Then there is the fact that retro consoles boosted colors a lot because they would be duller over composite. So with higher quality signals it will be overly bright and saturated and scanlines also help with that. Some stuff needs color correction though, which some HDR shaders seem to do. I havent tried hardware solutions though, those may not be as good as GPU shading on most scalers. Then there are some new stuff like putting alternating scanlines on 480i, to eliminate deinterlacing artifacts and have a picture that mostly looks retro correct.
Honestly, I emulate. I use a CRT shader that adds scanlines, some glow effect, a curved picture, a bit of ghosting, and even a bit of screen noise. I don't particularly like scanlines on their own, but when combined with the rest of the CRT effects, I love the look. Now, keeping in mind, the shader I use is actually a bit messier than a real CRT probably looked back in the day, which is why a lot of retro gamers hate CRT shaders. But I haven't touched a CRT in years, I wouldn't have anything to compare it to. So I just go with someone that looks like what I remember it looking like. Which to me, was always a bit messy, had some scan lines, and a curved picture, along with a bit of a glow since I usually played at night. Another benefit to the specific CRT shader I'm using is that a lot of scanline/crt shaders tend to look weird at non-integer scales. In fact, this video shows the issue in Bonk, with the scalines being spaced a bit weirdly, giving it a wave effect. The shader I use doesn't seem to do that, or if it does, it's so subtle that I've never noticed it. So I can resize the picture as-needed for whatever image border I'm using. Edit: i.imgur.com/tPkGlSm.png that's what my setup looks like. (Specifically Metal Slug 2) Edit 2: Another CRT shader I use: i.imgur.com/601aKc9.png I actually wish I could find like, some super high quality pictures of games running with scanlines so I could see how close I could get to the real thing on my emulator. Retroarch has a TON of CRT shaders to pick from, and most have options you can change.
Real scanlines or blanklines as they are called actually create gaps in the image where as fake ones just kind of overlay on top of the image so the question is are you losing some detail? Real ones also fluctuate in thickness based on the brightness of the image. Fake ones do not. To me that retro look comes from Composite video, the soft glow of the tube, and they way it's displayed on a shadowmask. Scanlines are hardly noticeable on some tv's so I don't feel like they are the sole reason to achieving that retro look.
Yes, the way the scanlines fluctuate in thickness is a good point and something that can be easily observed if you look closely enough. Your point about scanlines not always being visible is a smart thing to point out as well, since the bigger the tv the more visible the scanlines and blanklines become (in most cases).
Wrong, retroarchs scanline shaders do add a blankline in between every line of pixels. So nothing gets lost there. There are probably cheap scanline shaders that does what you say thou.
Oh and also the thickness can also depend on the brightness. Heres two examples forums.libretro.com/uploads/default/original/3X/b/5/b5d40ae510b2074c960c796de931528a77805f0b.png forums.libretro.com/uploads/default/original/3X/9/0/901fa9ac363aaa595d9851e81cd49a07a846d735.png
@@vinnievincent85 That must require a really high res display and alot of resources to achieve that effect. Does Retroarch allow fluctuating scanlines based on brightness?
@@GoodVibeCollecting Some shaders is better at 4k. But I run it at oh something like 746x567 or something wierd like that because my 10 year old lcd tv refuses to not autoscale on other resolutions. Looks great! Would not look much different on higher res. However you want a bright tv cause scanlines tend to darken the image alot. Preferably a hdr tv with high nits. How much cpu and / or gpu power it needs depends on what you think is much. If you game on a pc you probably have enough. I dont know what the minumum reqs are but I dont think you need anything special. However new emulators can be heavier than one thinks even for old consoles. Because today most of them from the 64bit era and downwards are LLE, wich means almost perfect emulation but more resource intense. I recomend you to register at retroarch if you have any questions. You can even hunt for achievements in old games today :) Retrogaming makes me puke at modern games.
It's not just a "retro" thing, it's just that the scan lines actually changed the way the digital image was being watched from our perspective. If you use a modern monitor and play retro games with raw perfect pixels you get a very very blocky picture, but those games were made thinking about scan lines in mind, because the colours and shapes of textures had to be made a specific way so the TVs of those years would display the intended image. They couldn't just create raw images, they had to think how scanlines would affect the ending result. I just saw a comparison betwen 2 screens of Breath of Fire 2, where there's this big green eye with a red iris in the middle, and you can't tell what's the rest of the picture, but when you watch the very same moment through a CRT TV (or a very very good CRT shader on emulators) the picture changes dramatically. You can see that the eye is surrounded by some reptile skin, because each raw pixel changes in the final form when using those TVs. The transparent effect of lights, waterfalls and (why not) transparent pieces of clothes, like silk cloth were made intercalating pixels from that effect and the background. If you don't follow me, imagine a big chess board with hundreds of black and white squares. That's how those things look raw in the game. But when CRTs come into the game, they stop looking like that and they smooth so great that it looks like a normal transparency. Back then that's how these things were made. You couldn't just create a transparent layer. There were fully coloured pixels and not coloured pixels, but there was no middle point. You can watch this RUclips video called "The 30 Most Mind-Blowing Games Examples of Retro Pixel Art" to check it yourselves. Scanlines are not just a retro effect, they really change how the game looks in a good way. The intended way.
I was going nuts trying to pin down the background music the whole video until you showed Metal Slug footage and eased my torment. I feel PS2 games really benefit from having scan lines. The image is so muddy on modern TV's but really pops on a nice CRT.
I'm more of a *_dot-matrix_* type of gamer. It's just so fascinating to me to play games on a display typically designed for scientific *_calculators._*
Even though I've never had a preference for scanlines when playing older games I did find it helped me achieve the right colour balance when using an OSSC so I do always have them enabled. then there's the matter of intensity. In the end I think scanlines are a personal preference and I wouldn't call someone else's retro gaming experience invalid for not using or even liking scanlines. there's a strange amount of eletism online when it comes to crt's and scanlines.
I can't play retro games without scan lines. It amazes me how people don't get how essential they are to a sharp picture on retro games.When I see sharp pixels I want to scream. That's not what the games looked like.
@@alexojideagu They aren't even slightly essential. I play SNES on TVs form the 90s and TVs from 2020. Zero difference. Equally functional. Except now I can actually move my TV without pulling a back muscle.
I love scanlines, but real CRTs are the only way (presently) to do them justice, imo. I've been deep down the rabbit hole of using resource-heavy, multipass custom CRT shaders on modern 4k HDR displays to almost-perfectly represent the geometry and appearance of classic gaming with true scanlines on a *still* image. But, the moment gameplay begins and the image moves, the illusion falls apart completely. There is nothing one can do with a modern display using "sample & hold" technology to mimic the way a CRT appears when in motion (no motion blur or ghosting whatsoever). I pray for better display technology to arrive one day, because my CRT sadly won't last forever.
Yeah, and I find that there's also a certain depth to the image distinct to CRTs as well. It's hard to explain, but it feels like the picture sits back into the screen a little more.
Yeah I agree. I think NES games with scanlines can look beautiful even on a modern OLED 4K screen. However it's really only when the image is still. The image gets blurred and you can tell the scanlines are software when there is motion.
if you have a 1440p or 4k tv you can use a crt shader like crt royale nttsc to create a look similar to crt but the emulator need to report the correct resolution for proper scan lines.
I think scanlines in addition to being suitable for old games because they look like an old CRT TV, they hypnotize because they unconsciously look like the fabric of an oil painting canvas.
One more thing, some games have beautiful pixel art that you really don’t want to ruin with scan lines or filters... Batman: return of the joker is beautiful with crisp pixels! Kind of like looking at shovel knight! Zelda 1, the 2d Dreamcast fighters...Metroid, castlevania... other games do benefit from shaders like the more cartoony ones (Mickey mania, earthworm Jim, Mario world, etc)...
Pixel art just doesn't look right without scanlines 🤷🏻♂ I've still got my old Sony KV-40XBR800 around (weighing in at 300lbs!), sitting in a spare room with a bunch of old consoles hooked up to it. For me the biggest benefit of a CRT display is the lack of ghosting and latency however. I believe the only flat-panel option these days to get that is with a plasma display, but those have the drawbacks of rapid burn-in and massive power consumption.
Depends on settings. I use Mednafen (for 80's and 90's consoles) and FS-UAE (Amiga) and with scanlines the low-resolution of these machines looks better on LCD. For Mednafen I also enable the Bilinear Interpolation that adds soft blur effect to the image. I tried the both emulators without these filters and it looks too sharp and pixelated. Low resolution and razor sharp image of modern displays makes these old games look painful. Even dithering in pixelart graphics is useless when image is too sharp. Back in 90's many people had consoles plugged into 14" TVs and now when you use a over 20" display these freaking pixels get huge when image gets streteched.
As I'm doing a post-graduat in AI this year I'm thinking of implementing a super-resolution neural net for retro games. This would allow the neural net to fill in the missing details in the pixel art as it 'may' have been intended by the artist. In theory this sound simple, but in practice very hard to do.
6:40 Yeah many indie games don't have them but their native resolution is higher than 320x240. I play on a 4K monitor and retro games from the Mega Drive era have a 12x lower native resolution, so the image is just a blur. My only problem is that most of the time scanlines are made really poorly and some are great but aren't available for many systems. My favorite so far is the Sonic Mania CRT filter. To me scanlines are necessary because to the eye it is decreasing the resolution similarly how they blow up picture sizes for big billboards because the photos would need a 1000 megapixels to stretch that wide, so the completely blurry Dr. Robotnik now looks the way it did on a CRT monitor.
Must have scanlines if 240p. I can’t stand what happens to the look when put on digital without them. Everything is covered in squares. I’m pretty sure the pixel aspect ratio if way off from a crt also. It just blows me away how different it can look from what it was supposed to.
I programmed games 'back in the day' and we all had expensive computer monitors and the artists also had CRT TVs hooked into their computers. This was so they could make the best graphics possible and still have it look good on CRTs, even using the limitations of the CRTs for 'blending' and effects that don't look right when viewed on the source monitor. The graphics HAD to made this way, they didn't LOOK this way on the machines they were developed on. To me, scanlines will always be a downgrade and something only people who don't know/have never seen what the graphics looked like on monitors when artists were creating them enjoy.
Interesting philosophy. I don't quite follow, though. Bear with me for a moment while I level-set: The blank scanlines on a TV are from the fact that the raster is scanning 240 odd lines, followed by 240 even lines (offset by one.) ... Except that 240p resets that counter so that the 2nd interleaved lines are never drawn, leaving a "hole" between the lines that are. I.e., the blanks are from the 480-line resolution being cut in half. It's almost like CRTs have a "native" resolution, but it's an artifact of the beam spot size vs. the phosphor / grille and its inherent resolution (as in, ability to resolve detail), and not "pixels" per se. On a CRT (computer) monitor, it depends on the resolution being driven by the video card, and dot pitch of the screen. If you look at a DOS PC running on an SVGA monitor, for example, you'll see "scanlines" as well. That's from the old 25-line text mode having an effective resolution of 720x400 (80x25 characters, with a 9x16 font), while the screen itself is usually capable of resolving 800x600 or higher. The electron beam can only be one fixed size, so if it's small enough to resolve detail at higher than VGA resolution, it will leave un-scanned phosphor at lower resolution. (Let's ignore CGA resolutions for now, since we're probably talking more about the early-mid-90s.) OK, so, that all being the case, the graphic artist would probably either be pixel-doubling (zoom 2x) the artwork to match VGA or higher resolution monitors, or would be using DOS applications running at higher-color VGA resolutions (possibly 320x240 @ 256 colors, for example.) If the art was pixel-doubled to match the (full-screen) scale you would see on a TV, then there would be no scanlines, but it would be super sharp chunky pixels instead. Is that what you mean as the "not downgraded" way? OTOH, if they were running at common DOS graphic resolutions, then there probably _would_ have been visible scanlines, just as there were in 200/240-line PC games of the time. In the NES, SNES, Genesis era, Windows was not a given, and a lot of work was done in DOS, so either is likely. Either way, there would NOT be as much color blending from low-bandwidth composite or RF video, though, so no masked dithering or fake transparency. It would be very much equivalent to using a professional-class CRT TV with RGB input instead.
I like CRT scanlines, but on my HDTV, not so much with my setup. I use both a RetroTink 2x-Pro and a 2x-Multi in my setup, but am not a fan of the scanlines they produce.
The simulation of this effect is getting better with 4K displays and better shaders. I like CRTs but I also like the flexibility of playing both raster and vector games on a single display with really good (albeit imperfect) simulation of those old display types. I do find it humorous that you need a decent rig to play a game from 1982 with all the shader bells and whistles cranked up -- 95% of you processing power at least is going to the effects.
I personally prefer no scanlines for the fullest & brightest picture but for retro games they can sometimes be a necessity based on how the art was drawn. Most older games were not drawn in HD so playing them on an HD display can expose the faults in the original art. This is why I prefer retro consoles which give the option to toggle scanlines since their need is on a game by game basis.
I like classic games on a CRT, but I also like the cleaned up and smoothed look on a newer small flat screen as well, one with a 720p resolution hopefully. Though my older VISIO does a nice job I think
Modern day emulation for retro consoles is so goddamn good that it's not even worth going through this trouble anymore. And with the quality of certain CRT shaders in RetroArch, just hook your computer to your HD TV via HDMI and you're pretty much good to go, granted you scale your games by integer.
Funny thing is use them in reshade for all my PC expect if it block only see this happen form game by ubisoft. They help clean image in games when not run at my 1080p native resolution or if I set no AA to game get max fps that i can it mask it very well. Only downside is some game games can get too dark it some areas.
Basically, scanlines (although most are actually refering to the horizontal black lines) were just tech limitation. In that era (atari, nes, 16 bits, and even 32 bits consoles) were low res consoles. Meaning they render at 240i. Therefore in order to display correctly on a 480i crt (wich was the common horizontal line count for tvs) blacklines were added in between to the actually rastered 240 lines produced by the console. Meaning that what most call "scanlines" are the black lines that are not rastered in order to not stretch vertically the image sent by the console. There were other techniques that were quite interesting back in the day like dithering and deinterlacing... but those "scanlines" actually were a limitation of the device sending image data. So in conclusion... unless for nostalgia playing on an old crt... turning on scanlines on more modern displays just degrades image quality.
Scanlines improve the image quality by a lot. Pixellated 8bit and 16 bit games look like trash. Scanlines break up the blocks. The problem is people today are only seeing poor quality filters on LCD screens and not seeing how much better they make games look. The problem is only a few LCD filters are accurate.
@@MarianoDevourment Did you watch the video? It's not a placebo effect. Millions of retro fans say the same thing. The Scanlines break up the pixels so the blocky effect of pixels is removed and it gives a sharp defined image.
@@alexojideagu thats placebo effect, this video got it wrong that is why I made the clarification... its more technical but I think I made a good sum up on the subject. I actually experienced first hand what today is called retro. I had lived atari onwards, back in the day, with real hardware and crt tvs used back then. You may like it more... but it was a tech limitation, not a special effect. Developers had this in mind and one solution was to cut the frames into stripes rastering in sequence one row raster, the other black (no raster). Otherwise the image would be incorrectly be stretched vertically. Even could cause flikering and other undesired glitches.
@@MarianoDevourment We're not talking about the technical aspect, we're talking about how it LOOKS. Without scanlines the pixels look blocky on LCD TVs. Scanlines divide the image horizontally and remove the blocky pixel look. A TV wasn't designed to do that, but it looks much better.
I rather buy an old CRT for my old retro games because those old games picture quality looked better on a CRT than on a HDTV. Those retro games aren’t built for HDTV. That’s why the picture quality looked ugly on HD.
It’s such a weird thing. I first played retro games or games with scanline options on my 75 inch 4K tv. Didn’t really get the appeal. Now I’m playing all the classic Capcom fighters and Bomberman on Sega Saturn hooked up to an old Sony Trinitron with an RGB 21 pin connection and I have fallen in love.
back then i always adjusted my old ass tv to show me solid colors and get rid of these kind of artifacts, nowadays i can finally play with a cristal-clean image, and yet some people miss all those old artifacts that for me, were distorting the image, damn, its like people missing the hiss from vinyl records
But are you not talking about the blurriness and distortion that often was on old ass TV. that made it a blurry mess? Have you ever had a really good CRT “arcade” monitor. That did not have those artifacts but still has scanlines with softened up the image and made it actually look higher resolution and less blocky? We do not miss the artifacts we miss the “higher” resolution.
Retro Bird yeah, my PS2 using the AV cables displays some fuzziness that goes up the picture. Initially I thought it was scanlines as well until recently when I realized that it’s just fuzz and I may just need to replace the cables. Like I said earlier, my friend is convinced that those are scanlines and is trying to get me to use component cables even though I should probably test another AV cable (easier to hook up than components. I don’t have to go behind my TV since I have AV Switchboxes.)
I wasn't a scan line fan till I tried them out on My MiSTer FPGA and for some games I've tried on the GBA and SNES cores I really like them so it really depends on the game for me
scanlines do make older games look better but man it smashes my eyes after like 5mins, i wasnt really a console gamer when i was a kid (apart from atari 2600) so i think being used to the old pixel DOS games makes no scanlines seem more natural to me could be the PAL territory thing aswell as i only really remember noticing scanlines at the arcades
@@RetroBirdGaming not as far as I know. Of coarse it was possible but I just just referring to the few mentions that CRTs were all we had back then. There was also LCDs and other display technologies
I have a couple of old CRT PC monitors and I use them for retro games on my Windows XP machine. For 2D games I mostly use emulation, but let me tell you.. if you just create exact custom resolution (like 320x224 for Genesis for example) and let emulators switch to them natively you get mega sharp scanlines! Much better that that TV in this video!! the only thing is they can't run at 60hz at such low resolutions so I use 120hz.
I've always prefered sharp pixels myself. I really like pixel art and wish it had more clarity on CRTs but maybe I just have a bad CRT. I don't like how it looks in videos like this though either. I find that CRTs just kind of blur it together. Like instead of high quality pixel art it's low quality handdrawn art. I definitely think the art was designed around CRTs though considering how much better handheld pixel art ages on and LCD but I still prefer bright, sharp, pixels. Maybe it's because I really like pixel art outside of retro games too.
Well they would work on art either by paper in the early days or by using professional monitors that were much higher quality than what was available to consumers. For early consoles I’d say yes they relied on the CRT to blur and soften the image because most TVs of the time had only RF or maybe composite. Later on during the mid to late 90s much better connections came to consumers in the form of S-video and Component video. Both of these would provide a much better signal and was closer to the pure RGB signal that developers would of used on professional or PC CRTs.
When the artists created the art for the games back then, they were doing with CRT. The reason you have to use the "scanlines" is because on modern TVs/monitors you lose a lot of details and effects that are only noticeable in CRT. So the pixel perfect image ends up looking crap.
Despite what everybody says about "scanlines" I know I played games on CRTs for years and I didn't see any "scanlines" back then. I don't remember ever seeing "scanlines" until people started recording CRTs with cameras and uploading the footage to RUclips. Meaning: these "scanlines" only show up on a camera, not in person. "CRT filters" only re-create what the screen look like when you record them with cameras.
Scanlines are often hard to notice unless the TV is at least 27" and you're sitting close enough to the TV. So, there's a chance some of us didn't do either of those things growing up.
@@RetroBirdGaming I definitely played on a big screen TV back in the day, and I didn't see prominent black lines like that. In one of my oldest videos, you can see the CRT TV that I used to have. Those black lines simply show up more prominently on camera than they do to the naked eye because of how cameras work with rolling shutters etc. Technology Connections made a video on how he records CRT and adjusts the shutter speed to make scanlines show up more prominently.
The one thing to keep in mind is that "There is no way emulate" is not true at all. But first you do need a screen with a MUCH HIGHER resolution to emulate all the subpixel information. Just having twice the resolution with a black line inbetween is not even remotely approaching it. 4k will for the first time enable something even remotely similar, but real scanline emulation probably needs 8k.
Fun fact, a good scanline filter doesn't look good on a 720P display, and in most cases a 1080P display won't be good enough, you need a 4K display. You also need a beefy processor, or decent video card. This has the effect of pricing out anyone who still uses a sub 4K display, encouraging them to buy a new display. This also keeps the secondary market of old CRT's alive, so serves an incentive either way . Is this intended? In my opinion probably not, but the effect is the same. Pressure to buy, to consume. Personally, I stick to smoothers because I choose to use my 720P disolay until it breaks. I also keep the set around because it has composite and component inputs, and the low resolution of the display means you don't need heavy upscaling even with PS2 level hardware. What can I say, I'm from a generation who kept their wares for 20-30 years, my first console was an Intellivision and my first TV was a 12 inch tube that literally melted down in front of me in the early 2000's. Keeping up with the Jonses simply means wasting your money. If you can run scanline filters go for it. I sure wouldn't recommend basing a new purchase around it though.
Naturally occurring scanlines are fine. Simulated scanlines are annoying and reek of phony bologna. All that said, I don't miss scanlines on modern displays.
I'm nostalgic about how video games looked when they were brand new on arcade monitors... sure, there is a certain nostalgia about revisiting these same games via emulation in school with choppy framerates, missing sound and using keyboard/mouse (instead of the original controls) just because we could... but seeing the games as they were intended to be seen is something special. sure, it would add to the cost of the retro products to add decent scanline support, but very minimal cost for a great benefit. games that originated on the PC are a bit different as most of them were originally displayed without scanlines (barring the 80's era where personal computers using the family television was more common instead of a dedicated vga monitor). seeing modern arcades with pre-2000s video games using led or lcd monitors makes me sad, the games look worse than they did originally, showing flaws that didn't exist. it's a bit like film lovers who insist on widescreen to preserve the original aspect ratio over pan 'n' scan, or insisting on the original B&W vs a modern colorization effort, or silent films at the original framerate with an appropriate soundtrack from the era (as opposed to truly "silent"). it's about preserving the original presentation as closely as possible. in some ways modern tech can improve a presentation. you don't have to see dirt and scratches on a film after watching it a few more times on a dvd. you can play polygonal 3d games with a more stable framerate or play laserdisc games without worrying about the discs failing so often (or forcing a visible pause between scenes). but game preservation is important and part of that is preserving the original experience that made it beloved in the first place
Without scanlines the graphics of old 240p games are actually a little distorted, it can also give the illusion that everything curved is more rounded since your mind fills in the blanks; so it's not all just nostalgia. I like it for everything sprite based, for 3D I don't feel the graphics benefits from it. I like high end consumer TVs better than PVM/BVM, that's the look arcade games had and I'm not looking to get scanlines blacker than that.
I strongly dislike scanlines myself. I never noticed them on my TV back in the day, and I have no desire to see them on my lcd. They do nothing for me. They don't make me feel nostalgic. Only grumpy that my picture is darker. I use upscalers on my lcd, and could not comprehend spending money on an upscaler to make my picture better, only to make it worse with scanlines. To some people scanlines look better to them, and thats cool. They're just not for me.
Well this video convinced me of one thing: Never _ever_ play a game with vertical scrolling on a CRT or with scanlines. That platformer shown looked very trippy when it looked like the pattern on the grass was ascending up as the screen scrolled. All the black lines also just make the image appear very dark if you ask me. Then again, I'm the person who claims that Persona 5's UI is only good looking in screenshots because seeing it in motion makes me dizzy, so it seems I'm just the minority.
They don't look like that on a decent CRT. What you're seeing in the video is from scan lines being added from an external source outside of the screen, which despite the claims of this video saying they "look" about as good as what you would see on a Sony PVM monitor, they absolutely do not in motion. At all.
Because lots of retro games weren't meant to look with sharp pixels, but smooth as a cartoon from a TV show. It depends of the game. NES Mario Bros and Metroid look better with sharp pixels, but NES Ninja Gaiden look better with the smoothness provided by the scanlines effect
But a huge fan of scan lines but I do like crt filters and shaders! Really takes care of low res 3d models on more modern retro consoles from ps1 to ps2/Dreamcast. GameCube does look good without scan lines. Dreamcast can look good without them depending on the game and how far you sit from the display. Sometimes though, I do prefer my clean pixels and turn off shaders! The pixels really bring out the retro look and the fact that shaders are off really boosts performance.
I prefer to play retro games and arcade games on a CRT TV, to me it's more authentic and looks good. Unfortunately not everyone has a CRT TV laying around, ossc, framemeister, MiSTer and mini consoles will look pretty decent on modern TV'S. Ultimately if you're happy with what you have that's what matters.
I feel like scanlines seem unnecessary. Yes there are certain games where the artists were aware of the scanlines and used the CRT tv qualities to pump up the image, but they also had no idea their work would one day be run on 1080p+ TV’s and all the brightness and other qualities that brings to the table. Aside from the transparency effects in like Sonic the Hedgehogs waterfalls, I think the images look great in their pixelated blocky glory.
A bit late, but here‘s my take: I don’t like scan lines. I don’t like the look. It might very well have to do with the fact that I’m not American. The European PAL standard had more scanlines which were closer together than with the American NTSC standard. So they weren’t as pronounced at all. In fact, you had to get really close to make them out. In my teens, I imported American VHS tapes of movies that hadn’t been released yet overseas (before the internet, there sometimes were large gaps between releases). As a consequence, I had a VHS tape recorder which could handle both PAL and NTSC and the American tapes looked a lot worse with their scanlines. The same is true for games. I get the nostalgia factor for people who grew up with scanlines, but it’s certainly not the way it "has to look". Most of the world didn’t experience said look. It’s the look of a certain kind of CRTs that followed a standard which was already outdated in the 1960s. Other CRTs at the same time didn’t have that look. Personally, I like the crisp pixelated look that HDTVs give me. The only thing that is slightly annoying is the fact that dithering doesn’t produce the same effect as on a CRT. I mean HD dithering also has a beauty of its own, but it’s not what was originally intended by the programmers. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a filter which reproduces the original dithering effect to my satisfaction, I guess only the real deal will be sufficient there. But as I said, I actually like the HD look, so it’s not a deal breaker for me.
I love true CRT scanlines. I agree it’s part of the look it I hate there emulated scanline look. Here’s something I thought about the other day though. I just got a Sony Trinitron CRT with HDMI. I use it for my mini consoles that output 16:9 aspect ratio because this CRT is 16:9! Mega find! Anyway the question is...since it’s HDMI, but still a CRT, am I getting true scanlines without emulation on a mini console? All I know is the NeoGeo mini got slammed for its look on a HDTV, but on this tv it looks incredible!
Those mini consoles output at 720p, which isn't going to produce true scanlines. However, that's a really interesting setup. If you like how it looks then I wouldn't worry about it too much.
Retro Bird that’s really good to know! It’s the best solution I’ve found, but it’s not like these kind of tvs are easy to come across. My solution before game me less than great results.
@@joshmiller887 Yeah, those TVs are really hard to find. They supposedly have some issues with input lag depending on your setup, but I've never used one myself.
Retro Bird I have heard that as well with the lag. I’ve been hyper conscious of it when I’m playing, and I don’t notice any..that could also be that I don’t have a lot of experience with a lot of these mini console’s original hardware/software. Some I do. Some I don’t. Thanks for all the info!
All i wanted was a video that shows an old axhool game with scanlines and the same game without. Zooming in on a game and not showing what it looks like without scanlines isnt helpful.
I just bought an Arcade 1UP Big Blue, and I find the graphics atrocious...all blocky and pixelated...and to my dismay, no scanlines option on the Big Blue. I'm thinking about getting a Raspberry Pi upgrade. Does anyone know if the Rasperry Pi graphics look better? Any options for scanlines? Any insight on this would be greatly appreciated.
It would seem to me that there's some science that backs up a less is more approach which would support scan lines. Blizzard entertainment learned after putting starcraft out that when you render small sprites with too much detail you end up with a really muddled image. I bet it has a lot to do with the elements with which the gamer interacts. If the elements are small then scan lines are probably helpful and if the elements are larger scan lines probably are inconsequential. It would be really nice if we could pin a comment that lists the games shown in this video.
I hear ya. I started doing pinned comments on all my videos eventually (that listed the games played with timestamps). Perhaps at some point I will go back and do pinned comments for some of the older videos that people are still watching.
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
About the artist back then being aware about scan lines. As one of those artists I would say it’s reverse.
There was nothing else than CRT. We did not have the concept of sharp square pixels. Because, well they did not exist yet :)
We even fell that later generation CRT monitors made pixel look sharp compared to earlier output depending on cables or sometimes using RF output.
Actually if there was something we needed to check was joe artwork drawn on real CRT monitors would look on a lot blurrier home tv display.
So yes the artwork was designed to look good on CRT solely as we drew it there. And yes the blurring / interpolating effects of scanlines / CRT created more detail and sub pixels and we placed our pixels and colors in such way to make the art look amazing on a CRT. And sometimes we needed to compromise and draw so it looked ok on both a CRT and a home TV.
And finally yes because the art was designed around that viewing it on a modern LCD gives a different visual appearance that not always but often do not work as well as on CRT.
Thank you for sharing all of this. Very interesting to read about. Would you feel comfortable sharing which games you worked on back then?
Retro Bird sure. Assisted a little of fuzz ball for amiga and made graphics for combat cars for mega drive. Still most pixels was done for fun in the amiga demo scene.
I'm happy you've shared this.. But the concept of sharp square pixels not existing?
Black box nes games had sharp pixel art right on the box
@@EmperorMAR I think he meant in gameplay on a monitor
Also, often modern screens "rescale" the pixels so it looks HORRIBLE!!! so it's not even pixel perfect, say it's just the worst thing ever, and a tear of sadness rolls down my cheek, and I drink when it gets to my mouth :-( it's important to stay hydrated
I'm a scanline fan and turn the option on if available when not on original hardware on CRT
Yeah, I'm typically the same way.
Me too. Many British people didn't grow up with scanlines at home due to PAL picture being compressed. Only when a game had a 60hz mode you could see it. But as a kid I always thought they made games look far better. I saw them in Arcade games because they had scanlines.
@@alexojideagu PAL had more scanlines in the same space plus at home people were typically about 8 feet away from the TV while in an arcade you'd be about a foot from the screen
Every time I use a scanline overlay, I get some weird stupid "imperfection" effects like black flickering etc that try way too hard to "look old".
Same thing also happens with VHS overlays - those overlays always have a million lines wandering across the screen, or appearing and reapparing on a specific part of the screen.
I hope that I will some day be able to find some overlays like this that actually look like "back in the 90s", instead of "today on old worn-out televisions that were made way back in the 90s".
Same, but I didn't realize the trend until I picked up my neighbors old crt he left out abandoned. Then I realized I liked and kissed the old style.
As someone who did pixel art in the 90s, I never thought much about scanlines. I did think about CRT's unique look when dithering and placing colors next to each other. It wasn't quite a blur so it's very hard to simulate effectively. The scanline filters do help a bit, but images don't look lustrous as on the real thing.
Cool to here your first hand perspective. Did you work on commercial projects back in the day? If so, what are they? I'm very curious.
I'm crazy about:
-scanlines
-screendoor effect
-curved crt screen effect
-chromatic aberration
-colot artifacts
-subtle glow
Just a heads up, nothing was designed with screen curvature in mind because all screens were different and the LESS curve on TV, the more expensive it was, later CRTs were flat.
Oh and also I never seen scanlines outside of emulation, maybe lower res bad American TVs had some, but PAL image through SCART NEVER had that scanline thingy.
I love scanline on an actual CRT. My Panasonic Quintrix looks fantastic and vibrant! The way the bright lines bloom over the dark lines makes the image look organic and allows 240p games to somehow look more alive.
But I kinda hate most artificial scanline filters. They often just make the image dimmer and they lack all of the qualities that makes actual scanlines so appealing. Good artificial scanlines aren't just about making every other line dark and then call it a day. You really have to simulate all of the aspects of an actual CRT, like the line bloom.
I've noticed that artificial scanlines can look a bit off as well. Some are better than others, but yeah...
@@RetroBirdGaming I hate the bad scanline filters that put horizontal banding blocks. I've found some filters that don't if you tweak the settings. However even many commercial games with scanline filter options have this nasty banding instead of clean scanlines.
There are 3 things I know of that will get you thicker scanlines. 1: a large TV. 2: high tvl count monitor i.e. Broadcast monitor. 3: quality video output, for example, rgb/component video will get you thicker scanlines than composite.
The vertical black lines you refer to in this video is the mask of the tube. Crt screens have a literal screen behind the glass which causes the, "screen door" pattern. Large TVs suffer from this. Low tvl count tvs, in particular, have a terrible screen door pattern. Also, the screen door pattern is more visible when using quality output, like component video, and less visible with composite video. The flatscreen Sony crt in this video is shar. Probably sharp enough to not have a screen door pattern when viewed from a practical distance however when zoomed in super close it will be visible.
It's good to be aware of these things when picking out crts and choosing what kind of video output you are going to use. Personally I try to get the thickest scanlines I can while still avoiding the screen door pattern.
Edit: there is actually a lot more to it. Liike how brightness effects scanlines and how the mask of the tube affects scanlines... and how tate scanlines look... I think I am going to do a video on it
"Personally I try to get the thickest scanlines I can"
LMAO why would you get the "crappy emulator filter" look on a real CRT when most of them never, EVER had anything that looks like scanlines?
While not about tell someone that they have to play on a CRT, I just can’t really immerse myself in game with pixel art without scan-lines.
While I love that more indie games are embracing pixel art these days it bums me out that a lot of them don’t use scan-lines.
That's something I've thought about too. Indie developers leaving out scanlines. They should at least have an option.
Yeah. I always feel like indie games that go for the 8 bit look always fall a bit short when it comes to being accurate.
What 2D games are you guys playing? Owlboy and Blasphemous have lots of scanline options, for example. That being said, as a PC gamer I always associated scanlines with excessively low resolutions and I much prefer integer scaling. I would assume many indie developers were also PC gamers as kids.
@@richardhunter9779 The newer TMNT games also did this. They have great scanline options.
I love scanlines and i don't imagine retro game without them.
Yeah, it would be really strange for me to suddenly not have them anymore.
Well glad you weren't around when people played them because scanlines are a modern thing created with bad emulator filters, they weren't a thing on TVs people actually played in 1990s and early 2000s lmao.
As long as it doesn't darken the picture too much, I love adding scanlines to old games. The good ones are minor and don't distract too much.
i dont know how to explain it, but scanlines make the image pop out more. I can seperate the foreground from background more easilly when there are scanlines.
Bought a retrotink 2x Pro and honestly I prefer scanlines for composite consoles such as the Nintendo NES and Sega Genesis. It helps mask the artifacts and makes it look more ascetically pleasing to my eye. Though it is much more darker that way.
Yeah, there is an argument to be made for composite video. The waterfalls in Sonic are probably the most famous argument but it goes much deeper than that. I may cover it in a future video.
Some thoughts. Apparently consideration of the final output varied by developer. For example, some developers compensated for the widening effect of stretching an 8:7 image to 4:3 and some didn't, resulting in some games having proper circles on CRTs and aspect corrected emulators and other games having stretched circles in the original format but proper circles in emulators without aspect correction. Developers of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive depended heavily on the interpolation effect provided by lower quality home TVs to smooth out color dithering and to produce the pseudo-transparency effect seen in the Sonic games. The waterfalls look especially awful with raw output, and Mega Drive games in general look far grainier on high resolution displays than they did on 80s and early 90s CRTs.
I learned a lot from this video. Thanks!
Good to hear!
I'm a pixel artist that also worked on effects shaders including scanlines.
I used to always prefer games without the scanlines because it lets me appreciate the pixel art better... but then I played Loop Hero and it convinced me that scanlines are absolutely amazing at creating a certain mood.
To me it's a matter of vibes rather than one being better than the other. Darker and nostalgic games are a perfect fit for scanlines! For bright and colorful games... I think I'd rather keep them off.
Scanlines seem to round pixels out a bit on LCDs. That makes stuff like interfaces look much better, even if you are already running emulators that render at higher resolutions.
Then there is the fact that retro consoles boosted colors a lot because they would be duller over composite. So with higher quality signals it will be overly bright and saturated and scanlines also help with that. Some stuff needs color correction though, which some HDR shaders seem to do.
I havent tried hardware solutions though, those may not be as good as GPU shading on most scalers.
Then there are some new stuff like putting alternating scanlines on 480i, to eliminate deinterlacing artifacts and have a picture that mostly looks retro correct.
Honestly, I emulate. I use a CRT shader that adds scanlines, some glow effect, a curved picture, a bit of ghosting, and even a bit of screen noise. I don't particularly like scanlines on their own, but when combined with the rest of the CRT effects, I love the look.
Now, keeping in mind, the shader I use is actually a bit messier than a real CRT probably looked back in the day, which is why a lot of retro gamers hate CRT shaders. But I haven't touched a CRT in years, I wouldn't have anything to compare it to. So I just go with someone that looks like what I remember it looking like. Which to me, was always a bit messy, had some scan lines, and a curved picture, along with a bit of a glow since I usually played at night.
Another benefit to the specific CRT shader I'm using is that a lot of scanline/crt shaders tend to look weird at non-integer scales. In fact, this video shows the issue in Bonk, with the scalines being spaced a bit weirdly, giving it a wave effect. The shader I use doesn't seem to do that, or if it does, it's so subtle that I've never noticed it. So I can resize the picture as-needed for whatever image border I'm using.
Edit: i.imgur.com/tPkGlSm.png that's what my setup looks like. (Specifically Metal Slug 2)
Edit 2: Another CRT shader I use: i.imgur.com/601aKc9.png
I actually wish I could find like, some super high quality pictures of games running with scanlines so I could see how close I could get to the real thing on my emulator. Retroarch has a TON of CRT shaders to pick from, and most have options you can change.
Nice video, I like both actually, you just get used to not see them eventually
Thank you. Glad you enjoyed it!
What is the game with the bald boy starting at about 02:20 ??? This just majorly unlocked a memory for me!
Bonk! That game specifically is "Bonk's Revenge".
I wish more indie 2D games have an option for scanlines
Real scanlines or blanklines as they are called actually create gaps in the image where as fake ones just kind of overlay on top of the image so the question is are you losing some detail? Real ones also fluctuate in thickness based on the brightness of the image. Fake ones do not. To me that retro look comes from Composite video, the soft glow of the tube, and they way it's displayed on a shadowmask. Scanlines are hardly noticeable on some tv's so I don't feel like they are the sole reason to achieving that retro look.
Yes, the way the scanlines fluctuate in thickness is a good point and something that can be easily observed if you look closely enough. Your point about scanlines not always being visible is a smart thing to point out as well, since the bigger the tv the more visible the scanlines and blanklines become (in most cases).
Wrong, retroarchs scanline shaders do add a blankline in between every line of pixels. So nothing gets lost there. There are probably cheap scanline shaders that does what you say thou.
Oh and also the thickness can also depend on the brightness. Heres two examples
forums.libretro.com/uploads/default/original/3X/b/5/b5d40ae510b2074c960c796de931528a77805f0b.png
forums.libretro.com/uploads/default/original/3X/9/0/901fa9ac363aaa595d9851e81cd49a07a846d735.png
@@vinnievincent85 That must require a really high res display and alot of resources to achieve that effect. Does Retroarch allow fluctuating scanlines based on brightness?
@@GoodVibeCollecting Some shaders is better at 4k. But I run it at oh something like 746x567 or something wierd like that because my 10 year old lcd tv refuses to not autoscale on other resolutions. Looks great! Would not look much different on higher res. However you want a bright tv cause scanlines tend to darken the image alot. Preferably a hdr tv with high nits. How much cpu and / or gpu power it needs depends on what you think is much. If you game on a pc you probably have enough. I dont know what the minumum reqs are but I dont think you need anything special. However new emulators can be heavier than one thinks even for old consoles. Because today most of them from the 64bit era and downwards are LLE, wich means almost perfect emulation but more resource intense. I recomend you to register at retroarch if you have any questions. You can even hunt for achievements in old games today :) Retrogaming makes me puke at modern games.
It's not just a "retro" thing, it's just that the scan lines actually changed the way the digital image was being watched from our perspective. If you use a modern monitor and play retro games with raw perfect pixels you get a very very blocky picture, but those games were made thinking about scan lines in mind, because the colours and shapes of textures had to be made a specific way so the TVs of those years would display the intended image. They couldn't just create raw images, they had to think how scanlines would affect the ending result.
I just saw a comparison betwen 2 screens of Breath of Fire 2, where there's this big green eye with a red iris in the middle, and you can't tell what's the rest of the picture, but when you watch the very same moment through a CRT TV (or a very very good CRT shader on emulators) the picture changes dramatically. You can see that the eye is surrounded by some reptile skin, because each raw pixel changes in the final form when using those TVs.
The transparent effect of lights, waterfalls and (why not) transparent pieces of clothes, like silk cloth were made intercalating pixels from that effect and the background. If you don't follow me, imagine a big chess board with hundreds of black and white squares. That's how those things look raw in the game. But when CRTs come into the game, they stop looking like that and they smooth so great that it looks like a normal transparency. Back then that's how these things were made. You couldn't just create a transparent layer. There were fully coloured pixels and not coloured pixels, but there was no middle point.
You can watch this RUclips video called "The 30 Most Mind-Blowing Games Examples of Retro Pixel Art" to check it yourselves. Scanlines are not just a retro effect, they really change how the game looks in a good way. The intended way.
I was going nuts trying to pin down the background music the whole video until you showed Metal Slug footage and eased my torment. I feel PS2 games really benefit from having scan lines. The image is so muddy on modern TV's but really pops on a nice CRT.
I'm more of a *_dot-matrix_* type of gamer.
It's just so fascinating to me to play games on a display typically designed for scientific *_calculators._*
Even though I've never had a preference for scanlines when playing older games I did find it helped me achieve the right colour balance when using an OSSC so I do always have them enabled. then there's the matter of intensity. In the end I think scanlines are a personal preference and I wouldn't call someone else's retro gaming experience invalid for not using or even liking scanlines. there's a strange amount of eletism online when it comes to crt's and scanlines.
Oh scan lines are so mouth watering!! I love CRTs!!
I can't play retro games without scan lines. It amazes me how people don't get how essential they are to a sharp picture on retro games.When I see sharp pixels I want to scream. That's not what the games looked like.
@@alexojideagu totally agree!
@@alexojideagu They aren't even slightly essential.
I play SNES on TVs form the 90s and TVs from 2020. Zero difference. Equally functional. Except now I can actually move my TV without pulling a back muscle.
@@Synathidy Functional but ugly as hell on LCD screens without filters. I refuse to play 2D retro games on any LCD device without filters.
I love scanlines, I have gameplays with scanlines in HD... Nice video, really interesting... :)
Thank you! Glad you liked it :)
I love scanlines, but real CRTs are the only way (presently) to do them justice, imo. I've been deep down the rabbit hole of using resource-heavy, multipass custom CRT shaders on modern 4k HDR displays to almost-perfectly represent the geometry and appearance of classic gaming with true scanlines on a *still* image. But, the moment gameplay begins and the image moves, the illusion falls apart completely. There is nothing one can do with a modern display using "sample & hold" technology to mimic the way a CRT appears when in motion (no motion blur or ghosting whatsoever). I pray for better display technology to arrive one day, because my CRT sadly won't last forever.
Yeah, and I find that there's also a certain depth to the image distinct to CRTs as well. It's hard to explain, but it feels like the picture sits back into the screen a little more.
Yeah I agree. I think NES games with scanlines can look beautiful even on a modern OLED 4K screen. However it's really only when the image is still. The image gets blurred and you can tell the scanlines are software when there is motion.
That unveiling of the Sony Trinitron needed an angelic choir sound effect thrown in
hahaha all hail the CRTs on this channel
if you have a 1440p or 4k tv you can use a crt shader like crt royale nttsc to create a look similar to crt but the emulator need to report the correct resolution for proper scan lines.
I think scanlines in addition to being suitable for old games because they look like an old CRT TV, they hypnotize because they unconsciously look like the fabric of an oil painting canvas.
One more thing, some games have beautiful pixel art that you really don’t want to ruin with scan lines or filters... Batman: return of the joker is beautiful with crisp pixels! Kind of like looking at shovel knight! Zelda 1, the 2d Dreamcast fighters...Metroid, castlevania... other games do benefit from shaders like the more cartoony ones (Mickey mania, earthworm Jim, Mario world, etc)...
Very informative and well put together video, cheers
Thank you. Glad you enjoyed it.
Pixel art just doesn't look right without scanlines 🤷🏻♂
I've still got my old Sony KV-40XBR800 around (weighing in at 300lbs!), sitting in a spare room with a bunch of old consoles hooked up to it. For me the biggest benefit of a CRT display is the lack of ghosting and latency however. I believe the only flat-panel option these days to get that is with a plasma display, but those have the drawbacks of rapid burn-in and massive power consumption.
Love scanlines when on CRT but find the emulated scanlines kind of annoying.
The thing is that what you'll get from the emulated scanlines really varies too.
Depends on settings. I use Mednafen (for 80's and 90's consoles) and FS-UAE (Amiga) and with scanlines the low-resolution of these machines looks better on LCD. For Mednafen I also enable the Bilinear Interpolation that adds soft blur effect to the image. I tried the both emulators without these filters and it looks too sharp and pixelated. Low resolution and razor sharp image of modern displays makes these old games look painful. Even dithering in pixelart graphics is useless when image is too sharp. Back in 90's many people had consoles plugged into 14" TVs and now when you use a over 20" display these freaking pixels get huge when image gets streteched.
As I'm doing a post-graduat in AI this year I'm thinking of implementing a super-resolution neural net for retro games. This would allow the neural net to fill in the missing details in the pixel art as it 'may' have been intended by the artist. In theory this sound simple, but in practice very hard to do.
6:40 Yeah many indie games don't have them but their native resolution is higher than 320x240.
I play on a 4K monitor and retro games from the Mega Drive era have a 12x lower native resolution, so the image is just a blur.
My only problem is that most of the time scanlines are made really poorly and some are great but aren't available for many systems. My favorite so far is the Sonic Mania CRT filter.
To me scanlines are necessary because to the eye it is decreasing the resolution similarly how they blow up picture sizes for big billboards because the photos would need a 1000 megapixels to stretch that wide, so the completely blurry Dr. Robotnik now looks the way it did on a CRT monitor.
Must have scanlines if 240p.
I can’t stand what happens to the look when put on digital without them. Everything is covered in squares. I’m pretty sure the pixel aspect ratio if way off from a crt also. It just blows me away how different it can look from what it was supposed to.
Personally, I'll take the screen being covered in squares over being covered with black lines any day.
I programmed games 'back in the day' and we all had expensive computer monitors and the artists also had CRT TVs hooked into their computers. This was so they could make the best graphics possible and still have it look good on CRTs, even using the limitations of the CRTs for 'blending' and effects that don't look right when viewed on the source monitor. The graphics HAD to made this way, they didn't LOOK this way on the machines they were developed on. To me, scanlines will always be a downgrade and something only people who don't know/have never seen what the graphics looked like on monitors when artists were creating them enjoy.
Interesting philosophy. I don't quite follow, though. Bear with me for a moment while I level-set:
The blank scanlines on a TV are from the fact that the raster is scanning 240 odd lines, followed by 240 even lines (offset by one.) ... Except that 240p resets that counter so that the 2nd interleaved lines are never drawn, leaving a "hole" between the lines that are. I.e., the blanks are from the 480-line resolution being cut in half. It's almost like CRTs have a "native" resolution, but it's an artifact of the beam spot size vs. the phosphor / grille and its inherent resolution (as in, ability to resolve detail), and not "pixels" per se.
On a CRT (computer) monitor, it depends on the resolution being driven by the video card, and dot pitch of the screen. If you look at a DOS PC running on an SVGA monitor, for example, you'll see "scanlines" as well. That's from the old 25-line text mode having an effective resolution of 720x400 (80x25 characters, with a 9x16 font), while the screen itself is usually capable of resolving 800x600 or higher. The electron beam can only be one fixed size, so if it's small enough to resolve detail at higher than VGA resolution, it will leave un-scanned phosphor at lower resolution.
(Let's ignore CGA resolutions for now, since we're probably talking more about the early-mid-90s.)
OK, so, that all being the case, the graphic artist would probably either be pixel-doubling (zoom 2x) the artwork to match VGA or higher resolution monitors, or would be using DOS applications running at higher-color VGA resolutions (possibly 320x240 @ 256 colors, for example.)
If the art was pixel-doubled to match the (full-screen) scale you would see on a TV, then there would be no scanlines, but it would be super sharp chunky pixels instead. Is that what you mean as the "not downgraded" way? OTOH, if they were running at common DOS graphic resolutions, then there probably _would_ have been visible scanlines, just as there were in 200/240-line PC games of the time. In the NES, SNES, Genesis era, Windows was not a given, and a lot of work was done in DOS, so either is likely.
Either way, there would NOT be as much color blending from low-bandwidth composite or RF video, though, so no masked dithering or fake transparency. It would be very much equivalent to using a professional-class CRT TV with RGB input instead.
I like CRT scanlines, but on my HDTV, not so much with my setup. I use both a RetroTink 2x-Pro and a 2x-Multi in my setup, but am not a fan of the scanlines they produce.
The simulation of this effect is getting better with 4K displays and better shaders. I like CRTs but I also like the flexibility of playing both raster and vector games on a single display with really good (albeit imperfect) simulation of those old display types. I do find it humorous that you need a decent rig to play a game from 1982 with all the shader bells and whistles cranked up -- 95% of you processing power at least is going to the effects.
I do use them. I'm 37 years old. It was like that. And they're designed for that.
Yeah, never could get to love the scanlines on my OSSC. On my CRT I barely even notice them anyways as it has a slot mask.
That's interesting. I've heard such great things about OSSC
I personally prefer no scanlines for the fullest & brightest picture but for retro games they can sometimes be a necessity based on how the art was drawn. Most older games were not drawn in HD so playing them on an HD display can expose the faults in the original art. This is why I prefer retro consoles which give the option to toggle scanlines since their need is on a game by game basis.
I like classic games on a CRT, but I also like the cleaned up and smoothed look on a newer small flat screen as well, one with a 720p resolution hopefully. Though my older VISIO does a nice job I think
Modern day emulation for retro consoles is so goddamn good that it's not even worth going through this trouble anymore. And with the quality of certain CRT shaders in RetroArch, just hook your computer to your HD TV via HDMI and you're pretty much good to go, granted you scale your games by integer.
The advances in emulation definitely make for a nice alternative.
Funny thing is use them in reshade for all my PC expect if it block only see this happen form game by ubisoft. They help clean image in games when not run at my 1080p native resolution or if I set no AA to game get max fps that i can it mask it very well. Only downside is some game games can get too dark it some areas.
Oh, so you use scanlines for modern games as well?
@@RetroBirdGaming Yes I use scanlines for few reason in modern games if allow.
Basically, scanlines (although most are actually refering to the horizontal black lines) were just tech limitation. In that era (atari, nes, 16 bits, and even 32 bits consoles) were low res consoles. Meaning they render at 240i. Therefore in order to display correctly on a 480i crt (wich was the common horizontal line count for tvs) blacklines were added in between to the actually rastered 240 lines produced by the console.
Meaning that what most call "scanlines" are the black lines that are not rastered in order to not stretch vertically the image sent by the console.
There were other techniques that were quite interesting back in the day like dithering and deinterlacing... but those "scanlines" actually were a limitation of the device sending image data.
So in conclusion... unless for nostalgia playing on an old crt... turning on scanlines on more modern displays just degrades image quality.
Scanlines improve the image quality by a lot. Pixellated 8bit and 16 bit games look like trash. Scanlines break up the blocks. The problem is people today are only seeing poor quality filters on LCD screens and not seeing how much better they make games look. The problem is only a few LCD filters are accurate.
@@alexojideagu i think you are mistaken and probably experiencing a placebo effect.
What you mean "scanlines break up the blocks"?
@@MarianoDevourment Did you watch the video? It's not a placebo effect. Millions of retro fans say the same thing. The Scanlines break up the pixels so the blocky effect of pixels is removed and it gives a sharp defined image.
@@alexojideagu thats placebo effect, this video got it wrong that is why I made the clarification... its more technical but I think I made a good sum up on the subject.
I actually experienced first hand what today is called retro.
I had lived atari onwards, back in the day, with real hardware and crt tvs used back then.
You may like it more... but it was a tech limitation, not a special effect. Developers had this in mind and one solution was to cut the frames into stripes rastering in sequence one row raster, the other black (no raster).
Otherwise the image would be incorrectly be stretched vertically. Even could cause flikering and other undesired glitches.
@@MarianoDevourment We're not talking about the technical aspect, we're talking about how it LOOKS. Without scanlines the pixels look blocky on LCD TVs. Scanlines divide the image horizontally and remove the blocky pixel look. A TV wasn't designed to do that, but it looks much better.
i need use scanlines in pocked consoles ,is possible ?
There isbt a better feeling than playing SF 3rd strike with original bezzels and scanline shaders PERIOD
good ol CRT i still love those old tvs! :)
They're awesome!
@@RetroBirdGaming its also nice to see that others do too! ^^
I rather buy an old CRT for my old retro games because those old games picture quality looked better on a CRT than on a HDTV. Those retro games aren’t built for HDTV. That’s why the picture quality looked ugly on HD.
It’s such a weird thing. I first played retro games or games with scanline options on my 75 inch 4K tv. Didn’t really get the appeal. Now I’m playing all the classic Capcom fighters and Bomberman on Sega Saturn hooked up to an old Sony Trinitron with an RGB 21 pin connection and I have fallen in love.
back then i always adjusted my old ass tv to show me solid colors and get rid of these kind of artifacts, nowadays i can finally play with a cristal-clean image, and yet some people miss all those old artifacts that for me, were distorting the image, damn, its like people missing the hiss from vinyl records
Just to be clear, you're saying that you don't like Scanlines?
@@RetroBirdGaming yep
But are you not talking about the blurriness and distortion that often was on old ass TV. that made it a blurry mess?
Have you ever had a really good CRT “arcade” monitor. That did not have those artifacts but still has scanlines with softened up the image and made it actually look higher resolution and less blocky?
We do not miss the artifacts we miss the “higher” resolution.
FINALLY! Someone who agrees with me! "Crystal-clean" is definitely the right thing to say here if you ask me.
CRT pi shader, makes an excellent work on simulating CRT non pvm, CRT royale too
I use that shader on my Raspberry Pi
What is that Raspberry Pi device you show in the video? Im unfamiliar with it.
It's just a regular Raspberry Pi that I got an unofficial case for.
Just gonna say this:
My friend is convinced that a bit fuzz that goes up the picture is scanlines.
Haha I believe you :)
Retro Bird yeah, my PS2 using the AV cables displays some fuzziness that goes up the picture. Initially I thought it was scanlines as well until recently when I realized that it’s just fuzz and I may just need to replace the cables. Like I said earlier, my friend is convinced that those are scanlines and is trying to get me to use component cables even though I should probably test another AV cable (easier to hook up than components. I don’t have to go behind my TV since I have AV Switchboxes.)
I'm born in 1977 and playing since 1985! ...and I don't prefer at all scaline for even my old system and games!
Scanlines is like canvas for paintings
That's a fun way to think about it!
I wasn't a scan line fan till I tried them out on My MiSTer FPGA and for some games I've tried on the GBA and SNES cores I really like them so it really depends on the game for me
I don't really care about scan lines. I just want the cleanest & neatest graphics possible.
scanlines do make older games look better but man it smashes my eyes after like 5mins, i wasnt really a console gamer when i was a kid (apart from atari 2600) so i think being used to the old pixel DOS games makes no scanlines seem more natural to me
could be the PAL territory thing aswell as i only really remember noticing scanlines at the arcades
There were projectors in addition to CRTs
Scanlines on projector screens?
@@RetroBirdGaming not as far as I know. Of coarse it was possible but I just just referring to the few mentions that CRTs were all we had back then. There was also LCDs and other display technologies
I have a couple of old CRT PC monitors and I use them for retro games on my Windows XP machine. For 2D games I mostly use emulation, but let me tell you.. if you just create exact custom resolution (like 320x224 for Genesis for example) and let emulators switch to them natively you get mega sharp scanlines! Much better that that TV in this video!! the only thing is they can't run at 60hz at such low resolutions so I use 120hz.
Interesting. I've never used CRT PC Monitors.
2:36 game looks cute ngl LOL
What is that even? Is that Krillin from Dragon Ball?
I've always prefered sharp pixels myself. I really like pixel art and wish it had more clarity on CRTs but maybe I just have a bad CRT. I don't like how it looks in videos like this though either. I find that CRTs just kind of blur it together. Like instead of high quality pixel art it's low quality handdrawn art. I definitely think the art was designed around CRTs though considering how much better handheld pixel art ages on and LCD but I still prefer bright, sharp, pixels. Maybe it's because I really like pixel art outside of retro games too.
Scan-lines are beautiful.
Not sure if artist took scanlines into consideration when making games but more so taking a crts ability to soften and blur the image
Well they would work on art either by paper in the early days or by using professional monitors that were much higher quality than what was available to consumers. For early consoles I’d say yes they relied on the CRT to blur and soften the image because most TVs of the time had only RF or maybe composite. Later on during the mid to late 90s much better connections came to consumers in the form of S-video and Component video. Both of these would provide a much better signal and was closer to the pure RGB signal that developers would of used on professional or PC CRTs.
When the artists created the art for the games back then, they were doing with CRT. The reason you have to use the "scanlines" is because on modern TVs/monitors you lose a lot of details and effects that are only noticeable in CRT. So the pixel perfect image ends up looking crap.
I loveeeee me my scan lines that's how I remember it and to appears much better.
And the reason I got my PVM 20M2U
Despite what everybody says about "scanlines" I know I played games on CRTs for years and I didn't see any "scanlines" back then. I don't remember ever seeing "scanlines" until people started recording CRTs with cameras and uploading the footage to RUclips. Meaning: these "scanlines" only show up on a camera, not in person. "CRT filters" only re-create what the screen look like when you record them with cameras.
Scanlines are often hard to notice unless the TV is at least 27" and you're sitting close enough to the TV. So, there's a chance some of us didn't do either of those things growing up.
@@RetroBirdGaming I definitely played on a big screen TV back in the day, and I didn't see prominent black lines like that. In one of my oldest videos, you can see the CRT TV that I used to have. Those black lines simply show up more prominently on camera than they do to the naked eye because of how cameras work with rolling shutters etc. Technology Connections made a video on how he records CRT and adjusts the shutter speed to make scanlines show up more prominently.
The one thing to keep in mind is that "There is no way emulate" is not true at all. But first you do need a screen with a MUCH HIGHER resolution to emulate all the subpixel information. Just having twice the resolution with a black line inbetween is not even remotely approaching it. 4k will for the first time enable something even remotely similar, but real scanline emulation probably needs 8k.
Fun fact, a good scanline filter doesn't look good on a 720P display, and in most cases a 1080P display won't be good enough, you need a 4K display. You also need a beefy processor, or decent video card.
This has the effect of pricing out anyone who still uses a sub 4K display, encouraging them to buy a new display. This also keeps the secondary market of old CRT's alive, so serves an incentive either way .
Is this intended? In my opinion probably not, but the effect is the same. Pressure to buy, to consume.
Personally, I stick to smoothers because I choose to use my 720P disolay until it breaks. I also keep the set around because it has composite and component inputs, and the low resolution of the display means you don't need heavy upscaling even with PS2 level hardware.
What can I say, I'm from a generation who kept their wares for 20-30 years, my first console was an Intellivision and my first TV was a 12 inch tube that literally melted down in front of me in the early 2000's. Keeping up with the Jonses simply means wasting your money.
If you can run scanline filters go for it. I sure wouldn't recommend basing a new purchase around it though.
That's the way we grew up playing the games. Back in the day there was no such thing as having an arcade in your house.
PCSX2 with 4K res, 4:3, and scanlines enabled make these PS2 games look better than ever.
Always scanlines for games that used to be played on CRT´s, oooobviously!
Naturally occurring scanlines are fine. Simulated scanlines are annoying and reek of phony bologna. All that said, I don't miss scanlines on modern displays.
Haha. I've noticed most of my viewers agreeing with you.
I'm nostalgic about how video games looked when they were brand new on arcade monitors... sure, there is a certain nostalgia about revisiting these same games via emulation in school with choppy framerates, missing sound and using keyboard/mouse (instead of the original controls) just because we could... but seeing the games as they were intended to be seen is something special. sure, it would add to the cost of the retro products to add decent scanline support, but very minimal cost for a great benefit. games that originated on the PC are a bit different as most of them were originally displayed without scanlines (barring the 80's era where personal computers using the family television was more common instead of a dedicated vga monitor). seeing modern arcades with pre-2000s video games using led or lcd monitors makes me sad, the games look worse than they did originally, showing flaws that didn't exist. it's a bit like film lovers who insist on widescreen to preserve the original aspect ratio over pan 'n' scan, or insisting on the original B&W vs a modern colorization effort, or silent films at the original framerate with an appropriate soundtrack from the era (as opposed to truly "silent"). it's about preserving the original presentation as closely as possible. in some ways modern tech can improve a presentation. you don't have to see dirt and scratches on a film after watching it a few more times on a dvd. you can play polygonal 3d games with a more stable framerate or play laserdisc games without worrying about the discs failing so often (or forcing a visible pause between scenes). but game preservation is important and part of that is preserving the original experience that made it beloved in the first place
What is the name of that run and gun game you're playing??
That would be Metal Slug 3.
Without scanlines the graphics of old 240p games are actually a little distorted, it can also give the illusion that everything curved is more rounded since your mind fills in the blanks; so it's not all just nostalgia. I like it for everything sprite based, for 3D I don't feel the graphics benefits from it. I like high end consumer TVs better than PVM/BVM, that's the look arcade games had and I'm not looking to get scanlines blacker than that.
Well said. I have a similar preference where those consumer TVs just feel "right" to me.
I strongly dislike scanlines myself. I never noticed them on my TV back in the day, and I have no desire to see them on my lcd. They do nothing for me. They don't make me feel nostalgic. Only grumpy that my picture is darker. I use upscalers on my lcd, and could not comprehend spending money on an upscaler to make my picture better, only to make it worse with scanlines. To some people scanlines look better to them, and thats cool. They're just not for me.
Well this video convinced me of one thing: Never _ever_ play a game with vertical scrolling on a CRT or with scanlines. That platformer shown looked very trippy when it looked like the pattern on the grass was ascending up as the screen scrolled. All the black lines also just make the image appear very dark if you ask me. Then again, I'm the person who claims that Persona 5's UI is only good looking in screenshots because seeing it in motion makes me dizzy, so it seems I'm just the minority.
They don't look like that on a decent CRT. What you're seeing in the video is from scan lines being added from an external source outside of the screen, which despite the claims of this video saying they "look" about as good as what you would see on a Sony PVM monitor, they absolutely do not in motion. At all.
I am indifferent about them. But I do like to use crts for retro games.
Because lots of retro games weren't meant to look with sharp pixels, but smooth as a cartoon from a TV show. It depends of the game. NES Mario Bros and Metroid look better with sharp pixels, but NES Ninja Gaiden look better with the smoothness provided by the scanlines effect
I think modern pixel art games feel off cause there are no scanlines.
But a huge fan of scan lines but I do like crt filters and shaders! Really takes care of low res 3d models on more modern retro consoles from ps1 to ps2/Dreamcast. GameCube does look good without scan lines. Dreamcast can look good without them depending on the game and how far you sit from the display. Sometimes though, I do prefer my clean pixels and turn off shaders! The pixels really bring out the retro look and the fact that shaders are off really boosts performance.
I prefer to play retro games and arcade games on a CRT TV, to me it's more authentic and looks good.
Unfortunately not everyone has a CRT TV laying around, ossc, framemeister, MiSTer and mini consoles will look pretty decent on modern TV'S. Ultimately if you're happy with what you have that's what matters.
I like the way you think. Very open-minded and accepting.
I feel like scanlines seem unnecessary. Yes there are certain games where the artists were aware of the scanlines and used the CRT tv qualities to pump up the image, but they also had no idea their work would one day be run on 1080p+ TV’s and all the brightness and other qualities that brings to the table.
Aside from the transparency effects in like Sonic the Hedgehogs waterfalls, I think the images look great in their pixelated blocky glory.
what game is the last one you're playing there? :-)
A bit late, but here‘s my take:
I don’t like scan lines. I don’t like the look. It might very well have to do with the fact that I’m not American. The European PAL standard had more scanlines which were closer together than with the American NTSC standard. So they weren’t as pronounced at all. In fact, you had to get really close to make them out.
In my teens, I imported American VHS tapes of movies that hadn’t been released yet overseas (before the internet, there sometimes were large gaps between releases). As a consequence, I had a VHS tape recorder which could handle both PAL and NTSC and the American tapes looked a lot worse with their scanlines.
The same is true for games. I get the nostalgia factor for people who grew up with scanlines, but it’s certainly not the way it "has to look". Most of the world didn’t experience said look. It’s the look of a certain kind of CRTs that followed a standard which was already outdated in the 1960s. Other CRTs at the same time didn’t have that look.
Personally, I like the crisp pixelated look that HDTVs give me. The only thing that is slightly annoying is the fact that dithering doesn’t produce the same effect as on a CRT. I mean HD dithering also has a beauty of its own, but it’s not what was originally intended by the programmers.
Unfortunately, I haven’t found a filter which reproduces the original dithering effect to my satisfaction, I guess only the real deal will be sufficient there.
But as I said, I actually like the HD look, so it’s not a deal breaker for me.
On im on both they offer nastaga but the fact they are taken off when emulated I rather see the clean image.
I love true CRT scanlines. I agree it’s part of the look it I hate there emulated scanline look. Here’s something I thought about the other day though. I just got a Sony Trinitron CRT with HDMI. I use it for my mini consoles that output 16:9 aspect ratio because this CRT is 16:9! Mega find! Anyway the question is...since it’s HDMI, but still a CRT, am I getting true scanlines without emulation on a mini console? All I know is the NeoGeo mini got slammed for its look on a HDTV, but on this tv it looks incredible!
Those mini consoles output at 720p, which isn't going to produce true scanlines. However, that's a really interesting setup. If you like how it looks then I wouldn't worry about it too much.
Retro Bird that’s really good to know! It’s the best solution I’ve found, but it’s not like these kind of tvs are easy to come across. My solution before game me less than great results.
@@joshmiller887 Yeah, those TVs are really hard to find. They supposedly have some issues with input lag depending on your setup, but I've never used one myself.
Retro Bird I have heard that as well with the lag. I’ve been hyper conscious of it when I’m playing, and I don’t notice any..that could also be that I don’t have a lot of experience with a lot of these mini console’s original hardware/software. Some I do. Some I don’t. Thanks for all the info!
@@joshmiller887 No problem!
I like scanlines
Do you need a coin holder......no? Its all about the retro feel, nothing its better than hearing the coin going inside, same for scanlines.
All i wanted was a video that shows an old axhool game with scanlines and the same game without.
Zooming in on a game and not showing what it looks like without scanlines isnt helpful.
Love scan lines
Nice!
Lol u threw me off at first with the metal slug music to g&g
I just bought an Arcade 1UP Big Blue, and I find the graphics atrocious...all blocky and pixelated...and to my dismay, no scanlines option on the Big Blue. I'm thinking about getting a Raspberry Pi upgrade. Does anyone know if the Rasperry Pi graphics look better? Any options for scanlines? Any insight on this would be greatly appreciated.
I always turn on scanlines, if I seen them in options (Not emulators)
It would seem to me that there's some science that backs up a less is more approach which would support scan lines. Blizzard entertainment learned after putting starcraft out that when you render small sprites with too much detail you end up with a really muddled image. I bet it has a lot to do with the elements with which the gamer interacts. If the elements are small then scan lines are probably helpful and if the elements are larger scan lines probably are inconsequential.
It would be really nice if we could pin a comment that lists the games shown in this video.
I hear ya. I started doing pinned comments on all my videos eventually (that listed the games played with timestamps). Perhaps at some point I will go back and do pinned comments for some of the older videos that people are still watching.
Will terraria look good with scanlines?
Scan lines make the graphics more detailed looking and less low res blocky looking.