… Dracula’s eyes still look like two red pixels. I guess my crt isn’t crt enough. Maybe if I smear some Vaseline all over it.
But in all seriousness, still not sure how I feel. Something seems different about the visuals, and it is nostalgic. I might try to change up my setup to use it as a second display, but I think if I had fallen for the hype and spent $100+ on one of these, I would have been very disappointed.
Today’s crt filters on modern displays is more than enough for fun effects, but I would never characterize any of this as objective improvements.
You need an interlaced TV. Monitors are too sharp, and also progressive scan.
Also, there is a difference in signal output clarity from RCA/SVideo compared to VGA/DVI.
PC VGA monitors were always sharper than CRT TVs. Even back in the day the pixels on lower-resolution games were clearly-distinguishable squares. You had to get up to 640x480 or so for blending to start happening.
The blending effect people talk about with old console games happened on TVs, not monitors, even if the monitors were CRTs.
I’m no expert, but weren’t old monitors much different than old tvs? I’m not sure how old of a monitor you got, but I remember all of my computers having very crisp pixels.
Resolution matters , en emulator may still be running at 640x480 vs the 240i a tv would have had
Symphony of the Night ran in the PS1’s 256x240 resolution which is well within the capabilities of even the dinkiest CRT computer monitor to render as discrete square pixels. Remember that it was designed to be played on a television, not a computer monitor, which would have been significantly muddier especially in the horizontal resolution department.
Funny enough, I was playing most of these games on emulators even back in the late 90s and early 2000s since I didn’t have a console, so the CRT computer monitor look is the ultimate in nostalgia for me, even for 8/16-bit games.
A lot of the artifacts on old CRTs were actually from the connection. There’s supposedly a big difference between the looks of Composite vs S-Video vs VGA, so that’s something you could play around with.
Early PC video cards had a composite video output, and clever programmers have learned to control the artifacts to produce more colors than intended. 8088 MPH by Hornet, CRTC, and DESiRE gets 1024 colors out of a 1981 IBM Color Graphics Adapter… that the 16-color CGA standard was named after. 😂
PAL consoles can often output RGB just because SCART existed, with NTSC versions of the same consoles only having S-video as the best connection without modification.
Edit: S-video has fewer artifacts than composite, but that ruins some effects like turning the “transparency” of water in Sonic the Hedgehog into a checkerboard. The checkerboard was always there, but the blurring of composite made it appear to just be darker shades of the colors behind it (dithering). The illusion of more colors was important for Sega’s 512-color Mega Drive when Nintendo’s SNES had a full 16-bit palette of over 32,000 colors and “real transparency” (selectively replacing pixels with a lighter/darker shade).
Yeah, size and weight aside I feel like the CRTs I’ve used in the past weren’t close to the quality of the ones people show on ‘CRTs are amazing’ videos.
I have no idea if it actually works for pixel effects, but the only CRT filter I like is triangular filter (offset rows gives honeycomb-ish pattern rather than lines/screen-door effect). Which would likely also make finding a CRT I actually like harder too.
EDIT: And I could take-or-leave the filter still (except for when it clashes with CRT effects in games), though I do like what it does for 2D (UI elements and pre-rendered stuff) plus toning down the brightness on full-white screens (like intros/logos especially).
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