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Cool-retro-term: terminal emulator which mimics look and feel of CRTs

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Re: Cool-retro-term: terminal emulator which mimics look and feel of CRTs

#21
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ghostty already supports shaders and effects like this.

It can only apply shader(s) to the current frame I think. To produce the crt ghosting you'd probably need access to the previous frame (not an expert).

I've tried the shaders in the following repo with ghostty. They definitely work. I ended up keeping a cursor trail shader. https://github.com/0xhckr/ghostty-shaders

Re: Cool-retro-term: terminal emulator which mimics look and feel of CRTs

#23
post #2

People go so overboard on this stuff, the amount of ghosting on the DOS example is insane. I don’t want to spoils anyone’s fun but that’s not really what most screens looked like back then.

if you're talking about cutting edge CRTs, many of the last generation actually beat flat panels for years. Some may still in some aspects.

There were plenty of junk CRTs out there used for text only display with insane levels of persistence and other issues that lead to a very unique appearance. It's also sort of moot at this point. The existing CRTs out there that have this behavior have degraded over the years. No one makes new high persistence CRTs that I am aware of. So it's mostly down to our memory of them.

I actually have a flat panel that has over 2 decades degraded and now has some weird persistence going on.

Re: Cool-retro-term: terminal emulator which mimics look and feel of CRTs

#24
post #9
post #2

People go so overboard on this stuff, the amount of ghosting on the DOS example is insane. I don’t want to spoils anyone’s fun but that’s not really what most screens looked like back then.

depends on how the brightness/contrast was set on the tube. if someone came in to a screen that was off and did not allow it enough time to warm up, it was common to see people adjust these knobs in the mornings. eventually, the tube would warm up, and things would just be too bright.

The single most annoying thing with these old displays was the flicker. Whenever I use one of my real old home computer era monitors it is the only thing that makes it unbearable after a while.

But I'm not surprised they don't go overboard with that in the emulators. They'd probably have to add PSE warnings if they did.

Re: Cool-retro-term: terminal emulator which mimics look and feel of CRTs

#25

Side question, was there a reason early CRT screens were amber? Or was this perhaps maybe downstream of PLATO & the first plasma (and touch) screens being a Friendly Orange Glow? Recommending Friendly Orange Glow (Doer, 2018), btw. Fun read. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545610/the-friendly...

The brain perceives amber as a "bright" color that contrasts well with black, without the headaches that come from staring at white light for hours.

Re: Cool-retro-term: terminal emulator which mimics look and feel of CRTs

#26
post #2

People go so overboard on this stuff, the amount of ghosting on the DOS example is insane. I don’t want to spoils anyone’s fun but that’s not really what most screens looked like back then.

It's almost like a caricature of a CRT. I can see the novelty, but hope that people aren't lead to believe monitors looked like this.

I think what bothers me most is the horizontal line that slowly moves across the screen every few seconds. It's an artifact of recording a CRT on film and doesn't occur when you look at a real monitor...

Re: Cool-retro-term: terminal emulator which mimics look and feel of CRTs

#27

Side question, was there a reason early CRT screens were amber? Or was this perhaps maybe downstream of PLATO & the first plasma (and touch) screens being a Friendly Orange Glow? Recommending Friendly Orange Glow (Doer, 2018), btw. Fun read. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545610/the-friendly...

Amber was fairly unusual. More common to see white or green.

Re: Cool-retro-term: terminal emulator which mimics look and feel of CRTs

#28
post #16

Side question, was there a reason early CRT screens were amber? Or was this perhaps maybe downstream of PLATO & the first plasma (and touch) screens being a Friendly Orange Glow? Recommending Friendly Orange Glow (Doer, 2018), btw. Fun read. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545610/the-friendly...

The color of the screens is related to the phosphor used to coat the back of the screen, which is excited to glow by the electron beam. According to wiki, amber was used as an "eye-friendly" ergonomic color for similar reasons we use blue blocking filters today.

In some cases the color was just a filter in front of a white phosphor screen.

Re: Cool-retro-term: terminal emulator which mimics look and feel of CRTs

#29

Not quite this extreme, but I usually use the old Sun console font in my terminal windows, because I'm an old fart and it makes me happy. Someone at work just the other day looked at my screen and said, "What the heck is wrong with your terminal window???"

do you have a link to download it? or a package name?

Re: Cool-retro-term: terminal emulator which mimics look and feel of CRTs

#30
post #26
post #2

People go so overboard on this stuff, the amount of ghosting on the DOS example is insane. I don’t want to spoils anyone’s fun but that’s not really what most screens looked like back then.

It's almost like a caricature of a CRT. I can see the novelty, but hope that people aren't lead to believe monitors looked like this. I think what bothers me most is the horizontal line that slowly moves across the screen every few seconds. It's an artifact of recording a CRT on film and doesn't occur when you look at a real monitor...

It could happen in home computers connected through the antenna input. I think if power was slightly off the desired frequency this could also happen, but we’d need to test.
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