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People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

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Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#41

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

dangson wrote: post #6
trenchpilgrim wrote: post #2

Some images to demonstrate how retro games look on CRT vs unfiltered on a modern display: https://x.com/ruuupu1 https://old.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/owdtpu/thats_why... https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/anwgxf/here_is_an_e... Modern emulators have post-processing filters to simulate the look, which is great. But it's not quite the same as the real thing.

This helps validate my memories of SNES and PS1 games looking so much better when I was a kid than on an emulator today.

I played SNES and PS1 games on a CRT. I played them on LCD and OLED TVs. I can’t tell the difference.

I mean I can tell that hdmi cables never introduce chromatic abberation something which was quite common on these old TVs when the SCART cables I used to use got old and I never had a LCD screen catch fire something which happened to me twice with aging CRT screens.

I really don’t get the nostalgia or whatever it is called when some of the people who think it was better then weren’t born at the time.

Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#42

Post by Waterluvian »

markdown wrote: post #40
asdff wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about the smell?

You gotta give it a few slaps too, when the image isn't very clear.

Pre-Gameboy, when I was a child, my grandfather had a television— the kind that was furniture. Sometimes it would eschew modern trappings like colour and v-sync, and I would employ my Classical Vaudevillian training to set it straight with a wallop.

Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#43

Post by voldacar »

WalterBright wrote: post #37

Those aren't old TVs. When I was a kid, I'd go to the TV repair shops and take old "unrepairable" vacuum tube TVs (no transistors!) off their hands. At home I tried to fix them. I had no idea how to fix them. But I had a lot of fun trying. One of the fun things was to randomly swap around the vacuum tubes and see what would happen. Very entertaining! I used to have a box full of scavenged tubes. Sadly, I eventually t…

Most TV tubes aren't too valuable. Now if your TV was made by telefunken, that might be a different story

Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#44

Post by auselen »

retrac wrote: post #23

I think some younger people might have never really seen a CRT. And they're positively rare now. I encountered a CRT TV in the hospital waiting room recently and was a bit startled to see one. So for those only passingly familiar, if you get the opportunity, spend a bit of time experimenting with it visually. Jiggle your eyes, look away suddenly, and then back, and try oblique angles. Maybe you'll see what they mean…

I might miss visual aspects of CRTs, but I mean most of them had a coil sound or some kind of cracking sound. May be as TVs, screens for gaming consoles they were fun, but as monitors I don’t miss the heat burning my face.

Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#45

Post by anthk »

dangson wrote: post #6
trenchpilgrim wrote: post #2

Some images to demonstrate how retro games look on CRT vs unfiltered on a modern display: https://x.com/ruuupu1 https://old.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/owdtpu/thats_why... https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/anwgxf/here_is_an_e... Modern emulators have post-processing filters to simulate the look, which is great. But it's not quite the same as the real thing.

This helps validate my memories of SNES and PS1 games looking so much better when I was a kid than on an emulator today.

With 25% scanlines on PC CRT's they looked pretty close to TV's. On LCD's, forget it. Not even close, even with CRT filters.

Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#46

Post by Dylan16807 »

emh68 wrote: post #15

Sometimes I think about the bizarre path computer technology took. For instance, long-term storage. It would stand to reason that we'd invent some kind of big electrical array, and that's the best we could hope for. But hard drive technology (which relies on crazy materials technology for the platter and magnets, crazy high-precision encoders, and crazy physics like floating a tiny spring over the air bubble created…

> The switch to LCDs/LEDs was in a lot of ways a step back. Sure, we don't have huge 40lb boxes on our desks, but we lost the ultra-fast refresh rate enabled by the electron beam, not to mention the internal glow that made computers magical (maybe I'm just an old fuddy-duddy, like people in the 80s who swore that vinyl records "sounded better").

CRTs don't have particularly good refresh rates. There is very little delay on the output scan, but 99% of the time the delays built into rendering make that irrelevant compared to fast screens using other technologies. And the time between scans doesn't go very low.

I have no idea what you mean by internal glow.

Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#47

Post by Dylan16807 »

M95D wrote: post #31
nomel wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most modern displays are calibrated, to some reasonable level, and can easily accommodate the very limited gamut of an old CRT, especially anything supporting HDR10. I suspect this is more of "they need to be fudged so they're wrong" more than anything.

I don't think old CRT gramut is "very limited". Only plasma screens were as good.

Plasma has great contrast and a slightly wider gamut than a CRT. Neither one have particularly good gamuts unless you're comparing to sRGB. Many current screens can do much better.

Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#48

Post by gadders »

Waterluvian wrote: post #28
retrac wrote: post #23

I think some younger people might have never really seen a CRT. And they're positively rare now. I encountered a CRT TV in the hospital waiting room recently and was a bit startled to see one. So for those only passingly familiar, if you get the opportunity, spend a bit of time experimenting with it visually. Jiggle your eyes, look away suddenly, and then back, and try oblique angles. Maybe you'll see what they mean…

Also don’t forget to rub your palm across the screen to collect the fuzzies that built up.

Put a magnet by the screen as well.

Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#49

Post by everdrive »

retrac wrote: post #23

I think some younger people might have never really seen a CRT. And they're positively rare now. I encountered a CRT TV in the hospital waiting room recently and was a bit startled to see one. So for those only passingly familiar, if you get the opportunity, spend a bit of time experimenting with it visually. Jiggle your eyes, look away suddenly, and then back, and try oblique angles. Maybe you'll see what they mean…

Once we lost CRTs we began this insane race for all these duct tape solutions; all sorts of anti-aliasing, lighting, etc, and a resolution race that can only be described as pathological. Try modern games in low resolution with minimal effects on a CRT. You'll be surprised how much better they look, but also how much better they run; you don't need such a powerful rig when you turn your graphical effects down when using a CRT.

Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#50

Post by speeder »

everdrive wrote: post #49
retrac wrote: post #23

I think some younger people might have never really seen a CRT. And they're positively rare now. I encountered a CRT TV in the hospital waiting room recently and was a bit startled to see one. So for those only passingly familiar, if you get the opportunity, spend a bit of time experimenting with it visually. Jiggle your eyes, look away suddenly, and then back, and try oblique angles. Maybe you'll see what they mean…

Once we lost CRTs we began this insane race for all these duct tape solutions; all sorts of anti-aliasing, lighting, etc, and a resolution race that can only be described as pathological. Try modern games in low resolution with minimal effects on a CRT. You'll be surprised how much better they look, but also how much better they run; you don't need such a powerful rig when you turn your graphical effects down when us…

I got very sad when my CRT monitor died. I was using a Radeon RX 380X, part of the reason is that it was one of the few cards to still have analog output.

Then I went and played lots of recent games in lower resolution, but could turn on lots of expensive effects even with such underpowered card, because I could do low-res with anti-alias disabled and no scaling and have decent results.

But true pleasure was playing for example Crypt of Necrodancer on that screen, the game felt so easy. I eventually stopped playing after that screen died, I could never nail the timing anymore on modern screens, the response time is not the same.

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