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Cathode-Retro: A collection of shaders to emulate the display of an NTSC signal

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Re: Cathode-Retro: A collection of shaders to emulate the display of an NTSC signal

#71

Post by kiwijamo »

pdntspa wrote: post #32

I always hated the weird fuzziness, soft lines, and curved image that old TVs imparted on games, it is amazing to me that entire communities have been built up around it. When I started playing games on an emulator and pixels were hard and square and the image was actually flat, I was like YES!!

I had the same experience going switching between CRT and LCD e.g. I disliked playing games on the PlayStation on our CRT TV (using crappy analog RGB input) but loved playing games on my GameBoy Pocket with its crisp LCD screen. Even when LCD TVs came along it was a while before the input became digital and lost all of that analog fuzziness.

Re: Cathode-Retro: A collection of shaders to emulate the display of an NTSC signal

#72

Post by cmpalmer52 »

So when can I load these into my TV and turn my 65” UHD TV into a 25” Curtis Mathis console (mini-bar optional) from 1978?

Seriously, my wife is into Mid-Century Modern - a wood console CRT emulator would be awesome. I may need to set up a machine to connect to the TV. But I’d like to watch streamed shows on it.

Re: Cathode-Retro: A collection of shaders to emulate the display of an NTSC signal

#73

Post by icedchai »

doublepg23 wrote: post #18
karmakaze wrote: post #15

The shadow mask is overly represented. This may work better on a yet even higher resolution display, or perhaps there's an option to reduce the shadow mask effect. The other thing that this emulation can't get right is that phosphor-based displays had more vibrant colors (at lower intensities) than currently popular (IPS) LCD panels. VA panels are better for this.

I was blown away how sharp an Apple ][ display is in person. It’s really hard to get across how cool it looks.

Were you looking at color or black-and-white? I always felt Apple II graphics were pretty meh due to all the color artifacts/fringing on composite monitors (IIgs being the exception, those generally had RGB monitors.)

Re: Cathode-Retro: A collection of shaders to emulate the display of an NTSC signal

#74

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

PumpkinSpice wrote: post #70
bane wrote: post #49

I love the current infatuation with modeling old CRT display systems. Old graphics and videos from the "time before" rely a bit on how those display systems and signals worked in order to make low-color and resolution artifacts look "better" in terms of smoother color gradients and softer edges and diagonals. The shift to modern displays mades everything form that era look blocky and chunky. The thing that makes this…

I'd go a bit further with this claim. Most of what's being done in this space is about inventing new retro aesthetics, not about faithfully approximating how things worked in the 1980s and 1990s. For example, color TVs of that era didn't really have pronounced scanlines. They also didn't have thick, lightly-colored, reflective bezels. I get that it looks cool and makes old games more aesthetically pleasing. But the r…

Arcade machines running 240p definitely had pronounced scanlines.

Re: Cathode-Retro: A collection of shaders to emulate the display of an NTSC signal

#75

Post by doublepg23 »

icedchai wrote: post #73
doublepg23 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was blown away how sharp an Apple ][ display is in person. It’s really hard to get across how cool it looks.

Were you looking at color or black-and-white? I always felt Apple II graphics were pretty meh due to all the color artifacts/fringing on composite monitors (IIgs being the exception, those generally had RGB monitors.)

green-on-black for a ][+ is what I have, but should be getting a recapped ][e model

Re: Cathode-Retro: A collection of shaders to emulate the display of an NTSC signal

#76

Post by matheusmoreira »

layer8 wrote: post #12

They should show comparison photos like the ones from https://wackoid.com/game/10-pictures-that-show-why-crt-tvs-a... . Additionally, LCD and OLED have their own subpixel artifacts, so I wonder if that has to/can be compensated for when displaying a CRT emulation.

Sonic games also have plenty of CRT waterfalls:

https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/a/167807

Re: Cathode-Retro: A collection of shaders to emulate the display of an NTSC signal

#77

Post by c-hendricks »

pdntspa wrote: post #43
c-hendricks wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting, because artists on some games accounted for the fuzziness and used it to their advantage. You should play them how you want of course, but for something like Gameboy emulation I absolutely turn on shaders to avoid the nasty black-and-white.

Is a shader really needed just to get the correct color palette? That should be a simple LUT

And a LUT is involved, but then you've got grid lines, response times, and contrast.

Re: Cathode-Retro: A collection of shaders to emulate the display of an NTSC signal

#78

Post by c-hendricks »

crazygringo wrote: post #58
c-hendricks wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting, because artists on some games accounted for the fuzziness and used it to their advantage. You should play them how you want of course, but for something like Gameboy emulation I absolutely turn on shaders to avoid the nasty black-and-white.

> because artists on some games accounted for the fuzziness and used it to their advantage Everybody repeats this, but I've honestly never been convinced. Different screens and different systems had different types of different degrees of fuzziness. Designing for it seems like it would be impossible. I've never once seen an example of pixel art that looked good crisp and bad fuzzy, and then was somehow modified in a…

It doesn't make sense that people designed for the end result to be softer?

Re: Cathode-Retro: A collection of shaders to emulate the display of an NTSC signal

#79

Post by masswerk »

crazygringo wrote: post #29
masswerk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mind that CRTs had a viewing distance, much like the subject point in classic painting. E.g., at this distance, dithering tended to blend into a solid tint on common consumer CRTs. (The granularity of a shadow mask is generally smaller than that of a pixel/PEL, so there are actually two kinds of rasterization involved, which helps blending. The effect also depends on the shape of the mask, as in round, oval, square h…

> Regarding CRT intensities, mind that a CRT set up for daylight viewing would give you headaches when viewed in the dark, which is hard to achieve with a modern display panel. Are you suggesting CRT's were brighter than modern LCD screens? That's not the case at all. Average consumer CRT's were 100 nits, the super-bright ones in the 2000's around 200 nits. While your cheapest MacBook is 400 nits, and iPhones have be…

I guess, you cant substitute experience by technical description (quite obviously).

Re: Cathode-Retro: A collection of shaders to emulate the display of an NTSC signal

#80

Post by low_tech_love »

bane wrote: post #49

I love the current infatuation with modeling old CRT display systems. Old graphics and videos from the "time before" rely a bit on how those display systems and signals worked in order to make low-color and resolution artifacts look "better" in terms of smoother color gradients and softer edges and diagonals. The shift to modern displays mades everything form that era look blocky and chunky. The thing that makes this…

One side-effect of this is that every time I fire up RetroArch to play a game I spend half an hour looking through every shader and still end up undecided…!
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