I’ve been dying for a video like this for a while and this was awesome!! I really like how you formatted and talked about all the smaller details and intricacies. Awesome video!!
It really is a huge difference Playing something like Super Nintendo or Saturn games on a CRT vs a flatscreen really feels natural. It’s a warm feeling I guess I describe it as, Earthbound on a TV thru S video is immaculate 👌✨
I think the CRT effect on old pixel art games is the reason why you hear people say "I remember it looking way better when I was younger" when they try the same game again but on modern screens or emulated.
At least people are more likely to be playing them on a 4K TV instead of a 1080P TV. Whoever decided on that resolution to become a standard should be slapped.
@@shadesoftime 720 and 1080 are bad cuz they aren't a multiple of 240 and 480. 240 doubles into 480 nicely, but 480 doubles into 960. If you play, say, 480 content on a 1080 display, then it'll be blurry, becuz going past 960, you've got 120 more pixels to duplicate. But that means 120 pixels get duplicated while 360 pixels don't. If you play a DVD on a computer with a 1080 display, then try comparing full-screen and a x2 mode. Most video players have that feature.
@@Schwarzornyeah we got stuck with 16:9 when 16:10 was so much better. Today we should be using 21:9 at least, but somehow we still have 16:9 and 1080p as the standard. 4k is how I assumed 1080p was going to look when I was growing up back in the day, but sadly 1080p looks bad unless it’s a small screen.
You are right about the "raw pixel look" being wrong. Those games were not designed for "raw pixel." They were designed for the CRT to blend those pixels.
I still appreciate it, though. Both look nice to me. But I've enjoyed pixel art for years. So seeing the dithering techniques "wrong" is something I can still appreciate.
@@wj11jam78 Furthermore, this video is really a bunch of bullshit because it shows sprites that are maybe two inches wide on an actual screen enormously blown up as if they were taking up half the screen. "Look, it's so blocky!" Yeah right. Sitting a reasonable distance from a screen, you don't see Chrono's face blown up like a gigantic poster. You see a little square taking up like 1/16th of the screen which the resolution of your eyesight resolves into something more like a picture, instead of a bunch of blocky pixels. No one plays video games with a microscope.
@@Margatroidbro, they are blown up to showcase the differences in the technology. Your retort is an over exaggerated strawman. Not to mention your argument is simply not true. You would absolutely be able to notice a difference between pixels on an LED and CRT. Our eyes are more sensitive than any sensor ever created. We can easily notice the difference between a blended image and a sharpened one. If I took a photo of something and increased the sharpness in Photoshop or Lightroom by crunching together the blended edges you can easily tell a difference when the photos are placed side by side. It’s the exact same principle in effect here. Now does that difference matter to most people playing games? Not really. But saying it’s not noticeable is simply false. It’s easy to notice in person and thus also easy to have a preference to which look you prefer.
A lot of pixel art is made to utilize CRTs "blurriness". Not all, but generally console stuff is. Computer games are a bit more tricky, since computers often used sharper displays. But they're all over the place. A CGI full colour image on a standard TV is not a sharp image. And the output of an Amiga could be tailored in mind towards all sorts of displays. If one has the option, test out several different display options and go with what you like best. Most do not have that option, however. Since, who of us collect several different TVs and old computer monitors just to play our games on. >_> EDIT: Oh, and if you're just picking up one display device, just buy something as similar as what you had back in the day. At least if you have fond memories of the look of the games back then. Then it should not look that off. Unlike what the Raw Pixel Look can give you.
I feel like one thing you've glossed over in the raw pixel argument, is that the artists were using CRT monitors when making them. Back in the day, CRTs were all there was. It wasn't just TVs that used CRTs, computer monitors used them too. So when the artists were "working with the raw pixels" they were doing it on a CRT monitor. The artists themselves may have never seen what we call the "raw pixel look" when they were making it.
i dunno. when emulated the games look pretty good. some of the details on the sprite work probably wouldnt have even been visible on old ass crts. maybe the dev tools and tech was more advanced than we think?
To be fair: CRT Monitors are several times more sharp than CRT TV sets with composite, and they likely had a zoom feature on their art program. Still a good point, though
Ah, you've never seen the CRT Monitor then. They were actually not that bad. CRT might not have the "pixels" in common sense, as it is an analog device. But if we are talking about COLOR CRTs, it does have a patterned masking device inside, either shadow mask or aperture grille (with matching luminophore sheet at glass). Masking devices produces matrix of differently colored dots on screen surface not unlike of subpixels on LCD display and if you set up horizontal line resolution, number of lines and blanking offsets to values specified in display datasheet, it produced an image where logical pixels matched device pattern to produce pixel-perfect rendering. Only monochrome CRTs has a uniform coating without breaks. Image on CRT Monitor doesn't shift up and down (progressive scan), display can be driven up to 200Hz (almost any could output ~100Hz), has hard physical pixels and full-range color gamut (not available in most LCDs even now). Supports only component video signal though, through D-SUB 15 usually, and the eye strain is real deal, unlike most of current day fairy tales. You can spend 20 hours behind LCD quite comfortably and then be ready to gouge your eyes after 2 hours staring in CRT. Also: common NES game has a resolution of 240x240 pixels - fits in one(!) NTSC field. LCD monitors started to appear in 90s and quickly replaced CRTs in designers work (as they are more comfortable to work with + studios had money on expensive wide gamut LCDs).
@@zetash1be441 actually my family had one when I was a kid in the 90's. I may remember it wrong since I was a kid at the time, but I remember it being clearer than the TV, but certainly fuzzier than modern screens.
There's a youtuber called Shot97, and he specializes in showcasing/playing classic games on his CRT TV, for exactly the reasons described in this video. He also creates really detailed corresponding reviews with screenshots and even lil gifs on a small blog for his videos. I'd highly recommend people to check his stuff out. It's like a little secret corner store in TH-cam and genuinely such a cool channel. The guy is passionate. And the way he literally records the view of the CRT TV, is really comforting.
Thank you for actually citing the model numbers of products you show. TVs like all things vary massively in quality from one brand to the next, even from one product line to another within the same company.
@@michaelbuckers Did you watch the video? In the 90s, there was no such thing as pixel art. The pixels were arranged in such a way that they really looked like a gradient, or light and shadow. The games did look much better than when we put them on an LED TV! That's a fact! One problem I see is that it's not possible to film a CRT TV; the image doesn't convey reality. You have to watch it live to see the real quality.
@@marcuscook5145 I agree with you here. PS1 3D games were already ugly, even as a kid I thought so. But games with 2D sprites were very beautiful. This was the only generation change that made games uglier in general, but because it was 3D we thought it was awesome!
Dude, over here in Europe most CRTs of the early 2000s did support RGB cables. We also had 100hz TVs which got rid of the flicker. Motion clarity was pristine.
SCART goes back to 1980, but back then it was on high end sets mostly. I've a true beauty Philips from 1984 with 2x SCART. But from 1990 basically every TV in Europe left the factory with at least a single RGB scart. What became common around 1995 is a second SCART with S-video or a separate front S-video port. Be carefull with 100Hz sets. They disable light guns, and some do weird things to 60Hz NTSC material.
Even if motion clarity looks better than LCDs, 100Hz TVs still lose a ton of motion clarity compared to 50Hz/60Hz TVs by showing each frame twice, so 60Hz is still superior as it has reduced whine and flicker without needing the bandaid fix of 100Hz which reduces motion clarity and breaks lightgun compatibility; to top it all off 100Hz TVs usually have digital processing Of course, use what you want; that's the point of the hobby. But 100Hz TVs do objectively suffer in quite a few areas
Games that use pre-rendered graphics like Donkey Kong Country 2 and Killer Instinct look surreal on a CRT TV, it really gives the illusion of a game that uses 3D models, but on an emulator or on a modern TV the illusion simply breaks because you can clearly see the pixels and that everything there is just 2D sprites.
I was into 3d graphic back then, and I swear donkey Kong country 1 2 3 were indistinguishable from a Pixar movie on a Sony trinitron, it was jaw dropping. Emulating them without shaders sucks -_- Prerendered background games have the same problem (ff7 8 9, resident evil 1 2 3, and so on), lately I muself found some nice mix with the shaders found in RetroArch: scanline/dot is a must (I prefer dot for my taste), kawase-glow for the pixel bleeding effect (it works wonders by itself, although I would like to be able to tone it down a little), and some light upscale blur filtering, hqx or bzr are overkill imho, although fsr has positively impressed me, otherwise just bicub. I then found an ntsc filter still in retroarch that seem to do all of the above by itself, but it was too dark and the green seems colorless... I couldn' fix it. If anyone has its own mix please post it :)
People also often forget that PC monitors were CRT too in the era where CRT TV's were prevalent. So, yes, the game designers back in the day, saw the graphics with scanlines too on CRT PC monitors and designed the sprites with consideration for what it looks like when scaled to gameplay size. So, yes, those graphics at that time, were deisnged with scanlines look in mind. This was still going on quite a while into the PS2 Era. I have receipts! Just google the 'Making of Silent Hill 2 - HQ' and you can see in the office shots ( at 1: 57 for instance) that even with development of SH2, the devs were still using CRT monitors and CRT monitors have scanlines. So even those early polygon games, were designed with the scanlines rendered look in mind. Desinging game graphics with scanlines in mind went well into the PS2 era. Or 'PlayStation Rewind: Final Fantasy X-2 Behind the Scenes', just a short snippet on 08: 53. Basically, from the moment the devs changed to LCD screens with no scanlines. There was this transition to designing graphics based on the new screen medium But of course this went in a different pace in different places around the world. This was of course just a technology of it's time. And I can't imagine anyone getting angry over viewing the content on new technology. If someone prefers one over the other sure. I find it more an interesting irony, that most modern 'retro looking videogames' adopt that raw pixel look. But back then people never saw the graphics like the raw pixel look. So there's a bit of kitsch in that retro design/look there, that is actually not accurate for it's time its suppose to represent. But I can still enjoy the (faux) pixel art designed games. Just that, if you know, you know. And overtime, some people just think the games used to look like the raw pixel style. I don't blame them either, you start your eulator on your phone or pc in standard mode, and the supposedly original game shows you the raw pixels because we don't use CRT monitors/TVs anymore. A thing of it's time, because of the technology then.
You may have been disappointed by that first 13" CRT, but that is how most people experienced gaming back then. THAT is the true, authentic experience! People weren't gaming back then on expensive studio monitors.
i still play on me old 13 inch samsung crt its good enought for me since i dont have much space. and i like lightgun games so crt is a must even small one.
@@Ephicx depends on country and how rich you were yes 20 inches were common yet some people had secound smaller tv. Common practice in 2000s when crt were still used but cheaper.
@@Ephicx Not when you were 8 years old, and your parents bought you a cheap CRT for your room. I spent my entire childhood gaming on a cheap, 13" CRT, and I image that goes for a LOT of other people.
not if you had a shitty TV to play on with only RF connection. Playing n64 through a RF adapter made things look pretty bad. Seeing a large TV that finally had at least composite was insanely good by comparison.
@@scikoolaid my TV had composite/av as well as RF my TV was a 1981 Pioneer front projection 60" TV which had 3 RF inputs, 4 composite inputs, composite audio input and output and 2 power plugs for your VCR or whatever built into the unit. It was the best TV I ever had IMO.
NO THEY DIDNT, what are you on about!!! CRT’s can probably do up to 480i or p, modern tv’s can do literally up to 1080p for retro consoles with up scaling tools like the mclassic.
@@jakeplayzyt5220 Yes they did and do, if you buy a CRT TV. Resolution isn't everything and extreme sharpness is detrimental for a game that runs at 320x240 I don't care how good your upscaler is.
Yet, most consoles came with a simple component to SCART adapter. You needed special cables that would transmit the RGB signals from the video out to the TV. The SNES couldn't do rgb, only component and RF, the n64 could do component and s-video, only the GameCube and the Wii could do RGB. Very few TVs had S-Video, and if they had, they were the high price models, something the parents wouldn't allow their children to play on with their "toy". Like other people already commented, for the proper retro experience, you need a small TV and component. Very few gamers could afford expensive and big TVs
@@tannenfreund87 they were composite to scart plugs. Component SCART does exist and can transfer YPbPr signal, but it was only really a thing in Australia where component and SCART were there alongside each other
It's very much a case by case thing. Some game's artists blatantly optimized around Composite, like Sonic 1, Crash Bandicoot, or Earthworm Jim, the difference is incredibly dramatic. Other artists just drew the art on an RBG monitor and never cared beyond that. And a game will look better or worse on RGB, depending on whether the artists exploited Composite as a medium. A fairly easy way, IMO, to identify whether or not a game was being optimized for CRT, is whether or not circles and squares are actually circles or squares. Super Mario World, is not optimized for the resolution it would be displayed on; every square is a rectangle, every circle is an oval. If they didn't optimize for resolution, they definitely didn't optimize for Composite. Whereas the skeleton's shield at 27:22 becomes perfectly circular on CRT, and so whatever game that sprite is from is definitely optimized for CRT. Note this argument also works for Arcade games, as games like Donkey Kong have actual circles in them, in DK's case, the barrels.
I never really got the hype behind CRTs. I could see why competitive scenes liked them, with their better input lag and such. But this video really changed my mind. I came into it expecting to watch maybe 10 minutes before I got bored, but the very detailed and well-supported way you laid out your arguments really sucked me in, and before I knew it the video was over. Thanks for this!
Hey, to be fair even us growing up in the 90s with these TVs everywhere we kind of took them for granted because most of the time the smaller TVs didn’t look that good, most of us is Kids couldn’t afford the larger or higher quality CRT’s because they weighed a ton, and cost a lot. We were all waiting for LCDs and lighter flatscreen TVs to come out just so you didn’t have to have a 200+ pound box sitting in your house that you could barely move without 2 to 3 people. But now that we’ve had 20 years of bad LCD TVs to deal with, and are now only getting OLED that compared to the image quality that Good CRT’s had, we’re looking back and appreciating what we did have. If you really want the best though try to find a good Sony Trinitron or something a person is throwing away, or a good CRT monitor for Pc’s and hook up with what you can. I still miss playing older 3D pc games like Doom 3, Half life 1 and 2, Dawn of War 1, on a real CRT monitor, they weighed a lot but looked so incredibly good. We wanted larger screens but that made the weight of CRT monitors and their size way too high, so we were stuck with tiny screens. At least now you can get a large OLED that looks great too and does not weigh much at all. But I still have 3 CRT’s I found in my basement, the 32 inch 160 pound Sony Trinitron is what I use to play old game systems because they look and feel so good to play on. If you have the means try to get one for free or cheap. It took me about 3 years to find what I wanted but it is nostalgic and nice to watch things on a CRT again. The image feels different because it has actual depth, it’s not just a flat panel with lights, it’s real glass with an image that comes through a screen, and it has a glow that OLED’s are now finally bringing back that gives a feeling of life LCD’s just didn’t have. We had LCD’s back in the 90’s and early 2000’s but they sucked and were only used for tiny screens and handheld gaming devices (and they always looked worse in comparison).
@@ChristopherAndersonPirate P'reciate the suggestions, if I decide to pick one up in the future I'll keep your advice in mind. I grew up in the 00s, playing my PS2 mostly on a tiny ~12" screen CRT in my bedroom. Thing's long gone by now, so I have no idea what it was. I do remember, though, being somewhat disappointed at how Kingdom Hearts 2 looked on our big flatscreen when I went back to play it one day. I'd chalked it up to my rose-tinted glasses, but who knows now...
Unfortunately this happened late enough in the life cycle of CRTs that a not significant amount of aperture grille CRTs were produced. RPTV wasn't far off. In reality it's comparatively difficult to find an aperture grille TV in good working order that isn't a Sony.
Tridot has benefits. For example horizontal scrolling looks nicer on tridot, as you can experience weird moiré on sony tubes as vertical lines never follow the grill lines perfectly. Also 80 character text on home computers looks superior on tridot. On Trinitron these can be difficult to read as many vertical letter elements get lost in a blue or red vertical phosphor line.
I was born in 1983 in germany. As far back I can remember our TVs always had a RBG port (or SCART how we call it here) for VHS, DVD or consoles. Didn't know that this wasn't a big thing in the US. Great video :)
My dear, dear dude, This was the single greatest, most comprehensive video I've ever watched on CRT TVs, retro games, and everything in between. You somehow helped me learn something new even though I already understood the theoretical aspects of everything. Like, you actually showed how 480i works compared to 240p and why flickering exists. You covered so many things that I had never seen using actual examples. I can't imagine how many weeks it took you to make this video. I shared this with about 15 people and I hope more people will like, comment, and subscribe your stuff. I have a retro room myself (which you can see in my latest video from a few months ago) and somehow watching your video made me even feel better about it. If you're ever in LA, reach out and lunch is on me. Also, you have a particular tonality and enunciation in your voice that makes you come off incredibly sincere and honest. The closest other TH-camr I can compare to is The Proper People. They narrate their urban exploration videos with the same exact type of inunciation you have, which I find downright charming. Thanks so much for producing this gem of a video and I look very much forward to more amazing content from you.
Yeah, but he got some things wrong, like how CRTs are displaying half of the picture mainly because displaying the full picture at once would result in unpleasant or even harmful flicker, due to phosphors' light dying out faster than the tube can excite them. Also, 7th Gen console game devs also expected players to have CRTs, like the PS3 and the Wii, since both have games with settings that "deflicker" the image, depending on your monitor region.
Devs absolutely used specific pixel placements to generate effects and blending that can only be seen on on CRTs (or sometimes with a CRT filter). If we had LCDs back then the raw pixels likely would have been different. Cool stuff.
We didn't have LCDs but we did have progressive scan CRTs. That's why I don't quite get the retro scene's love with CRTs. I was playing EGA and VGA games on progressive scan CRTs in the 80s and 90s. Devs were definitely using those as well when creating graphics. Shrug.
@@AntonioRodriguezSilver Progressive scan only eliminates interlaced video from the retro graphics. There's still everything else, like scanlines, colour bleeding, signal degradation, etc.
This is about consoles, not PCs. 480p Progressive Scan was never used to play consumer game consoles by the layperson until the 6th generation with the Dreamcast's VGA output. It's not like the 5th gen and down weren't progressive though, as most games from that time display in 240p, only using half the lines of interlaced 480i.
Finally, a much-needed video that explains in depth why CRT is very relevant in retro gaming, even down to the minute details that tend to get overlooked from the bigger TH-camrs. I'd like to point out that there's one use case worth mentioning that wasn't covered in the video where the raw pixels look trumps over any kind of CRT filter, and it's for uploading/streaming to video sharing platforms like TH-cam. Here, all videos go through the compression algorithm to get people watching one video without having to download a hundred of GBs worth of lossless video data. This includes chroma subsampling from RGB 4:4:4 and YCbCr 4:2:2 to YUV 4:2:0 that causes some detail loss crucial to conveying convincing CRT effects. As a workaround, you could use 4K camera to capture some gameplay footage offscreen, but that might take the gameplay focus away from the viewer's attention. I'd like to see the ability to append an uncompressed CRT filter overlay through the .png file on top of the video that has raw pixels look, or even better, one that also pull the Black Frame Insertion trick whenever 120FPS becomes available on TH-cam. Also, the part where Minecraft is output to a CRT seems like the end result is a progressive 240p video, which certainly isn't ideal. Had the source 480p/720p/1080p signal properly processed into an interlaced 480i, I bet that the otherwise cropped-down text would become more legible.
9:51 I like how you actually alternated the image at that frequency instead of just bulllshitting us. I can tell without even pausing, just by blinking.
I pulled out the old super Nintendo to show my 5 year old daughter and the delay from the buttons to the modern 55 inch TV was horrendous 😂 I couldn't even enjoy playing it. I tried explaining to my daughter and she was just having a blast anyways. Sweet video! I plan on getting a CRT sometime soon.
the lacking detail of older technology used to force our brains to fill in, what made them look magical, immersive, personal even, because everyone could have a different perspective on a scene, and every tv had its own quirks, colors and glitches. I played metal gear solid 3 on a crt a long time ago, it's still my favorite game and super nostalgic, it just looked so real to me, realer than any graphics nowadays look
That’s definitely part of it. When I draw sometimes I like to use a blurry brush so I can play with my imagination a bit. But I also think that they knew how to take advantage of the low resolution.
There's a name for that: grid effect, it is even on Wikipedia. It also masks the jaggenes of diagonal lines and text smoother, as addressed by the video, but the "mind filling the black lines" is an actual thing.
As someone who studies film and video games, I think that your use of the term "grain" is extremely relevant, even if technically inaccurate. CRT scanlines and phosphor bleed are, in my opinion, truly comparable to film grain for movies on actual film. Something about the feel of the media is lost when either are absent where they were historically.
They add CG "grain" to a lot of modern digital movies to try and make them look better. Digital looks lifeless and too video like for me. Nothing beats actual film.
It's not complicated. It adds noise to the image, where there previously was none. You know.... Noise. That stuff that you see literally everywhere every time you look at anything in the real world.
One things is that emulators are still great. There are two reasons. For one you can hook up a PC or any device up to a VGA CRT and run them at 480p. That gets rid of the discrepancy of low res UI and videos and still allows you to benefit from stuff like upscaling. By running the game at a higher resolution and then downscaling it to 480p, you get cleaner edges because you are essentially Super Sampling the edges as it's a form of anti aliasing. For 6th gen games this is fantastic and it can look even better than real hardware. Some consoles could do this natively like the Xbox 360 and Sega Dreamcast as both have native VGA out. The GameCube and OG Xbox also work great on a VGA CRT as both can be converted from component to VGA and then can be displayed on them. It's so nice looking and you still get those nice scanlines on them. The only issue is that they must receive a 480p signal or higher otherwise you won't get a picture. There are relatively few VGA CRTs that accept a 15khz signal like 480i/240p.This can be mitigated either with modded software which can force 480p in all games or an external upscaler of a high quality. The other point with emulation is that CRT shaders exist. There are some extremely high quality CRT shaders out on the market and I love to use them. They can almost become indistinguishable from a real CRT from the right distance and if you have a high enough resolution monitor. High quality CRT shaders at 1440p and higher are extremely nice and I don't play emulated games without them when they're 240p.
This sounds like a lot of effort that needs to be put in to do what CRT TV's do natively. I understand that CRT TVs are difficult to find now but if you have access to one, it is definitely a much simpler option.
@@mmpsp693 I'm not a big fan of VGA crts for emulation since they can't output the low res for the majority of platforms. They are stuck at a minimum of 640x480 60hz without some niche hacks that require certain video cards and software combinations. Most retro consoles operate at 240p 15khz so everything will have to be upscaled to be displayed on a VGA CRT which at that point, why bother with a CRT if you are gonna be getting the same type of upscaling (line doubling and such) on an LCD or other digital display.
@@theenemy333 you can use fake scanlines and still get the motion clarity, no artifacts for games that use "non square" pixels, fast input and response, etc. Also, they can run at other frequencies, which are required for some arcade, old pc, and even the wonderswan color.
This is probably one of the best informative videos for casuals I have ever seen on a topic, I am so glad I came to this video first to learn more about this. Love your style, and thanks!
not who you're talking to but I did, cuz I thought this was coming knowledge in the retro game community. was probably more of a guffaw than a laugh@@Hugme778
We've had a huge 34 inch CRT in our basement for nearly 22 years, still works thankfully but hasn't been plugged in for a long time, simply because CRTs aren't really "Energy Efficient". Which is why the moment you turn those suckers on, you're extracting at least 800 watts of power just to turn on the TV. Although what I do miss with modern displays compared to CRTs is the tingling feeling you place your finger on the CRTs and you can feel the statis as you glide or rub your finger side to side against the screen (felt so good back in the day).
RGB SCART can be found on likely over 99% of European TVs from the nineties and 2000s. SCART became mandatory on all TVs in France from 1980 (I think), and it eventually became standard to put it on all TVs in Europe. There was basically no reason to not turn on RGB functionality as it didn't really cost extra and the set wouldn't be very competitive if it couldn't offer RGB, so only some very cheap portable sets from the nineties onward in Europe didn't have RGB.
Thanks for clearing that up! I know that you can find SCART/RGB on old TVs everywhere here, but I didn't know if that was the case for every country in Europe. (although I was expecting it)
@@KonaKonaKaabisteru RGB definitely makes a very nice difference! Would love to get my hands on a decent Trinitron someday, but I am very satisfied with my Bang & Olufsen MX4200 which I lucked into getting. It gives an incredibly sharp RGB image.
This video made me realise that true nostalgia for flat pixel art is rarer than I thought. It existed with the PC and DOS games where the CRT monitors were progressive scanning and much higher resolution while the games were still lower resolution: the pixels were very much visible.
Same with handhelds. Emulated 3DS and PSP for example have ugly blocky pixels on the edges of everything at original resolutions. On their original displays they look so much better. Though I noticed a CRT shader also gets rid of the weird looking blocky pixels on emulated PSP, which is interesting as these games weren't intended for CRTs in the first place.
Since I never owned a console in my life, and my dad was a programmer, my own "retro" gaming is the 1988-1998 era of PC games though, and things there are completely different. You definitely had 480p CRTs as PC monitors, and PCs had graphics card related oddities like standard VGA 256 colour mode being 320x200 stretched to 4:3, rather than actual 240p. As you can imagine (and somewhat mentioned at 43:44), there's a completely different set of challenges involved in making those look right on modern monitors.
Yeah I collect vintage PCs as well. The best modern monitor I have to display 200p is a dell with 1920x1200 resolution. With it, I can display a 4:3 image (which would be 1600x1200) which is an integer multiplication of 320x200 *and* is also an integer multiplication of 320x240 ! However I wish there was a 4k version of this resolution (3840x2400) as this would allow me to display 640x400 and 640x480 with an integer scaling too ...
13:26 for anyone new to this topic, Gen 6 consoles are all capable of outputting 480p. The Xbox can output 720p on some games, and a very limited number of Xbox and PS2 games can even output 1080i. None of these can be displayed on a consumer grade CRT, however. The Dreamcast could play most of its games in 480p over a VGA connected to a CRT computer monitor. A few older consoles could output 480i as well. The N64's "hi-rez" is 480i. The Sega Genesis could do it. The Sonic 2 split screen multiplayer is 480i. The Sega Saturn had a bunch of 480i games. Early PS3 models and I think all Xboxes 360 support analogue out and will play on a CRT in 480i since HDTVs were still not the norm when the 7th gen dropped.
All PS3 models support analog. I use my superslim in composite. It is great to play PS1 games in actual 240p not get disgustingly stretched to fit even 720p.
@@mscottjohnson3424 Same goes for all 360's. Also the PS3 outputs analog even through HDMI. If you have a pre HDMI 2.0 cable the TV will have analog artifacts, just less obnoxious because it's HD. My old af hdmi cable had the same analog artifacting as my PS2 does with the PS3 but not the PS4. And also looked worse on the 4k than the not even full 1080p oldie I main as expected from an analog situation.
@@mscottjohnson3424 Yep. Launch 360's did not have HDMI. And the PS3 was sold with composite cables even later in it's life. The HDMI cable was whatever that rando laying around is.
I always feel odd because I don't have that strong CRT nostalgia a lot of people seem to. I *love* the look of raw pixels on a clear screen. Even though I did grow up using CRTs up until well after the xbox 360 launched(I remember being unable to play FF13 because I couldn't read the text on a CRT), I still prefer looking at unfiltered pixels in emulators.
A high quality connection like component/RGB hooked to a CRT will give you that “raw pixel” look. It’s not exclusive to only emulators. I believe he shows it in the video at one point. A CRT image is not a fuzzy one, it can be incredibly sharp and defined especially if you consider PVMs and BVMs which are so sharp you could poke your eye out.
@@mmarshfairc3 Yeah, but at that point, you are spending hundreds of dollars, not to mention the space to have the physical hardware, a decent upscaler, and a good PVM.....or, you can emulate the sharp pixel look for practically free even with the cheapest computer or smartphone emulator.
It's not just you, man. I actually remember asking my mom at around the age of 5 or 6 why TVs looked bad. Got my first LCD with the launch of the Wii in 2006 and never looked back.
I was a very late adopter of modern TVs, I kept our family CRT alive for as long as I could afford it, got it repaired when it really shouldn’t have been worth the effort, because I just hated modern TVs and how games looked on them, it felt uncanny.
And was much better than our rgb and vga outputs for the dreamcast (for the most part anyways.) now though we have DCdigital and can pretty much make any resolution work and not look like crap.
Purely anecdotal, but I think most people used a RF signal for NES/SNES/Genesis back in the day. I never even saw yellow/white/red cables until we got the N64 and PSX.
I have waited a long time for a video like this, as more and more people are streaming or making retro games, it hurts to see games now NOT the way you did when they were out fresh. Old games don't need to look worse than they did. Thankyou sir1
Developers often used much higher quality art for the arcade games in comparison to the home console releases because arcade cabinets were much more powerful than the home consoles up until around the 6th generation of consoles.
Looking at your crt footage really takes me back. When I was really young I used to play NES games on an NES my family had sitting around in the basement along with one of those ancient box tvs from the 80s. It REALLY cant be emphasized enough how much different of an experience it is playing these super old games on actual hardware and the actual telivisions they were made for. Its not a luxury anyone can experience obviously, nor is it convient at all, but if anyone has the chance they should absolutely take up on experiencing a game this way.
As a programmer, a pixel artist, and someone who started gaming in the 90's I prefer seeing pixel art on LCD/LED. I miss basically nothing about CRT monitors. Some things may look better on CRT but I think its the exception not the rule. And when things look better on CRT its often simply because the original pixel art wasn't shaded by the artist. The CRT makes the images look like they're shaded automatically. Most devs do shade their pixel art today, which is why newer pixel art looks good on LED/LCD.
I know you are not from Europe, but SCART RGB is worth talking about. Here it came with all tv’s, And was until recently still used next to HDMI. I remember having near HD quality on tv decoders.
@@boingaon Our first machines with SCART RGB out were a Philips P2000 (1981), BBC Micro (1982), Videopac G7200 (1983), MSX (1983), CPC (1984), Spectrum 128k (1985), Sega Master System (1987). Basically any machine targetted at the EU market. These were all hooked up over RGB Scart back in the day.
Another good thing about the interlaced video formats are, that they keep roughly the same perceived refresh rate, while requiring half the pixel fill rate. Something old hardware was a bit more limited at.
check surplus sites near you, medical company bankruptcy auctions/liquidations, trash sites of an obscure place lol, calling into areas that have outdated equipment but can’t throw away (local radio/news stations, school IT departments, churches too lol) There’s def a ton of possible methods. Just requires a fair share of effort put into it. I got mine for legit $5 dollars on a medical surplus auction site near me. OEV-203 (reskinned PVM-20M2MDU), and it’s damn good. Only luck of the draw for these sorts of places if it works or rather works well. Be sure to test it with something before the purchase if possible.
I learned so much from you! I couldn't never put words to the reasons why I felt my retro games looked so good on a CRT. You made this very digestible, even to a total tech novice such as myself. Thank you so very much! 🙏🙏
Weighing in on the debate about how games should be consumed based on the developer's intentions: The developer will always design the game around the expected means of consumption, so the way a game is meant to be consumed is based on the most common consumer television setup in the homes of consumers. In the early 90's it was SD 240p/480i CRT televisions. In the early 2000's it was 720p/1080i flat-screen CRT/Plasma/LCD displays. And now, it is 4K LCD or OLED panels utilizing post-render upscaling with advanced scaling algorithms. Take the PS5 as an example. It rarely outputs 4K footage directly from the render pipeline due to GPU performance limitations and often relies on upscaling APIs produced by AMD like FSR to feed a reasonably clean 4K image to the television so you don't have to hope that your television's built-in upscaler can cope with that kind of video processing. The most obvious way to see that developers tailor their game asset designs to the display technology is to look at the way that they design the sprites and background art for games on the SNES vs. the GBC or GBA. They were around at nearly the same time, but the pixel art is quite different. GBC and GBA simply embraced the fact that the smaller screen format would make the individual pixels less blocky and focused more on crisp outlines and strong, blockier coloring and shading methods because the screen wouldn't be able to fix it for them. Embracing a particular art style because the technology limits you makes the art style seem intentional and, thus, ageless. Take Legend of Zelda: Windwaker as a prime example. It's simpler, posterized design language still reads as clean and modern even now, while other games released at the same time that might have looked good on a CRT have become significantly less appealing when viewed on an LCD. It's all about the art style and how versatile it can be made for different display technologies. Do GBC and GBA games tend to look better on CRT televisions compared to their built-in LCD display? Well, yeah. Pixel art is MEANT for CRT. Everything else is a compromise. Having said that, while most developers would prefer that you consume their media in the format they designed it for so you can have the best experience, I can confidently say that any artist out there will be happy if you can appreciate their art in whatever format you can view it. So if you can only emulate the game but you find that to be enjoyable, then the developer would be happy with that outcome.
@@zoltanz288 They can certainly get VERY close, and for the vast majority of people it's more than enough for their needs. It's just those people who really love retro gaming who will want to purchase the original hardware to play it on as well as the original displays to view it on for the best possible experience. Buy according to your interest, financial situation, and space availability dictates. Bonus points for people who kept their GTX900 series cards which feature analog output over DVI-I. It's the best of both worlds since emulating the game systems that you'd really want to see on CRTs is something you could easily use an older PC for, since they're not hugely resource hungry compared to modern AAA titles. It's really only PS3 and XBox 360 where the emulation needs faster processors and good GPU acceleration. DVI-I to component adapters do exist and are passive adapters, so there's no additional latency from a signal converter in the mix, so you only have to deal with whatever latency your emulator adds to inputs.
RetroArch shaders are excellent at replicating the look and feel of old CRT TVs, adding that authentic retro gaming vibe. They effectively mimic scanlines, curvature, and color bleeding, making classic games appear much closer to how they would on vintage displays. With a wide variety of customizable shaders such as CRT-Royale or CRT-Easymode they offer a range of options to suit different preferences, from subtle enhancements to more dramatic effects. This level of accuracy adds nostalgia and enhances the visual experience for retro gaming enthusiasts.
As you said, the artists did work with the individual pixels. But also as you alluded to much earlier, since the most common displays were CRTs that also meant the monitors they used to *make* the pixel art were still CRTs. So effectively what they were seeing at creation time is closer to what people were seeing playing it at the time than they are to people making pixel art now. Barring the artists making their pixel art on a CRT as well.
They did design for consumer CRT's and embrace the CRT limits to their benefit. Stories about this go back very early, but most noticable are the hurdles taken by Atari 2600 designers for various games to overcome sprite limits, the way how a lightgun works with Duckhunt and the famous waterfalls in Sonic the Hedgehog.
Still midway through the video, but here are my two cents: Most crt sets are fine Composite on a crt is good enough for the majority of consoles Motion clarity is the reason to get a crt CRT are almost required for games with non 4:3 "pixel aspect ratio", such as nes, Snes. Wii are awesome on a crt because it can emulate tons of consoles Play however you want to, just enjoy
Phenomenal video, only one aspect missing. A major reason why pixel art naturally looked more "blended" on CRTs has to do with the temporal nature of how the individual phosphor elements were energized, then darkened (by themselves) with time. Thats also why most of the dithering works so well also. Deeper blacks come as a function of the fact that there is no "back lighting" necessary, the energized phosphor creates it's own light output.
I also have to throw this extra comment, if you want to make a video about the state of PCSX2, please make sure to grab the latest version (2.1), as what you used in this video seems to still be the ANCIENT 1.6... PCSX2 has radically changed both visually and performance wise, by adopting the Duckstation Interface ( thanks Stenzek ), and by making is so convenient to have per-game profiles for nearly everything.
Yeah, I don't know what that guy is going on about. Because even in America, there was plenty of TVS that did our RGB before high-definition, they were just expensive.
I grew up playing 80s and 90s games on CRT TVs, as did my friends. In the early 2000's we all got into emulating (particularly SNES and MAME) in a big way, and one of the first things we were blown away by was how much clearer and cooler the pixel art looked to us on our flat screen monitors than our old tvs. Granted my experience is from a small friend group (and thus probably fairly unrepresentative of any wider held opinions out there), but I do always find it funny all these decades later to see people pining for the 'cooler' and 'better' look of the CRT monitors, when everyone I knew at the time was glad to be rid of them. I can see why people like the look on the CRT TVs, but personally I still find the look of playing my old favourites on modern monitors preferable.
Wow. I was amazed by the fact that you have 60p and 60i. It's true that many people say a CRT can only display 30fps, but it's not true. I also use a CRT for my retro games. Here in Europe we mainly use SCART which is a very good quality. A CRT has these rich colors and more depth in them. Everyone should see this video. Thanks!
Interlacing was invented when focus was so bad that the lines within a field overlap to create a homogeneous area at all intensities. Horizontally, it would have been better (for computers) to have a sharp focus.
This especially goes for DS games on DS, as well. Playing pokemon pearl feels great; the pixel art is amazing and the music playing through the speakers it was specifically designed for leaves me speechless sometimes. Gameboy too! I've emulated games for these systems and the experience is just not the same.
this video has everything, i just want to add for those interested in sound, composite cable sound is way more atmospheric on crt speakers especially if they are big, it's just a soft fuzzy sound with deep rumbling bass, sounds like a boombox kind of, and it adds sooo much to the feel
In the UK and I would assume other Pal regions "RGB" or as we called it scart, Was pretty much the standard from the mid 80's. When I originally got a PS3 we hooked it up via scart on our old sony 1080i plasma TV. That TV played excellently with legacy devices as well so for me at least the transition was (expensive but) relatively painless. I just laugh looking back at how we worried it might fall over, being "so thin and light". Thing was a monster. Also apologies I don't recall the model number, I will have a look and may edit it in if found. Sony KDE-P37XS1. I think not 100%. Had 3 scart no hdmi and is chonky so close enough.
Hey Godpuu...Great video. Thanks for all the insight it was very helpful. l just got back into retro gaming myself just last month. l already got a 27" CRT TV, and luckily still have all of my original games/consoles!! lts like being a kid all over again!! Having a blast at 48!! Gaming the past 15 years has taught me, substance, depth and charm beats shallow eye candy every time!!
The problem with nostalgia...we didn't grow up with this very nice looking CRT image. 90% of us probably had a standard Zenith/Magnavox TV with our systems hooked up via RF and all kinds of noise and interference with important things like lifebars being cut off in the corners. Your average gamer back then didn't have access to PVMs, or high quality CRT TVs even unless you were upper class. I was blown away at how crisp and clean pixels could look via emulation on a high resolution monitor. I could never go back. And buying a PVM/Upscaler/SCART/RGB connection isn't "going back" its trying to re-write time.
Fair, but I dont think this video is about going back. This video specifically seems to handle what the theoretical best-looking way to play video games from generation 3-7 is, with some consideration for how they play.
I have to agree. Used half of my life CRTs, and I freaking love nowadays being able to play my childhood classics in an enormous clean, crisp image. Is just awesome, for me.
Actually, people did. It's called arcades. This video is dumb and ignorant. This is a clear case of grass is always greener. If you could go back in time and show people the clean raw pixel look, people would have desired it over what they had then with wonky geometry. People used to actually pay companies like Redmond cable to make cables that let you connect the Genesis to a computer monitor for that clean raw pixel look. The only real advantage CRTs have ever had is low persistence, but even that isn't a straight advantage because it came at the cost of headache inducing flicker. I can't even play games for more than around 30 minutes on 60hz CRTs anymore because the flickering is so annoying.
That's why I kind of laugh at people who tell me I gotta get some sort of hardware that costs a few hundred bucks to display the true look and when I look at my rigged setup which uses a handheld emulator, hdmi to composite then composite to VCR and VCR to RF, I'm just like.. It looks exactly like I remember it because this is what I had. I didn't have a PVM. I had a shitty little 13 inch TV when I was a kid that I bought from walmart with my OWN money when the larger set that was given to me when I was a child broke down. I love my current setup. It's a 13 inch sharp that was given to me for free. I had the VCR already, so you really can't beat free when you're getting into a hobby or to relive some nostalgia.
I’ve only been playing my emulated games with the most basic settings (so no CRT or composite effects), but after watching this video, it makes me really want to see how these old games were intended to be seen. A lot of this imagery is quite beautiful!
despite being born in 2002, I grew up with a CRT TV, and used it until it broke. I remember getting a PS3 for one of my birthdays and ended up playing Skyrim on it. Some text was cut off, but i didn't mind it that much. I personally don't really care if Retrogames are displayed on a modern or a CRT display, what really matters is if the game is good and fun to play.
Wait, you never had SCART on CRTs in the US? It was the main connection here in Europe for many kind of Devices most used by VHS and DVD Players. Only Game Consoles rarely used it.
I believe some of more advanced CRT supported 480p. And you said that 240p jump the another line and this is the scanline effect. I am not sure, but 240p seems to duplicated each line. And scanlines are just the space between each CRT line, with different sizes for each CRT model.
I'm glad the kids are starting to understand the beauty of this literal artform. One of the most impressive uses of it at 33:46 was the waterfalls in Sonic; on emulator it looks like blue lines over the background. On CRT it looks like an alpha channel over the parallax background. Amazing.
Interesting ... NTSC 60Hz was the standard in most places But here in Europe PAL was the standard with only 50Hz , that said our TVs in the 90s had most commonly Scart RGB connectors and / or Composite by default , Component and S-Video were super rare. There were also 100Hz TVs in europe but they werent great for gaming because they showed the same frame twice , which caused input lag. 50 and 100 Hz were basicly the standard here , because the movie / film industry around the globe captured video material in 24fps , at least thats how i remember it , but please correct me if im wrong. Anyways , between NTSC and PAL , PAL did noticeably lag behind NTSC when it came to speedrunning or reaction times. So when you needed it for competitive reasons you would most of the time go with NTSC. Unless you intentionally needed the lag for some speedrun glitches , then you would use the PAL version.
9:54 if you blink during this part of the video, you can actually still see the fields alternating. It’s amazing to see this even after TH-cam encoding
CRTs rock for visuals, even when a game wasn't designed around it. There is just something about its quirks that really looks phenomenal in-context, like the colorwarping giving depth to solid colors, the colorblending being the coolest anti aliasing ever and certain colors coming out more vibrant and saturated. Sadly, the technology is very much dying and people like me barely grew up with these displays due to their physical issues that made LCDs the new standard and it is unlikely that there will be many to be found in even 20 years, as old units can easily break. And that is honestly why I love the current era. While we aren't quite there with getting the perfect retro gaming experience or even replicating the visuals of most CRT televisions 1:1, we are getting ever closer almost every single day and there is a little something for everyone. For example, CRT filters in emulators are intended for native res as that is what it would have looked like originally, but I really love the look of it in upscaled HD. Much sharper overall and yet still doing wonders for the parts(Like UI or some backgrounds, etc) that otherwise would look blurry or pixelated by comparison because they don't upscale. Kirby's Return to Dreamland is a magic game that always looks good regardless of what you do, but combining it with any filter and one of the three original colorspaces genuinely blew my socks off. I hope newer emulators eventually get CRT filters and color space correction for fun, I'd really like to experiment with using it on games that never natively had access to it, like 3DS games and such. If the games happen to jell well with giving them the "retro TV experience", then that may as well be a remaster of sorts.
Only if you think video game history began with third generation home consoles. I remember the 1970s. Atari, Intellivision, et al. look vastly better the sharper they are, so there is the exception. Also, obviously, Vectrex games and arcade games like Tempest and Battle Zone look better on a vector display.
That's why I have spent extra effort reproducing to insane accuracy a digital image of the Sony Trinitron KVM1620B, that we've owned since 1991, but got stuck in a boot loop recently and needs repairs ontop of a faulty color mode in composite input... That CRT supported PAL, Sécam and RGB up to 60Hz, but not NTSC ( needs parts soldered ), and the phosphor coating contains 443 continuous RGB triads vertically, and a screen aspect ratio of 1.3645:1 ( 300x220mm ). To replicate it natively on a 1920x1080p monitor, all I have to do is ensure that the drawn space is upscaled by 3 exactly to make each pixel column deal with 1/3rd of a triad. Results a resolution of 1329x972. Then I can draw the CRT around that screen size and crop to 1080p at the end ( in a 4K monitor, the whole CRT becomes visible ) Sure, the relatively small size and triad count means this CRT will usually downsample the horizontal resolution of a lot of games, in 5th and 6th gen ( specifically those 512x256 PS1 games! ), but that's exactly how i remember my games and VHS looking in my childhood. In practicality, I use Reshade with my crt overlay as a png on top, then i use various shaders to resize the contents to match available screenspace, compress the sides to give a cylindrical distortion that matches the CRT shape even more and finally CRTRoyale itself to create the triads ( and thanks to the png exacly 443 will be visible, regardless of overscan ) If i'm also playing a low res game in the 216-288p range, i'll add a little scanline shader to show those seams. in higher res, the lines are so densely packed you don't see them. Still, it's important to note that being from 1991, that CRT was powerful enough to display 480p60 signals, unlike standart definition CRTs from before. This was mostly observed during the last decade of CRTs. Extra for 21:00 -> Yes, for the USA, RGB is rare, but is extremely common in Europe! The plug itself is called "Scart" or "Péritel" and doesn't necessarily mean RGB ( you can send a composite signal through a scart input on a CRT with an adapter if you want, and ths signal will not be RGB ). This also means that european releases of consoles like the SNES and Gamecube ( see 49:00 ) also support RGB and 480p ( more like 528p for the GC itself ) without having to use the Digital Out, you can just opt for Scart RGB. Same for the PS2! All in all, it's a very well detailed video, at least when it comes to the NTSC side of the world. Some comparisons with PAL or at least mentions of differences would be helpful too!
RGB scart was very common in the UK / Pal territories Although for the majority of the life of the SNES console I played with RF and was happy with that. The only time I considered an RGB scart was when a 50/60hz switch was installed and games were displaying in black + white What I've noticed when it comes to the look of raw pixels vs through a CRT is that the colours look different. I've seen various colour hacks of Mega Drive games but when viewing these games through a CRT they look quite good and accurate when comparing to their Arcade counterparts. (Through a MiSTer). I'm used to the CRT look so that's what looks accurate to me when it comes to retro games. Also the whole raw pixel thing only really applies to console games. PCs of the day that used CRT Monitors had high resolutions up to 1280x1080 in progressive scan. It was a shock to me to see the graphics on Nesticle through a PC Monitor back then
Finally I understand how I used to believe that game graphics were better in our old TVs! You gracefully lifted the feel of Mandilla effect over our entire generation! I am so glad that the self gaslight disappeared. You are a hero will done!
I'll never forget when I first got an HDTV and tried playing my PS2 games on it. I remember seeing the crappy, blocky pixels and thinking "This is HD?!"
Makes me realize how long it's been since I've seen anything on a CRT screen; some of those shots really put a lump in my throat, seeing those old games how I did when I was a kid. Thanks for sharing, great video and makes me want to hit up my local yard sales and flea markets to find one of these old things!
As someone who's old enough to have experienced CRTs back when they were not just dominant but pretty much the only popular tech for TVs let me tell you that the average TV was kinda crap when it comes to image quality, a good chunk of your opinions seem to be colored by experiencing mostly nice TVs but back in the day you'd have been stuck with something similar to that first mediocre CRT TV you picked up, at least most of the time. From what I remember the nicest experiences I had with CRTs were PC monitors rather than TVs since those tended to have higher (sometimes significantly higher) resolutions and much better picture quality, when I emulated SNES games on a PC in the early 2000's I was genuinely taken aback by just how good they could look after messing with the emulator settings for a while. And let's just say that emulating Neo Geo games on a CRT monitor is something I actually miss. That said I moved away from CRTs as soon as the chance presented itself and never looked back, for all the nice features they had they gave me horrible headaches after using them for a few hours that simply don't happen with modern displays even if I sit in front of a screen for hours on end. But that might have to do with my specific type of astigmatism.
I have a Samsung Syncmaster 955DF, it's a real 4:3 1440p (1392p) CRT monitor. Motion clarity on current displays is garbage, and colors are way off on LCDs and any OLED that isn't QD-OLED or AMOLED. I dislike CRT TVs. 480i is worse clarity than 480p, there is color convergance and geometry issues. My 32 inch Sony Trinitron KV TV from 2002 looks like crap vs my Syncmaster monitor. My Syncmaster is so sharp that text looks way, WAY better than a 1080p LCD i have.
im with ya. i also grew up with crts, both shitty and a few good ones, and i never want to go back. games have always looked better emulated for me. i cant go back to rgb cables again, ive tried. just no. the kids can have the old shit crts and cables.
Awesome video, thanks for making it. I started gaming in the mid-late 80s on the NES and I've been playing ever since. I remember 10-15 years ago trying to play NES and SNES games on a flat screen TV and it just looking like garbage. I thought to myself, there's no way the games used to look like this. The only thing I had known at the time about modern TVs with retro games was the input lag; I didn't yet learn about all the visual components. I'm so glad people like you are making videos like this. I feel like people my age have been vindicated in our belief that the pixel games back then really DID look much better that people realize.
I have to admit I don't really miss CRTs. I used them more than half of my life, and being able to play the classics of my childhood nowadays, emulated in a glorious gigantic sharp image... I don't know. Is heaven for me.
Probably because you lived when CRTs were actually around. This kiddo here is doing the equivalent of a hipster saying why vinyls are better than CDs or digital, because they're rarer and make him feel like he's special. Well, he's sure some kind of special anyways ;)
I'd rather have a sharp and pixelated image as opposed to a blurry but smooth image. I want to be able to see EVERY pixel in the best quality possible. That's why I got HDMI converters for both my PS2 and Wii and hooked them up to an HDTV. While it's not exactly HD, it's still crystal clear image quality considering the games run at either 480i or 480p. Also, I do NOT miss how heavy old CRTs were. You had to have multiple people carry it around, especially if it was an HD, widescreen CRT. Those could weigh as much as 200 lbs.
@chaptap8376 Yeah im old enough to remember switch. I preferred and still prefer higher resolution more compact design. I do wish tech would get good qualities of crt into modern display without concessions.
Modern hi-def televisions are obviously far superior to CRT. However, as someone who definitely was around during the CRT era (my entire childhood and through college), I don't think it's a hipster view to prefer CRT for retro gaming. It actually is better in my opinion. Sure, a modern tv has a better picture, but the dimensions of the game, the look, the brightness, sharpness, etc look proper on a CRT for old games and only old games. For everything else thet are garbage, but for old games I actually prefer them. Old games on a modern ratio screen don't look right and look stretched.
I mean it really just comes down to the games we're designed around a world that used CRT's. There's enough improvements and tech now that you can easily enjoy older games via emulators and modern equipment. I at least do as someone who grew up on all that stuff, it's just so much more convenient.
I despise scanlines. I would much prefer the pixels standing out and being crisp to having hundreds of sections of my game just be black lines running through everything. Also, playing a retro game on anything but PC is just weird to me, you get the best of all words by doing that with emulators, they can smooth over the sharpness without lines being cut through the image everywhere.
I once saw the Snes version of Street Fighter 2 running on a PVM with RGB in a Circuit City many years ago. I've been trying to figure out how that quality was achieved for a long time and now I know. Thank you.
26:34 One of the best image quality comparisons Ive seen, one is flat and bright, one is dim and has the suggestion of more detail (like it's more 3D actually).
"what developers think" this CRT effect wasnt really in the consciusness back in the day, ppl were aware it gets a bit smeary but thats about it. There were NO LCD screens to compare against.
For Audiophiles this is the same as well, recordings were made for the speakers of the day and therefore sound best through the equipment of the time period. Obviously, this is something they attempt to fix when remastering. I was born in 81, but growing up my parents had a rather nice stereo system and turntable; When I put on Fleetwood Mac or Simon & Garfunkel, I felt like I was sitting in the studio next to them. No digital version has ever sounded as good.
The difference was in the mixing/mastering process. Once the majority switched to digital, everything started getting brick limited/compressed to hell. Back then you just tried to play it through as many different types of drivers as possible and shoot for a happy medium. There were also mono/stereo mixes done back then.
The way you say things like people are supposed to *gasp* makes me laugh haha…every time you make a dramatic pause I react with “ya…what’s strange about that?”. It’s always eye opening going to channels run by kids (people born in the late 90’s and on) and the shock and awe over the things we considered normal. I do not envy you kiddo, you missed the boat on growing up in a good decade man. It’s always a good feeling to hear kids like yourself say how envious they are of people who grew up in the 90’s.
In my early childhood I played a bunch of SNES, but then starting in my teens I also played emulated SNES, so I grew strangely accustomed to the raw pixel look. Personally, I have to agree that the smoothening of the raw pixel look through CRT does give it more character. Interestingly though, I told my girlfriend (who's a bit of a gamer but not hardcore) that I was watching this video, and showed her the CRT vs. raw pixel examples, expecting that the superiority was crystal clear. Instead she said "I think both of them have their charm". It was interesting to hear a completely unbiased view and a reminder that all of this is, in the end, subjective.
After hearing your thesis and listening to most of the body of the essay, I have to say, you make some good points, but I'm not convinced. I remember switching to emulation on a laptop screen and being much more impressed by how clear and crisp all the pixels were. The idea that it was too sharp to be aesthetically pleasing was something I never understood. Perhaps it's just a taste thing, or perhaps you'll get me in the second half of the essay.
@@VikingKong. Those are two very different systems, fella. Are you maybe talking about the Mega Man X series? Those are probably the only two directly comparable video games since they're both 2d, but at the same time, there's also a lot of artist evolution going on between the earlier and later games. Also, thanks, I got distracted again and forgot to watch the rest.
![PASULOL รามเกียรติ์ ตอนที่ 4 นนทกพบรัก [Ramakien Ep.4: Nonthok in love]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/tMUQgmZzf_A/mqdefault.jpg)
I’ve been dying for a video like this for a while and this was awesome!! I really like how you formatted and talked about all the smaller details and intricacies. Awesome video!!
Hey thanks man, I’m glad you enjoyed the video!
hello salty
hello salt
It really is a huge difference
Playing something like Super Nintendo or Saturn games on a CRT vs a flatscreen really feels natural. It’s a warm feeling I guess I describe it as,
Earthbound on a TV thru S video is immaculate 👌✨
sup
I think the CRT effect on old pixel art games is the reason why you hear people say "I remember it looking way better when I was younger" when they try the same game again but on modern screens or emulated.
I had my mom play the first Sonic and that was her response. She was confused as to why it looked so pixelated lol
At least people are more likely to be playing them on a 4K TV instead of a 1080P TV. Whoever decided on that resolution to become a standard should be slapped.
@@Schwarzornwhat's wrong with 1080p?
@@shadesoftime 720 and 1080 are bad cuz they aren't a multiple of 240 and 480. 240 doubles into 480 nicely, but 480 doubles into 960. If you play, say, 480 content on a 1080 display, then it'll be blurry, becuz going past 960, you've got 120 more pixels to duplicate. But that means 120 pixels get duplicated while 360 pixels don't. If you play a DVD on a computer with a 1080 display, then try comparing full-screen and a x2 mode. Most video players have that feature.
@@Schwarzornyeah we got stuck with 16:9 when 16:10 was so much better. Today we should be using 21:9 at least, but somehow we still have 16:9 and 1080p as the standard.
4k is how I assumed 1080p was going to look when I was growing up back in the day, but sadly 1080p looks bad unless it’s a small screen.
You are right about the "raw pixel look" being wrong. Those games were not designed for "raw pixel." They were designed for the CRT to blend those pixels.
I still appreciate it, though. Both look nice to me. But I've enjoyed pixel art for years. So seeing the dithering techniques "wrong" is something I can still appreciate.
@@wj11jam78 Furthermore, this video is really a bunch of bullshit because it shows sprites that are maybe two inches wide on an actual screen enormously blown up as if they were taking up half the screen. "Look, it's so blocky!" Yeah right. Sitting a reasonable distance from a screen, you don't see Chrono's face blown up like a gigantic poster. You see a little square taking up like 1/16th of the screen which the resolution of your eyesight resolves into something more like a picture, instead of a bunch of blocky pixels. No one plays video games with a microscope.
@@Margatroidbro, they are blown up to showcase the differences in the technology. Your retort is an over exaggerated strawman. Not to mention your argument is simply not true. You would absolutely be able to notice a difference between pixels on an LED and CRT. Our eyes are more sensitive than any sensor ever created. We can easily notice the difference between a blended image and a sharpened one. If I took a photo of something and increased the sharpness in Photoshop or Lightroom by crunching together the blended edges you can easily tell a difference when the photos are placed side by side. It’s the exact same principle in effect here. Now does that difference matter to most people playing games? Not really. But saying it’s not noticeable is simply false. It’s easy to notice in person and thus also easy to have a preference to which look you prefer.
@@Margatroid 100% agree. Yes, the raw pixels look awful when blown up like that, but that is NOT how we used to play games.
A lot of pixel art is made to utilize CRTs "blurriness". Not all, but generally console stuff is. Computer games are a bit more tricky, since computers often used sharper displays. But they're all over the place. A CGI full colour image on a standard TV is not a sharp image. And the output of an Amiga could be tailored in mind towards all sorts of displays.
If one has the option, test out several different display options and go with what you like best. Most do not have that option, however. Since, who of us collect several different TVs and old computer monitors just to play our games on. >_>
EDIT: Oh, and if you're just picking up one display device, just buy something as similar as what you had back in the day. At least if you have fond memories of the look of the games back then. Then it should not look that off. Unlike what the Raw Pixel Look can give you.
I feel like one thing you've glossed over in the raw pixel argument, is that the artists were using CRT monitors when making them. Back in the day, CRTs were all there was. It wasn't just TVs that used CRTs, computer monitors used them too. So when the artists were "working with the raw pixels" they were doing it on a CRT monitor. The artists themselves may have never seen what we call the "raw pixel look" when they were making it.
i dunno. when emulated the games look pretty good. some of the details on the sprite work probably wouldnt have even been visible on old ass crts. maybe the dev tools and tech was more advanced than we think?
To be fair: CRT Monitors are several times more sharp than CRT TV sets with composite, and they likely had a zoom feature on their art program. Still a good point, though
@@ToaderTheToadprecisely
Ah, you've never seen the CRT Monitor then. They were actually not that bad.
CRT might not have the "pixels" in common sense, as it is an analog device. But if we are talking about COLOR CRTs, it does have a patterned masking device inside, either shadow mask or aperture grille (with matching luminophore sheet at glass). Masking devices produces matrix of differently colored dots on screen surface not unlike of subpixels on LCD display and if you set up horizontal line resolution, number of lines and blanking offsets to values specified in display datasheet, it produced an image where logical pixels matched device pattern to produce pixel-perfect rendering. Only monochrome CRTs has a uniform coating without breaks.
Image on CRT Monitor doesn't shift up and down (progressive scan), display can be driven up to 200Hz (almost any could output ~100Hz), has hard physical pixels and full-range color gamut (not available in most LCDs even now). Supports only component video signal though, through D-SUB 15 usually, and the eye strain is real deal, unlike most of current day fairy tales. You can spend 20 hours behind LCD quite comfortably and then be ready to gouge your eyes after 2 hours staring in CRT.
Also: common NES game has a resolution of 240x240 pixels - fits in one(!) NTSC field. LCD monitors started to appear in 90s and quickly replaced CRTs in designers work (as they are more comfortable to work with + studios had money on expensive wide gamut LCDs).
@@zetash1be441 actually my family had one when I was a kid in the 90's. I may remember it wrong since I was a kid at the time, but I remember it being clearer than the TV, but certainly fuzzier than modern screens.
There's a youtuber called Shot97, and he specializes in showcasing/playing classic games on his CRT TV, for exactly the reasons described in this video. He also creates really detailed corresponding reviews with screenshots and even lil gifs on a small blog for his videos. I'd highly recommend people to check his stuff out. It's like a little secret corner store in TH-cam and genuinely such a cool channel. The guy is passionate. And the way he literally records the view of the CRT TV, is really comforting.
Oo, thanks for the recommendation I'm going to check that out
Thank you for actually citing the model numbers of products you show. TVs like all things vary massively in quality from one brand to the next, even from one product line to another within the same company.
For years I could swear PS1 games looked much more vivid in my childhood and this video has FINALLY confirmed that.
Exactly. That was not just nostagia!
@@josevanz7654 It's not just nostalgia, it's nostalgia AND confirmation bias.
@@michaelbuckers Did you watch the video? In the 90s, there was no such thing as pixel art. The pixels were arranged in such a way that they really looked like a gradient, or light and shadow. The games did look much better than when we put them on an LED TV! That's a fact! One problem I see is that it's not possible to film a CRT TV; the image doesn't convey reality. You have to watch it live to see the real quality.
PS1 games look terrible without composite dithering. That's why PS1 emulation in the PS3 has a smoothing option.
@@marcuscook5145 I agree with you here. PS1 3D games were already ugly, even as a kid I thought so. But games with 2D sprites were very beautiful. This was the only generation change that made games uglier in general, but because it was 3D we thought it was awesome!
Dude, over here in Europe most CRTs of the early 2000s did support RGB cables. We also had 100hz TVs which got rid of the flicker. Motion clarity was pristine.
We also had Scart
SCART goes back to 1980, but back then it was on high end sets mostly. I've a true beauty Philips from 1984 with 2x SCART. But from 1990 basically every TV in Europe left the factory with at least a single RGB scart. What became common around 1995 is a second SCART with S-video or a separate front S-video port. Be carefull with 100Hz sets. They disable light guns, and some do weird things to 60Hz NTSC material.
Even if motion clarity looks better than LCDs, 100Hz TVs still lose a ton of motion clarity compared to 50Hz/60Hz TVs by showing each frame twice, so 60Hz is still superior as it has reduced whine and flicker without needing the bandaid fix of 100Hz which reduces motion clarity and breaks lightgun compatibility; to top it all off 100Hz TVs usually have digital processing
Of course, use what you want; that's the point of the hobby. But 100Hz TVs do objectively suffer in quite a few areas
@@ToaderTheToad I mean they also had higher resolution. Would be nice if there was TV that combined all the pluses and removed all the minuses
@@ToaderTheToad I'm curious if those TV's run at 120Hz when processing NTSC input, as 100Hz would make no sense.
Games that use pre-rendered graphics like Donkey Kong Country 2 and Killer Instinct look surreal on a CRT TV, it really gives the illusion of a game that uses 3D models, but on an emulator or on a modern TV the illusion simply breaks because you can clearly see the pixels and that everything there is just 2D sprites.
I was into 3d graphic back then, and I swear donkey Kong country 1 2 3 were indistinguishable from a Pixar movie on a Sony trinitron, it was jaw dropping. Emulating them without shaders sucks -_- Prerendered background games have the same problem (ff7 8 9, resident evil 1 2 3, and so on), lately I muself found some nice mix with the shaders found in RetroArch: scanline/dot is a must (I prefer dot for my taste), kawase-glow for the pixel bleeding effect (it works wonders by itself, although I would like to be able to tone it down a little), and some light upscale blur filtering, hqx or bzr are overkill imho, although fsr has positively impressed me, otherwise just bicub. I then found an ntsc filter still in retroarch that seem to do all of the above by itself, but it was too dark and the green seems colorless... I couldn' fix it. If anyone has its own mix please post it :)
This is just wrong lol
@@wxldfl4wer850 Explain
Nope. Nobody was convinced it was real 3d. The animations are what gave it away.
@@gamesandplanes3984 At that time, I guarantee you many people were.
Random in-depth deep dives like this are what TH-cam was made for, i love listening to stuff like this.
People also often forget that PC monitors were CRT too in the era where CRT TV's were prevalent. So, yes, the game designers back in the day, saw the graphics with scanlines too on CRT PC monitors and designed the sprites with consideration for what it looks like when scaled to gameplay size. So, yes, those graphics at that time, were deisnged with scanlines look in mind. This was still going on quite a while into the PS2 Era. I have receipts! Just google the 'Making of Silent Hill 2 - HQ' and you can see in the office shots ( at 1: 57 for instance) that even with development of SH2, the devs were still using CRT monitors and CRT monitors have scanlines. So even those early polygon games, were designed with the scanlines rendered look in mind. Desinging game graphics with scanlines in mind went well into the PS2 era. Or 'PlayStation Rewind: Final Fantasy X-2 Behind the Scenes', just a short snippet on 08: 53.
Basically, from the moment the devs changed to LCD screens with no scanlines. There was this transition to designing graphics based on the new screen medium But of course this went in a different pace in different places around the world. This was of course just a technology of it's time. And I can't imagine anyone getting angry over viewing the content on new technology. If someone prefers one over the other sure.
I find it more an interesting irony, that most modern 'retro looking videogames' adopt that raw pixel look. But back then people never saw the graphics like the raw pixel look. So there's a bit of kitsch in that retro design/look there, that is actually not accurate for it's time its suppose to represent. But I can still enjoy the (faux) pixel art designed games. Just that, if you know, you know. And overtime, some people just think the games used to look like the raw pixel style. I don't blame them either, you start your eulator on your phone or pc in standard mode, and the supposedly original game shows you the raw pixels because we don't use CRT monitors/TVs anymore. A thing of it's time, because of the technology then.
You may have been disappointed by that first 13" CRT, but that is how most people experienced gaming back then. THAT is the true, authentic experience! People weren't gaming back then on expensive studio monitors.
i still play on me old 13 inch samsung crt its good enought for me since i dont have much space. and i like lightgun games so crt is a must even small one.
People back then generally had at least 20 inches. 13 inch CRTs are tiny.
@@Ephicx depends on country and how rich you were yes 20 inches were common yet some people had secound smaller tv. Common practice in 2000s when crt were still used but cheaper.
@@Ephicx Not when you were 8 years old, and your parents bought you a cheap CRT for your room. I spent my entire childhood gaming on a cheap, 13" CRT, and I image that goes for a LOT of other people.
@@hughjazz44 My 13" Toshiba VHS combo was the TV of my entire childhood until my teens.
it really is true guys
the games DID look better when we were kids
the truth is ya need a good CRT
not if you had a shitty TV to play on with only RF connection. Playing n64 through a RF adapter made things look pretty bad. Seeing a large TV that finally had at least composite was insanely good by comparison.
@@scikoolaid my TV had composite/av as well as RF
my TV was a 1981 Pioneer front projection 60" TV which had 3 RF inputs, 4 composite inputs, composite audio input and output and 2 power plugs for your VCR or whatever built into the unit.
It was the best TV I ever had IMO.
NO THEY DIDNT, what are you on about!!! CRT’s can probably do up to 480i or p, modern tv’s can do literally up to 1080p for retro consoles with up scaling tools like the mclassic.
@@jakeplayzyt5220lol.... you're joking. Willfully ignorant
@@jakeplayzyt5220 Yes they did and do, if you buy a CRT TV. Resolution isn't everything and extreme sharpness is detrimental for a game that runs at 320x240 I don't care how good your upscaler is.
SCART connections were the standard in Europe. So if you live in Europe, RGB through SCART is easily accessible on most CRT TV's.
I was gonna say this same thing, every TV i ever had had SCART, even cheap VCR combo 11" ones
@@swordman521 Yup, Europeans have access to RGB while North Americans have component
There was RGB USA too but only professional monitors. It was not scart but BNC.
Yet, most consoles came with a simple component to SCART adapter. You needed special cables that would transmit the RGB signals from the video out to the TV. The SNES couldn't do rgb, only component and RF, the n64 could do component and s-video, only the GameCube and the Wii could do RGB. Very few TVs had S-Video, and if they had, they were the high price models, something the parents wouldn't allow their children to play on with their "toy".
Like other people already commented, for the proper retro experience, you need a small TV and component. Very few gamers could afford expensive and big TVs
@@tannenfreund87 they were composite to scart plugs. Component SCART does exist and can transfer YPbPr signal, but it was only really a thing in Australia where component and SCART were there alongside each other
It's very much a case by case thing. Some game's artists blatantly optimized around Composite, like Sonic 1, Crash Bandicoot, or Earthworm Jim, the difference is incredibly dramatic.
Other artists just drew the art on an RBG monitor and never cared beyond that. And a game will look better or worse on RGB, depending on whether the artists exploited Composite as a medium.
A fairly easy way, IMO, to identify whether or not a game was being optimized for CRT, is whether or not circles and squares are actually circles or squares. Super Mario World, is not optimized for the resolution it would be displayed on; every square is a rectangle, every circle is an oval. If they didn't optimize for resolution, they definitely didn't optimize for Composite. Whereas the skeleton's shield at 27:22 becomes perfectly circular on CRT, and so whatever game that sprite is from is definitely optimized for CRT.
Note this argument also works for Arcade games, as games like Donkey Kong have actual circles in them, in DK's case, the barrels.
This could be the BEST video that describes 240p vs 480i/p‼️‼️‼️
I never really got the hype behind CRTs. I could see why competitive scenes liked them, with their better input lag and such. But this video really changed my mind. I came into it expecting to watch maybe 10 minutes before I got bored, but the very detailed and well-supported way you laid out your arguments really sucked me in, and before I knew it the video was over. Thanks for this!
Hey, to be fair even us growing up in the 90s with these TVs everywhere we kind of took them for granted because most of the time the smaller TVs didn’t look that good, most of us is Kids couldn’t afford the larger or higher quality CRT’s because they weighed a ton, and cost a lot.
We were all waiting for LCDs and lighter flatscreen TVs to come out just so you didn’t have to have a 200+ pound box sitting in your house that you could barely move without 2 to 3 people.
But now that we’ve had 20 years of bad LCD TVs to deal with, and are now only getting OLED that compared to the image quality that Good CRT’s had, we’re looking back and appreciating what we did have.
If you really want the best though try to find a good Sony Trinitron or something a person is throwing away, or a good CRT monitor for Pc’s and hook up with what you can. I still miss playing older 3D pc games like Doom 3, Half life 1 and 2, Dawn of War 1, on a real CRT monitor, they weighed a lot but looked so incredibly good.
We wanted larger screens but that made the weight of CRT monitors and their size way too high, so we were stuck with tiny screens.
At least now you can get a large OLED that looks great too and does not weigh much at all.
But I still have 3 CRT’s I found in my basement, the 32 inch 160 pound Sony Trinitron is what I use to play old game systems because they look and feel so good to play on. If you have the means try to get one for free or cheap. It took me about 3 years to find what I wanted but it is nostalgic and nice to watch things on a CRT again. The image feels different because it has actual depth, it’s not just a flat panel with lights, it’s real glass with an image that comes through a screen, and it has a glow that OLED’s are now finally bringing back that gives a feeling of life LCD’s just didn’t have.
We had LCD’s back in the 90’s and early 2000’s but they sucked and were only used for tiny screens and handheld gaming devices (and they always looked worse in comparison).
@@ChristopherAndersonPirate
P'reciate the suggestions, if I decide to pick one up in the future I'll keep your advice in mind.
I grew up in the 00s, playing my PS2 mostly on a tiny ~12" screen CRT in my bedroom. Thing's long gone by now, so I have no idea what it was. I do remember, though, being somewhat disappointed at how Kingdom Hearts 2 looked on our big flatscreen when I went back to play it one day. I'd chalked it up to my rose-tinted glasses, but who knows now...
The thing about CRTs is the different kinds. Quality across the board got raised as soon as the Trinitron patents expired.
dotmasks looked kinda messy more than sony's slotmask and this is the reason. Trinitron was the defacto CRT design to rule them all and Sony owned it.
Nah. Toshiba and Panasonic were right up there too.
@@scikoolaid slotmask? you mean aperture grill?
Unfortunately this happened late enough in the life cycle of CRTs that a not significant amount of aperture grille CRTs were produced. RPTV wasn't far off. In reality it's comparatively difficult to find an aperture grille TV in good working order that isn't a Sony.
Tridot has benefits. For example horizontal scrolling looks nicer on tridot, as you can experience weird moiré on sony tubes as vertical lines never follow the grill lines perfectly. Also 80 character text on home computers looks superior on tridot. On Trinitron these can be difficult to read as many vertical letter elements get lost in a blue or red vertical phosphor line.
I was born in 1983 in germany. As far back I can remember our TVs always had a RBG port (or SCART how we call it here) for VHS, DVD or consoles. Didn't know that this wasn't a big thing in the US. Great video :)
The Interlacing puts your brain into a special state where you enjoy what you're looking at more.
My dear, dear dude,
This was the single greatest, most comprehensive video I've ever watched on CRT TVs, retro games, and everything in between.
You somehow helped me learn something new even though I already understood the theoretical aspects of everything. Like, you actually showed how 480i works compared to 240p and why flickering exists. You covered so many things that I had never seen using actual examples. I can't imagine how many weeks it took you to make this video.
I shared this with about 15 people and I hope more people will like, comment, and subscribe your stuff. I have a retro room myself (which you can see in my latest video from a few months ago) and somehow watching your video made me even feel better about it. If you're ever in LA, reach out and lunch is on me.
Also, you have a particular tonality and enunciation in your voice that makes you come off incredibly sincere and honest. The closest other TH-camr I can compare to is The Proper People. They narrate their urban exploration videos with the same exact type of inunciation you have, which I find downright charming.
Thanks so much for producing this gem of a video and I look very much forward to more amazing content from you.
Hey thanks man, this has gotta be the single nicest comment I've read. The video took about 2 months to make btw.
@linustechtips
Hire this guy
Yeah, but he got some things wrong, like how CRTs are displaying half of the picture mainly because displaying the full picture at once would result in unpleasant or even harmful flicker, due to phosphors' light dying out faster than the tube can excite them.
Also, 7th Gen console game devs also expected players to have CRTs, like the PS3 and the Wii, since both have games with settings that "deflicker" the image, depending on your monitor region.
“Yeah but he got things wrong 🥸” SHUT YOU GOOFY EDITED COMMENT AHH UP 🤐
This video is really a gem
Devs absolutely used specific pixel placements to generate effects and blending that can only be seen on on CRTs (or sometimes with a CRT filter). If we had LCDs back then the raw pixels likely would have been different. Cool stuff.
We didn't have LCDs but we did have progressive scan CRTs. That's why I don't quite get the retro scene's love with CRTs. I was playing EGA and VGA games on progressive scan CRTs in the 80s and 90s. Devs were definitely using those as well when creating graphics. Shrug.
@@AntonioRodriguezSilver Progressive scan only eliminates interlaced video from the retro graphics. There's still everything else, like scanlines, colour bleeding, signal degradation, etc.
This is about consoles, not PCs. 480p Progressive Scan was never used to play consumer game consoles by the layperson until the 6th generation with the Dreamcast's VGA output. It's not like the 5th gen and down weren't progressive though, as most games from that time display in 240p, only using half the lines of interlaced 480i.
Finally, a much-needed video that explains in depth why CRT is very relevant in retro gaming, even down to the minute details that tend to get overlooked from the bigger TH-camrs.
I'd like to point out that there's one use case worth mentioning that wasn't covered in the video where the raw pixels look trumps over any kind of CRT filter, and it's for uploading/streaming to video sharing platforms like TH-cam.
Here, all videos go through the compression algorithm to get people watching one video without having to download a hundred of GBs worth of lossless video data. This includes chroma subsampling from RGB 4:4:4 and YCbCr 4:2:2 to YUV 4:2:0 that causes some detail loss crucial to conveying convincing CRT effects.
As a workaround, you could use 4K camera to capture some gameplay footage offscreen, but that might take the gameplay focus away from the viewer's attention. I'd like to see the ability to append an uncompressed CRT filter overlay through the .png file on top of the video that has raw pixels look, or even better, one that also pull the Black Frame Insertion trick whenever 120FPS becomes available on TH-cam.
Also, the part where Minecraft is output to a CRT seems like the end result is a progressive 240p video, which certainly isn't ideal. Had the source 480p/720p/1080p signal properly processed into an interlaced 480i, I bet that the otherwise cropped-down text would become more legible.
9:51 I like how you actually alternated the image at that frequency instead of just bulllshitting us. I can tell without even pausing, just by blinking.
I pulled out the old super Nintendo to show my 5 year old daughter and the delay from the buttons to the modern 55 inch TV was horrendous 😂
I couldn't even enjoy playing it. I tried explaining to my daughter and she was just having a blast anyways. Sweet video! I plan on getting a CRT sometime soon.
the lacking detail of older technology used to force our brains to fill in, what made them look magical, immersive, personal even, because everyone could have a different perspective on a scene, and every tv had its own quirks, colors and glitches. I played metal gear solid 3 on a crt a long time ago, it's still my favorite game and super nostalgic, it just looked so real to me, realer than any graphics nowadays look
That’s definitely part of it. When I draw sometimes I like to use a blurry brush so I can play with my imagination a bit. But I also think that they knew how to take advantage of the low resolution.
lol sure bro
There's a name for that: grid effect, it is even on Wikipedia. It also masks the jaggenes of diagonal lines and text smoother, as addressed by the video, but the "mind filling the black lines" is an actual thing.
No way this comment is getting up votes. Absolutely, positively as wrong as wrong can be.
@@andyboxish4436 I might be wrong explain
As someone who studies film and video games, I think that your use of the term "grain" is extremely relevant, even if technically inaccurate. CRT scanlines and phosphor bleed are, in my opinion, truly comparable to film grain for movies on actual film. Something about the feel of the media is lost when either are absent where they were historically.
They add CG "grain" to a lot of modern digital movies to try and make them look better. Digital looks lifeless and too video like for me. Nothing beats actual film.
It's not complicated. It adds noise to the image, where there previously was none. You know.... Noise. That stuff that you see literally everywhere every time you look at anything in the real world.
You could have left out your qualifier, you basically just said "as an average nerd. . ."
@@gamesandplanes3984 If you're regularly seeing noise in the real world, you might want to see an eye doctor.
@Yixdy I mean, someone with a PhD in media studies and peer-reviewed published papers on video games is a bit beyond an "average" nerd. 😆
One things is that emulators are still great. There are two reasons. For one you can hook up a PC or any device up to a VGA CRT and run them at 480p. That gets rid of the discrepancy of low res UI and videos and still allows you to benefit from stuff like upscaling. By running the game at a higher resolution and then downscaling it to 480p, you get cleaner edges because you are essentially Super Sampling the edges as it's a form of anti aliasing. For 6th gen games this is fantastic and it can look even better than real hardware. Some consoles could do this natively like the Xbox 360 and Sega Dreamcast as both have native VGA out. The GameCube and OG Xbox also work great on a VGA CRT as both can be converted from component to VGA and then can be displayed on them. It's so nice looking and you still get those nice scanlines on them. The only issue is that they must receive a 480p signal or higher otherwise you won't get a picture. There are relatively few VGA CRTs that accept a 15khz signal like 480i/240p.This can be mitigated either with modded software which can force 480p in all games or an external upscaler of a high quality.
The other point with emulation is that CRT shaders exist. There are some extremely high quality CRT shaders out on the market and I love to use them. They can almost become indistinguishable from a real CRT from the right distance and if you have a high enough resolution monitor. High quality CRT shaders at 1440p and higher are extremely nice and I don't play emulated games without them when they're 240p.
VGA CRT with fake scanlines @ 480p is a great option
This sounds like a lot of effort that needs to be put in to do what CRT TV's do natively. I understand that CRT TVs are difficult to find now but if you have access to one, it is definitely a much simpler option.
@@theenemy333 VGA monitors are great for dedicated emulation pc
@@mmpsp693 I'm not a big fan of VGA crts for emulation since they can't output the low res for the majority of platforms. They are stuck at a minimum of 640x480 60hz without some niche hacks that require certain video cards and software combinations.
Most retro consoles operate at 240p 15khz so everything will have to be upscaled to be displayed on a VGA CRT which at that point, why bother with a CRT if you are gonna be getting the same type of upscaling (line doubling and such) on an LCD or other digital display.
@@theenemy333 you can use fake scanlines and still get the motion clarity, no artifacts for games that use "non square" pixels, fast input and response, etc. Also, they can run at other frequencies, which are required for some arcade, old pc, and even the wonderswan color.
One thing, I had a friend with Epilepsy. Older displays weren't great for him because they increased the risk of seizures.
This is probably one of the best informative videos for casuals I have ever seen on a topic, I am so glad I came to this video first to learn more about this. Love your style, and thanks!
I am so glad the retro gaming community more and more are realizing the importance of CRTs
loll
@@kidrobot.Did you really "laugh out loud"? 🤔
not who you're talking to but I did, cuz I thought this was coming knowledge in the retro game community. was probably more of a guffaw than a laugh@@Hugme778
We've had a huge 34 inch CRT in our basement for nearly 22 years, still works thankfully but hasn't been plugged in for a long time, simply because CRTs aren't really "Energy Efficient". Which is why the moment you turn those suckers on, you're extracting at least 800 watts of power just to turn on the TV. Although what I do miss with modern displays compared to CRTs is the tingling feeling you place your finger on the CRTs and you can feel the statis as you glide or rub your finger side to side against the screen (felt so good back in the day).
@@SuperFlashDriver,
I don’t think it’s that much, I’ll test my KV-34XBR910…
FYI: RGB is very common on consumer TVs in Germany. I would say in Europe, but I don't know if they are common in every country here.
RGB SCART can be found on likely over 99% of European TVs from the nineties and 2000s. SCART became mandatory on all TVs in France from 1980 (I think), and it eventually became standard to put it on all TVs in Europe. There was basically no reason to not turn on RGB functionality as it didn't really cost extra and the set wouldn't be very competitive if it couldn't offer RGB, so only some very cheap portable sets from the nineties onward in Europe didn't have RGB.
Thanks for clearing that up! I know that you can find SCART/RGB on old TVs everywhere here, but I didn't know if that was the case for every country in Europe. (although I was expecting it)
Eyup, I own few CRTs with RGB on them in Finland, including Sony Trinitrons - I can't stress enough how incredible retro games look on them.
@@KonaKonaKaabisteru RGB definitely makes a very nice difference! Would love to get my hands on a decent Trinitron someday, but I am very satisfied with my Bang & Olufsen MX4200 which I lucked into getting. It gives an incredibly sharp RGB image.
SCART has this one disadvantage over component that it cannot output 480i. It can do 240p, but it can't do 480p for some reason.
random channel talking about crt for 1 hour popped on my recommendation. perfect!
Right? Same.
This video made me realise that true nostalgia for flat pixel art is rarer than I thought. It existed with the PC and DOS games where the CRT monitors were progressive scanning and much higher resolution while the games were still lower resolution: the pixels were very much visible.
not only old videogames looks great on crt's. Also old movies looks marvelous.
Same with handhelds. Emulated 3DS and PSP for example have ugly blocky pixels on the edges of everything at original resolutions. On their original displays they look so much better. Though I noticed a CRT shader also gets rid of the weird looking blocky pixels on emulated PSP, which is interesting as these games weren't intended for CRTs in the first place.
Since I never owned a console in my life, and my dad was a programmer, my own "retro" gaming is the 1988-1998 era of PC games though, and things there are completely different. You definitely had 480p CRTs as PC monitors, and PCs had graphics card related oddities like standard VGA 256 colour mode being 320x200 stretched to 4:3, rather than actual 240p.
As you can imagine (and somewhat mentioned at 43:44), there's a completely different set of challenges involved in making those look right on modern monitors.
Yeah I collect vintage PCs as well.
The best modern monitor I have to display 200p is a dell with 1920x1200 resolution. With it, I can display a 4:3 image (which would be 1600x1200) which is an integer multiplication of 320x200 *and* is also an integer multiplication of 320x240 !
However I wish there was a 4k version of this resolution (3840x2400) as this would allow me to display 640x400 and 640x480 with an integer scaling too ...
13:26 for anyone new to this topic, Gen 6 consoles are all capable of outputting 480p. The Xbox can output 720p on some games, and a very limited number of Xbox and PS2 games can even output 1080i.
None of these can be displayed on a consumer grade CRT, however. The Dreamcast could play most of its games in 480p over a VGA connected to a CRT computer monitor.
A few older consoles could output 480i as well. The N64's "hi-rez" is 480i. The Sega Genesis could do it. The Sonic 2 split screen multiplayer is 480i. The Sega Saturn had a bunch of 480i games.
Early PS3 models and I think all Xboxes 360 support analogue out and will play on a CRT in 480i since HDTVs were still not the norm when the 7th gen dropped.
All PS3 models support analog. I use my superslim in composite. It is great to play PS1 games in actual 240p not get disgustingly stretched to fit even 720p.
@@rac1equalsbestgame853 good to know. I have a 2nd generation fat PS3, the one that doesn't have 4 USB ports on the front. It has analogue out.
@@mscottjohnson3424 Same goes for all 360's.
Also the PS3 outputs analog even through HDMI. If you have a pre HDMI 2.0 cable the TV will have analog artifacts, just less obnoxious because it's HD.
My old af hdmi cable had the same analog artifacting as my PS2 does with the PS3 but not the PS4. And also looked worse on the 4k than the not even full 1080p oldie I main as expected from an analog situation.
@@rac1equalsbestgame853 if I remember correctly, the earliest Core models of the 360 didn't have an HDMI out at all, but I could be misremembering.
@@mscottjohnson3424 Yep. Launch 360's did not have HDMI. And the PS3 was sold with composite cables even later in it's life. The HDMI cable was whatever that rando laying around is.
The image quality of this Sony tv is insane! Thanks for sharing!
DAMN, one of the best videos on the topic! Even i who already into CRT gaming learned a lot from this. Thank you for a great time!
I always feel odd because I don't have that strong CRT nostalgia a lot of people seem to. I *love* the look of raw pixels on a clear screen. Even though I did grow up using CRTs up until well after the xbox 360 launched(I remember being unable to play FF13 because I couldn't read the text on a CRT), I still prefer looking at unfiltered pixels in emulators.
A high quality connection like component/RGB hooked to a CRT will give you that “raw pixel” look. It’s not exclusive to only emulators. I believe he shows it in the video at one point. A CRT image is not a fuzzy one, it can be incredibly sharp and defined especially if you consider PVMs and BVMs which are so sharp you could poke your eye out.
@@mmarshfairc3 Yeah, but at that point, you are spending hundreds of dollars, not to mention the space to have the physical hardware, a decent upscaler, and a good PVM.....or, you can emulate the sharp pixel look for practically free even with the cheapest computer or smartphone emulator.
@@mdjey2 my point wasn't that FF13 was particularly bad looking, I was just using it as a way to show that I was still using a CRT when it released
It's not just you, man. I actually remember asking my mom at around the age of 5 or 6 why TVs looked bad. Got my first LCD with the launch of the Wii in 2006 and never looked back.
@@zankamishima Wii looks better on a CRT with component.
I was a very late adopter of modern TVs, I kept our family CRT alive for as long as I could afford it, got it repaired when it really shouldn’t have been worth the effort, because I just hated modern TVs and how games looked on them, it felt uncanny.
while I do agree that CRT is the way to go, CRT filters and shaders within retroarch is enough for me to avoid the hassle. awesome video man
SCART was very common on CRT TVs in Europe.
And was much better than our rgb and vga outputs for the dreamcast (for the most part anyways.) now though we have DCdigital and can pretty much make any resolution work and not look like crap.
Purely anecdotal, but I think most people used a RF signal for NES/SNES/Genesis back in the day. I never even saw yellow/white/red cables until we got the N64 and PSX.
Yup, they all initially used RF cables. Although I do believe the Genesis Model 3 came with an A/V connection.
True, didn't ever see them as a kid in the 80's, i had an nes in 89, and my friend got the Genesis xmas of 89.
I have waited a long time for a video like this, as more and more people are streaming or making retro games, it hurts to see games now NOT the way you did when they were out fresh. Old games don't need to look worse than they did. Thankyou sir1
Developers often used much higher quality art for the arcade games in comparison to the home console releases because arcade cabinets were much more powerful than the home consoles up until around the 6th generation of consoles.
I attentively watched the first half of the video waiting for you to mention the sonic waterfall and was not disappointed
Only problem is the example he showed was literally just a filter on an emulator
Looking at your crt footage really takes me back. When I was really young I used to play NES games on an NES my family had sitting around in the basement along with one of those ancient box tvs from the 80s.
It REALLY cant be emphasized enough how much different of an experience it is playing these super old games on actual hardware and the actual telivisions they were made for. Its not a luxury anyone can experience obviously, nor is it convient at all, but if anyone has the chance they should absolutely take up on experiencing a game this way.
As a programmer, a pixel artist, and someone who started gaming in the 90's I prefer seeing pixel art on LCD/LED. I miss basically nothing about CRT monitors.
Some things may look better on CRT but I think its the exception not the rule. And when things look better on CRT its often simply because the original pixel art wasn't shaded by the artist. The CRT makes the images look like they're shaded automatically. Most devs do shade their pixel art today, which is why newer pixel art looks good on LED/LCD.
I know you are not from Europe, but SCART RGB is worth talking about. Here it came with all tv’s, And was until recently still used next to HDMI. I remember having near HD quality on tv decoders.
How useful is scart when you are still limited to the output type of the console? Modding wasn’t a thing back then.
@@boingaon Our first machines with SCART RGB out were a Philips P2000 (1981), BBC Micro (1982), Videopac G7200 (1983), MSX (1983), CPC (1984), Spectrum 128k (1985), Sega Master System (1987). Basically any machine targetted at the EU market. These were all hooked up over RGB Scart back in the day.
Another good thing about the interlaced video formats are, that they keep roughly the same perceived refresh rate,
while requiring half the pixel fill rate. Something old hardware was a bit more limited at.
Yep. "persistence of vision" is the phenomenon responsible for that. You brain basically blends them together.
I do wish i could have a crt, they are just super cool to me! And the technology is super interesting!
Go for walks around your neighborhood if you have large trash pickup I’ve went through 3 this way
@@bennoismsnot these days lol . I see them alot at thrift stores
check surplus sites near you, medical company bankruptcy auctions/liquidations, trash sites of an obscure place lol, calling into areas that have outdated equipment but can’t throw away (local radio/news stations, school IT departments, churches too lol)
There’s def a ton of possible methods. Just requires a fair share of effort put into it.
I got mine for legit $5 dollars on a medical surplus auction site near me.
OEV-203 (reskinned PVM-20M2MDU), and it’s damn good. Only luck of the draw for these sorts of places if it works or rather works well. Be sure to test it with something before the purchase if possible.
check marketplace! i found my sony trinitron kv model year 1990 for 30 bucks and it was recently repaired so shes got some years left
I learned so much from you! I couldn't never put words to the reasons why I felt my retro games looked so good on a CRT. You made this very digestible, even to a total tech novice such as myself. Thank you so very much! 🙏🙏
It tooks me about half of the video to get it was a 1h long video.
Very nice content, my gentleman.
Weighing in on the debate about how games should be consumed based on the developer's intentions: The developer will always design the game around the expected means of consumption, so the way a game is meant to be consumed is based on the most common consumer television setup in the homes of consumers. In the early 90's it was SD 240p/480i CRT televisions. In the early 2000's it was 720p/1080i flat-screen CRT/Plasma/LCD displays. And now, it is 4K LCD or OLED panels utilizing post-render upscaling with advanced scaling algorithms. Take the PS5 as an example. It rarely outputs 4K footage directly from the render pipeline due to GPU performance limitations and often relies on upscaling APIs produced by AMD like FSR to feed a reasonably clean 4K image to the television so you don't have to hope that your television's built-in upscaler can cope with that kind of video processing. The most obvious way to see that developers tailor their game asset designs to the display technology is to look at the way that they design the sprites and background art for games on the SNES vs. the GBC or GBA. They were around at nearly the same time, but the pixel art is quite different. GBC and GBA simply embraced the fact that the smaller screen format would make the individual pixels less blocky and focused more on crisp outlines and strong, blockier coloring and shading methods because the screen wouldn't be able to fix it for them. Embracing a particular art style because the technology limits you makes the art style seem intentional and, thus, ageless. Take Legend of Zelda: Windwaker as a prime example. It's simpler, posterized design language still reads as clean and modern even now, while other games released at the same time that might have looked good on a CRT have become significantly less appealing when viewed on an LCD. It's all about the art style and how versatile it can be made for different display technologies. Do GBC and GBA games tend to look better on CRT televisions compared to their built-in LCD display? Well, yeah. Pixel art is MEANT for CRT. Everything else is a compromise.
Having said that, while most developers would prefer that you consume their media in the format they designed it for so you can have the best experience, I can confidently say that any artist out there will be happy if you can appreciate their art in whatever format you can view it. So if you can only emulate the game but you find that to be enjoyable, then the developer would be happy with that outcome.
emulators can really get old games to look like they did if you want to.
@@zoltanz288 They can certainly get VERY close, and for the vast majority of people it's more than enough for their needs. It's just those people who really love retro gaming who will want to purchase the original hardware to play it on as well as the original displays to view it on for the best possible experience. Buy according to your interest, financial situation, and space availability dictates.
Bonus points for people who kept their GTX900 series cards which feature analog output over DVI-I. It's the best of both worlds since emulating the game systems that you'd really want to see on CRTs is something you could easily use an older PC for, since they're not hugely resource hungry compared to modern AAA titles. It's really only PS3 and XBox 360 where the emulation needs faster processors and good GPU acceleration. DVI-I to component adapters do exist and are passive adapters, so there's no additional latency from a signal converter in the mix, so you only have to deal with whatever latency your emulator adds to inputs.
RetroArch shaders are excellent at replicating the look and feel of old CRT TVs, adding that authentic retro gaming vibe.
They effectively mimic scanlines, curvature, and color bleeding, making classic games appear much closer to how they
would on vintage displays. With a wide variety of customizable shaders such as CRT-Royale or CRT-Easymode they offer
a range of options to suit different preferences, from subtle enhancements to more dramatic effects. This level of accuracy
adds nostalgia and enhances the visual experience for retro gaming enthusiasts.
As you said, the artists did work with the individual pixels.
But also as you alluded to much earlier, since the most common displays were CRTs that also meant the monitors they used to *make* the pixel art were still CRTs. So effectively what they were seeing at creation time is closer to what people were seeing playing it at the time than they are to people making pixel art now. Barring the artists making their pixel art on a CRT as well.
They did design for consumer CRT's and embrace the CRT limits to their benefit. Stories about this go back very early, but most noticable are the hurdles taken by Atari 2600 designers for various games to overcome sprite limits, the way how a lightgun works with Duckhunt and the famous waterfalls in Sonic the Hedgehog.
Still midway through the video, but here are my two cents:
Most crt sets are fine
Composite on a crt is good enough for the majority of consoles
Motion clarity is the reason to get a crt
CRT are almost required for games with non 4:3 "pixel aspect ratio", such as nes, Snes.
Wii are awesome on a crt because it can emulate tons of consoles
Play however you want to, just enjoy
Phenomenal video, only one aspect missing. A major reason why pixel art naturally looked more "blended" on CRTs has to do with the temporal nature of how the individual phosphor elements were energized, then darkened (by themselves) with time. Thats also why most of the dithering works so well also. Deeper blacks come as a function of the fact that there is no "back lighting" necessary, the energized phosphor creates it's own light output.
I also have to throw this extra comment, if you want to make a video about the state of PCSX2, please make sure to grab the latest version (2.1), as what you used in this video seems to still be the ANCIENT 1.6... PCSX2 has radically changed both visually and performance wise, by adopting the Duckstation Interface ( thanks Stenzek ), and by making is so convenient to have per-game profiles for nearly everything.
Rgb connections can literally be found on any european consumer crt. Rgb was used everywhere here.
Yeah, I don't know what that guy is going on about. Because even in America, there was plenty of TVS that did our RGB before high-definition, they were just expensive.
I grew up playing 80s and 90s games on CRT TVs, as did my friends. In the early 2000's we all got into emulating (particularly SNES and MAME) in a big way, and one of the first things we were blown away by was how much clearer and cooler the pixel art looked to us on our flat screen monitors than our old tvs. Granted my experience is from a small friend group (and thus probably fairly unrepresentative of any wider held opinions out there), but I do always find it funny all these decades later to see people pining for the 'cooler' and 'better' look of the CRT monitors, when everyone I knew at the time was glad to be rid of them. I can see why people like the look on the CRT TVs, but personally I still find the look of playing my old favourites on modern monitors preferable.
Wow. I was amazed by the fact that you have 60p and 60i. It's true that many people say a CRT can only display 30fps, but it's not true. I also use a CRT for my retro games. Here in Europe we mainly use SCART which is a very good quality. A CRT has these rich colors and more depth in them. Everyone should see this video. Thanks!
I still have my 36" Toshiba CRT TV from 2007 and it works like a champ! Great video and all hail to the CRT!
Interlacing was actually invented to reduce flickering as well as saving bandwidth. You would get more flickering without it actually.
Interlacing was invented when focus was so bad that the lines within a field overlap to create a homogeneous area at all intensities. Horizontally, it would have been better (for computers) to have a sharp focus.
This especially goes for DS games on DS, as well. Playing pokemon pearl feels great; the pixel art is amazing and the music playing through the speakers it was specifically designed for leaves me speechless sometimes. Gameboy too! I've emulated games for these systems and the experience is just not the same.
I wish there was a simple answer to what TV you should play games on... So many things to consider... Excellent video through!
The simplest answer is to play on what looks best to YOU, not someone on TH-cam or Reddit.
this video has everything, i just want to add for those interested in sound, composite cable sound is way more atmospheric on crt speakers especially if they are big, it's just a soft fuzzy sound with deep rumbling bass, sounds like a boombox kind of, and it adds sooo much to the feel
Damn this video is really amazing! One of my favorites! Reminds me of the 8 bit guy! Looking him up guys!
In the UK and I would assume other Pal regions "RGB" or as we called it scart, Was pretty much the standard from the mid 80's. When I originally got a PS3 we hooked it up via scart on our old sony 1080i plasma TV. That TV played excellently with legacy devices as well so for me at least the transition was (expensive but) relatively painless. I just laugh looking back at how we worried it might fall over, being "so thin and light". Thing was a monster. Also apologies I don't recall the model number, I will have a look and may edit it in if found.
Sony KDE-P37XS1. I think not 100%. Had 3 scart no hdmi and is chonky so close enough.
And in the west many games were designed and developed on Amiga (even the Doom monsters). The best for ported to consoles which came out later.
Hey Godpuu...Great video. Thanks for all the insight it was very helpful. l just got back into retro gaming myself just last month. l already got a 27" CRT TV, and luckily still have all of my original games/consoles!! lts like being a kid all over again!! Having a blast at 48!! Gaming the past 15 years has taught me, substance, depth and charm beats shallow eye candy every time!!
The problem with nostalgia...we didn't grow up with this very nice looking CRT image. 90% of us probably had a standard Zenith/Magnavox TV with our systems hooked up via RF and all kinds of noise and interference with important things like lifebars being cut off in the corners. Your average gamer back then didn't have access to PVMs, or high quality CRT TVs even unless you were upper class. I was blown away at how crisp and clean pixels could look via emulation on a high resolution monitor. I could never go back. And buying a PVM/Upscaler/SCART/RGB connection isn't "going back" its trying to re-write time.
Fair, but I dont think this video is about going back. This video specifically seems to handle what the theoretical best-looking way to play video games from generation 3-7 is, with some consideration for how they play.
I have to agree. Used half of my life CRTs, and I freaking love nowadays being able to play my childhood classics in an enormous clean, crisp image. Is just awesome, for me.
Actually, people did. It's called arcades. This video is dumb and ignorant. This is a clear case of grass is always greener. If you could go back in time and show people the clean raw pixel look, people would have desired it over what they had then with wonky geometry. People used to actually pay companies like Redmond cable to make cables that let you connect the Genesis to a computer monitor for that clean raw pixel look.
The only real advantage CRTs have ever had is low persistence, but even that isn't a straight advantage because it came at the cost of headache inducing flicker. I can't even play games for more than around 30 minutes on 60hz CRTs anymore because the flickering is so annoying.
That's why I kind of laugh at people who tell me I gotta get some sort of hardware that costs a few hundred bucks to display the true look and when I look at my rigged setup which uses a handheld emulator, hdmi to composite then composite to VCR and VCR to RF, I'm just like.. It looks exactly like I remember it because this is what I had. I didn't have a PVM. I had a shitty little 13 inch TV when I was a kid that I bought from walmart with my OWN money when the larger set that was given to me when I was a child broke down. I love my current setup. It's a 13 inch sharp that was given to me for free. I had the VCR already, so you really can't beat free when you're getting into a hobby or to relive some nostalgia.
unless you lived in europe, where scart was the standard
I’ve only been playing my emulated games with the most basic settings (so no CRT or composite effects), but after watching this video, it makes me really want to see how these old games were intended to be seen. A lot of this imagery is quite beautiful!
despite being born in 2002, I grew up with a CRT TV, and used it until it broke. I remember getting a PS3 for one of my birthdays and ended up playing Skyrim on it. Some text was cut off, but i didn't mind it that much.
I personally don't really care if Retrogames are displayed on a modern or a CRT display, what really matters is if the game is good and fun to play.
Wait, you never had SCART on CRTs in the US? It was the main connection here in Europe for many kind of Devices most used by VHS and DVD Players. Only Game Consoles rarely used it.
I believe some of more advanced CRT supported 480p. And you said that 240p jump the another line and this is the scanline effect. I am not sure, but 240p seems to duplicated each line. And scanlines are just the space between each CRT line, with different sizes for each CRT model.
I'm glad the kids are starting to understand the beauty of this literal artform. One of the most impressive uses of it at 33:46 was the waterfalls in Sonic; on emulator it looks like blue lines over the background. On CRT it looks like an alpha channel over the parallax background. Amazing.
These kids need to stay away. We don’t need more people interested in retro hardware that has limited supply.
Interesting ...
NTSC 60Hz was the standard in most places
But here in Europe PAL was the standard with only 50Hz , that said our TVs in the 90s had most commonly Scart RGB connectors and / or Composite by default , Component and S-Video were super rare.
There were also 100Hz TVs in europe but they werent great for gaming because they showed the same frame twice , which caused input lag.
50 and 100 Hz were basicly the standard here , because the movie / film industry around the globe captured video material in 24fps , at least thats how i remember it , but please correct me if im wrong.
Anyways , between NTSC and PAL , PAL did noticeably lag behind NTSC when it came to speedrunning or reaction times. So when you needed it for competitive reasons you would most of the time go with NTSC. Unless you intentionally needed the lag for some speedrun glitches , then you would use the PAL version.
9:54 if you blink during this part of the video, you can actually still see the fields alternating. It’s amazing to see this even after TH-cam encoding
CRTs rock for visuals, even when a game wasn't designed around it. There is just something about its quirks that really looks phenomenal in-context, like the colorwarping giving depth to solid colors, the colorblending being the coolest anti aliasing ever and certain colors coming out more vibrant and saturated. Sadly, the technology is very much dying and people like me barely grew up with these displays due to their physical issues that made LCDs the new standard and it is unlikely that there will be many to be found in even 20 years, as old units can easily break.
And that is honestly why I love the current era. While we aren't quite there with getting the perfect retro gaming experience or even replicating the visuals of most CRT televisions 1:1, we are getting ever closer almost every single day and there is a little something for everyone. For example, CRT filters in emulators are intended for native res as that is what it would have looked like originally, but I really love the look of it in upscaled HD. Much sharper overall and yet still doing wonders for the parts(Like UI or some backgrounds, etc) that otherwise would look blurry or pixelated by comparison because they don't upscale. Kirby's Return to Dreamland is a magic game that always looks good regardless of what you do, but combining it with any filter and one of the three original colorspaces genuinely blew my socks off. I hope newer emulators eventually get CRT filters and color space correction for fun, I'd really like to experiment with using it on games that never natively had access to it, like 3DS games and such. If the games happen to jell well with giving them the "retro TV experience", then that may as well be a remaster of sorts.
Only if you think video game history began with third generation home consoles. I remember the 1970s. Atari, Intellivision, et al. look vastly better the sharper they are, so there is the exception. Also, obviously, Vectrex games and arcade games like Tempest and Battle Zone look better on a vector display.
That's why I have spent extra effort reproducing to insane accuracy a digital image of the Sony Trinitron KVM1620B, that we've owned since 1991, but got stuck in a boot loop recently and needs repairs ontop of a faulty color mode in composite input...
That CRT supported PAL, Sécam and RGB up to 60Hz, but not NTSC ( needs parts soldered ), and the phosphor coating contains 443 continuous RGB triads vertically, and a screen aspect ratio of 1.3645:1 ( 300x220mm ).
To replicate it natively on a 1920x1080p monitor, all I have to do is ensure that the drawn space is upscaled by 3 exactly to make each pixel column deal with 1/3rd of a triad.
Results a resolution of 1329x972. Then I can draw the CRT around that screen size and crop to 1080p at the end ( in a 4K monitor, the whole CRT becomes visible )
Sure, the relatively small size and triad count means this CRT will usually downsample the horizontal resolution of a lot of games, in 5th and 6th gen ( specifically those 512x256 PS1 games! ), but that's exactly how i remember my games and VHS looking in my childhood.
In practicality, I use Reshade with my crt overlay as a png on top, then i use various shaders to resize the contents to match available screenspace, compress the sides to give a cylindrical distortion that matches the CRT shape even more and finally CRTRoyale itself to create the triads ( and thanks to the png exacly 443 will be visible, regardless of overscan )
If i'm also playing a low res game in the 216-288p range, i'll add a little scanline shader to show those seams. in higher res, the lines are so densely packed you don't see them.
Still, it's important to note that being from 1991, that CRT was powerful enough to display 480p60 signals, unlike standart definition CRTs from before. This was mostly observed during the last decade of CRTs.
Extra for 21:00 -> Yes, for the USA, RGB is rare, but is extremely common in Europe! The plug itself is called "Scart" or "Péritel" and doesn't necessarily mean RGB ( you can send a composite signal through a scart input on a CRT with an adapter if you want, and ths signal will not be RGB ). This also means that european releases of consoles like the SNES and Gamecube ( see 49:00 ) also support RGB and 480p ( more like 528p for the GC itself ) without having to use the Digital Out, you can just opt for Scart RGB. Same for the PS2!
All in all, it's a very well detailed video, at least when it comes to the NTSC side of the world. Some comparisons with PAL or at least mentions of differences would be helpful too!
RGB scart was very common in the UK / Pal territories
Although for the majority of the life of the SNES console I played with RF and was happy with that.
The only time I considered an RGB scart was when a 50/60hz switch was installed and games were displaying in black + white
What I've noticed when it comes to the look of raw pixels vs through a CRT is that the colours look different.
I've seen various colour hacks of Mega Drive games but when viewing these games through a CRT they look quite good and accurate when comparing to their Arcade counterparts. (Through a MiSTer).
I'm used to the CRT look so that's what looks accurate to me when it comes to retro games.
Also the whole raw pixel thing only really applies to console games.
PCs of the day that used CRT Monitors had high resolutions up to 1280x1080 in progressive scan.
It was a shock to me to see the graphics on Nesticle through a PC Monitor back then
Finally I understand how I used to believe that game graphics were better in our old TVs! You gracefully lifted the feel of Mandilla effect over our entire generation! I am so glad that the self gaslight disappeared.
You are a hero will done!
I'll never forget when I first got an HDTV and tried playing my PS2 games on it. I remember seeing the crappy, blocky pixels and thinking "This is HD?!"
Makes me realize how long it's been since I've seen anything on a CRT screen; some of those shots really put a lump in my throat, seeing those old games how I did when I was a kid. Thanks for sharing, great video and makes me want to hit up my local yard sales and flea markets to find one of these old things!
As someone who's old enough to have experienced CRTs back when they were not just dominant but pretty much the only popular tech for TVs let me tell you that the average TV was kinda crap when it comes to image quality, a good chunk of your opinions seem to be colored by experiencing mostly nice TVs but back in the day you'd have been stuck with something similar to that first mediocre CRT TV you picked up, at least most of the time.
From what I remember the nicest experiences I had with CRTs were PC monitors rather than TVs since those tended to have higher (sometimes significantly higher) resolutions and much better picture quality, when I emulated SNES games on a PC in the early 2000's I was genuinely taken aback by just how good they could look after messing with the emulator settings for a while. And let's just say that emulating Neo Geo games on a CRT monitor is something I actually miss.
That said I moved away from CRTs as soon as the chance presented itself and never looked back, for all the nice features they had they gave me horrible headaches after using them for a few hours that simply don't happen with modern displays even if I sit in front of a screen for hours on end. But that might have to do with my specific type of astigmatism.
I have a Samsung Syncmaster 955DF, it's a real 4:3 1440p (1392p) CRT monitor.
Motion clarity on current displays is garbage, and colors are way off on LCDs and any OLED that isn't QD-OLED or AMOLED.
I dislike CRT TVs. 480i is worse clarity than 480p, there is color convergance and geometry issues. My 32 inch Sony Trinitron KV TV from 2002 looks
like crap vs my Syncmaster monitor.
My Syncmaster is so sharp that text looks way, WAY better than a 1080p LCD i have.
Crt is far better
Rubbish
@@danielporter3763 It depends on the CRT, not 480i standard definition interlacing crap.
im with ya. i also grew up with crts, both shitty and a few good ones, and i never want to go back. games have always looked better emulated for me. i cant go back to rgb cables again, ive tried. just no. the kids can have the old shit crts and cables.
Awesome video, thanks for making it. I started gaming in the mid-late 80s on the NES and I've been playing ever since. I remember 10-15 years ago trying to play NES and SNES games on a flat screen TV and it just looking like garbage. I thought to myself, there's no way the games used to look like this. The only thing I had known at the time about modern TVs with retro games was the input lag; I didn't yet learn about all the visual components. I'm so glad people like you are making videos like this. I feel like people my age have been vindicated in our belief that the pixel games back then really DID look much better that people realize.
I always though CRT filters were just for nostalgia. Now I understand why they exist at all. This was an amazing watch!!!
I have to admit I don't really miss CRTs. I used them more than half of my life, and being able to play the classics of my childhood nowadays, emulated in a glorious gigantic sharp image... I don't know. Is heaven for me.
Probably because you lived when CRTs were actually around. This kiddo here is doing the equivalent of a hipster saying why vinyls are better than CDs or digital, because they're rarer and make him feel like he's special. Well, he's sure some kind of special anyways ;)
I'd rather have a sharp and pixelated image as opposed to a blurry but smooth image. I want to be able to see EVERY pixel in the best quality possible. That's why I got HDMI converters for both my PS2 and Wii and hooked them up to an HDTV. While it's not exactly HD, it's still crystal clear image quality considering the games run at either 480i or 480p.
Also, I do NOT miss how heavy old CRTs were. You had to have multiple people carry it around, especially if it was an HD, widescreen CRT. Those could weigh as much as 200 lbs.
@chaptap8376 Yeah im old enough to remember switch. I preferred and still prefer higher resolution more compact design. I do wish tech would get good qualities of crt into modern display without concessions.
Modern hi-def televisions are obviously far superior to CRT. However, as someone who definitely was around during the CRT era (my entire childhood and through college), I don't think it's a hipster view to prefer CRT for retro gaming. It actually is better in my opinion. Sure, a modern tv has a better picture, but the dimensions of the game, the look, the brightness, sharpness, etc look proper on a CRT for old games and only old games. For everything else thet are garbage, but for old games I actually prefer them. Old games on a modern ratio screen don't look right and look stretched.
@@100percentSNAFU Lots of HDTVs, even today, have an option to fix the aspect ratio. You can usually select from either 4:3 or 16:9.
I mean it really just comes down to the games we're designed around a world that used CRT's. There's enough improvements and tech now that you can easily enjoy older games via emulators and modern equipment. I at least do as someone who grew up on all that stuff, it's just so much more convenient.
But the old setup wins on energy use. Nothing beats my PC Engine with a 14inch Sony Trinitron. 40W total for a perfect experience.
I despise scanlines. I would much prefer the pixels standing out and being crisp to having hundreds of sections of my game just be black lines running through everything. Also, playing a retro game on anything but PC is just weird to me, you get the best of all words by doing that with emulators, they can smooth over the sharpness without lines being cut through the image everywhere.
I once saw the Snes version of Street Fighter 2 running on a PVM with RGB in a Circuit City many years ago. I've been trying to figure out how that quality was achieved for a long time and now I know. Thank you.
26:34 One of the best image quality comparisons Ive seen, one is flat and bright, one is dim and has the suggestion of more detail (like it's more 3D actually).
Configure your upscaler to behave like a CRT, and you're good :)
"what developers think" this CRT effect wasnt really in the consciusness back in the day, ppl were aware it gets a bit smeary but thats about it. There were NO LCD screens to compare against.
For Audiophiles this is the same as well, recordings were made for the speakers of the day and therefore sound best through the equipment of the time period. Obviously, this is something they attempt to fix when remastering. I was born in 81, but growing up my parents had a rather nice stereo system and turntable; When I put on Fleetwood Mac or Simon & Garfunkel, I felt like I was sitting in the studio next to them. No digital version has ever sounded as good.
The difference was in the mixing/mastering process. Once the majority switched to digital, everything started getting brick limited/compressed to hell.
Back then you just tried to play it through as many different types of drivers as possible and shoot for a happy medium.
There were also mono/stereo mixes done back then.
The way you say things like people are supposed to *gasp* makes me laugh haha…every time you make a dramatic pause I react with “ya…what’s strange about that?”. It’s always eye opening going to channels run by kids (people born in the late 90’s and on) and the shock and awe over the things we considered normal. I do not envy you kiddo, you missed the boat on growing up in a good decade man. It’s always a good feeling to hear kids like yourself say how envious they are of people who grew up in the 90’s.
In my early childhood I played a bunch of SNES, but then starting in my teens I also played emulated SNES, so I grew strangely accustomed to the raw pixel look. Personally, I have to agree that the smoothening of the raw pixel look through CRT does give it more character.
Interestingly though, I told my girlfriend (who's a bit of a gamer but not hardcore) that I was watching this video, and showed her the CRT vs. raw pixel examples, expecting that the superiority was crystal clear. Instead she said "I think both of them have their charm". It was interesting to hear a completely unbiased view and a reminder that all of this is, in the end, subjective.
After hearing your thesis and listening to most of the body of the essay, I have to say, you make some good points, but I'm not convinced. I remember switching to emulation on a laptop screen and being much more impressed by how clear and crisp all the pixels were. The idea that it was too sharp to be aesthetically pleasing was something I never understood. Perhaps it's just a taste thing, or perhaps you'll get me in the second half of the essay.
silent after the chrono trigger pic
@@ZACHaDN Oh yeah, I forgot to watch the rest. Thanks, stranger.
I think it depends largely on the console and game being emulated. Raw pixel SNES sprites don't look so bad. PS1 graphics look like absolute shit.
@@VikingKong. Those are two very different systems, fella. Are you maybe talking about the Mega Man X series? Those are probably the only two directly comparable video games since they're both 2d, but at the same time, there's also a lot of artist evolution going on between the earlier and later games.
Also, thanks, I got distracted again and forgot to watch the rest.