Wow, thanks so much for this totorial! I'm getting into CRT's in 2022 for the first time since back in the PS2 era, and I'm emulating Twilight Princess at 3840x480p on my newly acquired Diamondtron VX1120. The picture's a bit dim because it's seen quite a lot of use I think, but my goodness does this look amazingly like I remember. (I used to be lucky enough to play my games on a Sony Trinitron back in the day)
@@BumboBoy The same reason that PS5 games still target ~4K rendering when outputting to a 1080p display: more data-typically refered to as "Super-Sampling." 640x480 at 4:3 aspect ratio contains 307,200 pixels with identical horizontal length as vertical length per pixel, resulting in pixels which are square. Meanwhile, 3840x480 uses the same number of vertical lines, but 6 times more horizontal pixels. This way, the horizontal pixels are undistinguishable, meaning vertical scanlines can be retained, while keeping horizontal pixel jutter... physically smaller, and therefore essentially unnoticable. In short, it's just more HD, but still aesthetically pleasing af.
i also wanted to add that if you're using an ATI or AMD card, then CRU will most likely not work, because the driver low-level blocks any unusual resolutions. you can add the resolution in CRU but it won't switch to it. you need to use CRT emudriver (it's a modified AMD driver that allows it to output unusual and very low resolutions), then use the bundled vmmaker tool to add custom 31khz resolutions for all the different consoles, the list of resolutions can be found in the libretro forums, the post is named "15khz crt documentation wiki". only difference is to create once you've done that, the resolutions become selectable in retroarch and actually work.
Cheers dude, I had to sell my Sony PVM 20M2MDE to help with a vet bill so having to use my PC CRT. Glad to see I can get scanines without darkening the image.
If you opt to use Linux with an X11 desktop environment, you actually don't even need to set custom resolutions. Just enable the "CRT Switchres" option in the settings and it will automatically take care of it for you.
Is there anyway you can make a proper tutorial on how to figure out CRU settings for any monitor? I’m not understanding how one would figure out the values for front/back porch and so on.
You might get quick hiccups from unmatched game to monitor hertz but still get no ghosting or you still get smooth but quick glitch every second from game trying to keep up.I get glass smooth by matching all my games to 60 hertz monitor with 60 hertz games.no hiccups.full liquid frames.I prescale each games pixels to match my scanlines.i do have videos of my matched scanlines.
Hey, thank you so much for the video, I managed to make it work and looks neat, the only issue I have is that the vertical scrolling is tearing, horizontal scrolling is ok but vertical tears somehow, thx again for your vid
Thanks bro. Works! Only problem I have is that the video is super sharp! Which is good lol but I just wish the graphics were low and had the phosphor glow. You know what I mean?
there is nothing wrong with this tutorial, but you still might not want to do this on a PC CRT. the problem is that the thicker the scanlines, the darker the image, and PC CRTs are much usually much dimmer than TVs to begin with. i found 640 x 480 to be a good tradeoff between good brightess and the authentic scanline look.
Is Interlaced resolution not working on my Samsung syncmaster 997MB because i dont have anything on extension blocks in CRU??? im using direct vga connection, no adapters.
I'm trying to achieve this with a DP or HDMI to VGA adapter. Are you using a similar setup where the original signal is digital? If yes, what converter are you using? It seems that some adapters do not work with this kind of 240p signal.
Welcome. Do you need a specific pc for proper operation or is it enough, for example, a laptop with an external CRT monitor connected via vga? What retro arch version is required?
I'm actually using a lenovo t540p with a haswell cpu and Nvidia gt 730m. I chose this setup to demonstrate even low end hardware can give you great results
not blaming u or the program makers but after using cru and making the resolution my laptop perma bluescreened and i had 2 reinstall windows thank god it's just something on the side from my main pc
I copied everything you did and whenever I launch retro arch on my crt it displays the same as my windows home screen and It’s all stretched out to 3840
@@juaquindeanda3316 Running games in 240p like this to display on your 1080p TV would be very counterproductive, the 320x240 signal probably wouldn’t be accepted by your TV and if it did it would mishandle then signal at 480i and ruin the image quality, you would probably end up with a very blurry image. This technique is mostly useful for just CRT monitors
@@juaquindeanda3316 The problem here is that HDTVs need to scale the 240p resolution to 1080p (or 4K, whatever the native resolution is.) and most displays do a very blurry scale, similarly to if you set TH-cam to 240p on a HDTV. This technique is designed for CRT displays that don’t need to scale anything, they will display whatever resolution you give them that meets certain requirements. It’s usually possible to output 240p into a HDTV but some HDTVs won’t accept it over HDMI, DVI, VGA, or component video cables. There are devices that can scale 240p to a higher resolution and do a much sharper scale that will look better, but they can be expensive and are mainly useful for playing real retro consoles, running a PC emulator into a scaler then into a HDTV isn’t worth it as most emulators can scale the game to 1080p equally well when configured correctly. SNES, Genesis, and NES emulators (basically any emulator for a console before the PS1) will always run at 240p internally and then scale it, and most of them can be configured to scale it correctly, for 3D console emulation you would need to configure it to run at native resolution before scaling.
@@exeacua windows doesn't really allow 15khz output, but you can try using crtemUdriver if you have a compatible AMD gpu. I used to do that, but Mister FPGA really makes it obsolete these days.
While it looks nice when everything is still I don't agree that it's the pinnacle this technique has a major downside that noone talks about. motion. 60fps games on a 120hz impulsed display (crt) causes double images in motion. which pretty much ruins the beautiful motion of a crt. The only way to counter this is by using black frame insertion which will half brightness.
@@BahnYukiThe only thing that can cancel out the bad motion is bfi unfortunately. It doesn't matter how you slice it showing double frames is never good on impulsed displays.
@@BahnYuki Sure it's fine not trying to shit on it. I just thought it was worth mentioning, I have tried both and ended up just preferring scandoubled 240p.
hi thx for your video it's really helping me out rigth now in setting up a crt monitor myself. i just can't get the picture to look right, would you be able to say whats wrong if you see it? would really appreciate the help edit: got it working now with 60Hz not 120Hz also tested for 640x480 but then i got a vertically doubled picture on the crt. can this be fixed with the right porches and sync values? i was surprised to get a picture at all to be honest at 480p on this crt TV (not PC monitor)
You have either an ED CRT or HD CRT, compatible with 31khz, that's why you can get 480p content to display on it. A regular SD CRT would not be able to do so.
@@BahnYuki I'm going to try out 2 more but from what I've played so far yeah it is smoother than on 1. I did a blind test for input lag and I couldn't tell the difference in sexy parodious on beetle saturn with no runahead. With runahead on an emu that supports it I imagine it may help those who feel this lag. Edit: I want to emphasize that it is smoother. 1 was still good but 2 looked as smooth as my crt tv.
This is a very innscurate guide, not show every step and not show where to find exact values and where to find them for other monitors...or yours works for all? Also you not show how do you have setting up RetroArch when it looks like sh1t (before resolution set), there is a way to do it? And the most important thing ..how do you f return to original resolution after switching? You can't read nothing on desktop.
![How to Play Shovel Knight on a CRT Display [Pixel Perfection]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/R7yK1TYdBY8/mqdefault.jpg)
Wow, thanks so much for this totorial! I'm getting into CRT's in 2022 for the first time since back in the PS2 era, and I'm emulating Twilight Princess at 3840x480p on my newly acquired Diamondtron VX1120. The picture's a bit dim because it's seen quite a lot of use I think, but my goodness does this look amazingly like I remember. (I used to be lucky enough to play my games on a Sony Trinitron back in the day)
Why do 3840x480? Why not just do 640x480 which your CRT should support natively?
@@BumboBoy The same reason that PS5 games still target ~4K rendering when outputting to a 1080p display: more data-typically refered to as "Super-Sampling."
640x480 at 4:3 aspect ratio contains 307,200 pixels with identical horizontal length as vertical length per pixel, resulting in pixels which are square.
Meanwhile, 3840x480 uses the same number of vertical lines, but 6 times more horizontal pixels. This way, the horizontal pixels are undistinguishable, meaning vertical scanlines can be retained, while keeping horizontal pixel jutter... physically smaller, and therefore essentially unnoticable.
In short, it's just more HD, but still aesthetically pleasing af.
i also wanted to add that if you're using an ATI or AMD card, then CRU will most likely not work, because the driver low-level blocks any unusual resolutions. you can add the resolution in CRU but it won't switch to it. you need to use CRT emudriver (it's a modified AMD driver that allows it to output unusual and very low resolutions), then use the bundled vmmaker tool to add custom 31khz resolutions for all the different consoles, the list of resolutions can be found in the libretro forums, the post is named "15khz crt documentation wiki". only difference is to create once you've done that, the resolutions become selectable in retroarch and actually work.
Cheers dude, I had to sell my Sony PVM 20M2MDE to help with a vet bill so having to use my PC CRT. Glad to see I can get scanines without darkening the image.
Thank you so much! I never dreamed this was possible
If you opt to use Linux with an X11 desktop environment, you actually don't even need to set custom resolutions. Just enable the "CRT Switchres" option in the settings and it will automatically take care of it for you.
Is there anyway you can make a proper tutorial on how to figure out CRU settings for any monitor? I’m not understanding how one would figure out the values for front/back porch and so on.
Just use automatic crt settings
Did that with a ibm e74 a couple weekends ago. Love it.
You might get quick hiccups from unmatched game to monitor hertz but still get no ghosting or you still get smooth but quick glitch every second from game trying to keep up.I get glass smooth by matching all my games to 60 hertz monitor with 60 hertz games.no hiccups.full liquid frames.I prescale each games pixels to match my scanlines.i do have videos of my matched scanlines.
Hey, thank you so much for the video, I managed to make it work and looks neat, the only issue I have is that the vertical scrolling is tearing, horizontal scrolling is ok but vertical tears somehow, thx again for your vid
Thanks bro. Works! Only problem I have is that the video is super sharp! Which is good lol but I just wish the graphics were low and had the phosphor glow. You know what I mean?
Can you make an updated video with 480i games like from ps2 with nice scanlines with an emulator just like this video?
there is nothing wrong with this tutorial, but you still might not want to do this on a PC CRT. the problem is that the thicker the scanlines, the darker the image, and PC CRTs are much usually much dimmer than TVs to begin with. i found 640 x 480 to be a good tradeoff between good brightess and the authentic scanline look.
Is Interlaced resolution not working on my Samsung syncmaster 997MB because i dont have anything on extension blocks in CRU??? im using direct vga connection, no adapters.
I'm trying to achieve this with a DP or HDMI to VGA adapter.
Are you using a similar setup where the original signal is digital? If yes, what converter are you using? It seems that some adapters do not work with this kind of 240p signal.
Update: It works!
Did you get it using hdmi to vga adapter?
@@Isaac________ displayport or hdmi to vga, trying to do this myself with a displayport to vga adapter and it doesnt show any 240p resolutions
Welcome. Do you need a specific pc for proper operation or is it enough, for example, a laptop with an external CRT monitor connected via vga? What retro arch version is required?
I'm actually using a lenovo t540p with a haswell cpu and Nvidia gt 730m. I chose this setup to demonstrate even low end hardware can give you great results
not blaming u or the program makers but after using cru and making the resolution my laptop perma bluescreened and i had 2 reinstall windows
thank god it's just something on the side from my main pc
Long time no post!
Mister can also do 240p@120hz
I copied everything you did and whenever I launch retro arch on my crt it displays the same as my windows home screen and It’s all stretched out to 3840
How about 480i?
Is there any way to do this with just windows output? I want to play Sonic Mania like this.
If you have an nvidea card you can do this with the nvidea control panel, that’s how I’ve been doing it
@@justanotheryoutubechannel how do you set it up with just windows? I want to get this working on my 1080p TV.
@@juaquindeanda3316 Running games in 240p like this to display on your 1080p TV would be very counterproductive, the 320x240 signal probably wouldn’t be accepted by your TV and if it did it would mishandle then signal at 480i and ruin the image quality, you would probably end up with a very blurry image. This technique is mostly useful for just CRT monitors
@@justanotheryoutubechannel but people have done it on HDTVs even a 4k TV and they said it looks amazing. Why wouldn't it work on my 1080p TV?
@@juaquindeanda3316 The problem here is that HDTVs need to scale the 240p resolution to 1080p (or 4K, whatever the native resolution is.) and most displays do a very blurry scale, similarly to if you set TH-cam to 240p on a HDTV. This technique is designed for CRT displays that don’t need to scale anything, they will display whatever resolution you give them that meets certain requirements. It’s usually possible to output 240p into a HDTV but some HDTVs won’t accept it over HDMI, DVI, VGA, or component video cables. There are devices that can scale 240p to a higher resolution and do a much sharper scale that will look better, but they can be expensive and are mainly useful for playing real retro consoles, running a PC emulator into a scaler then into a HDTV isn’t worth it as most emulators can scale the game to 1080p equally well when configured correctly.
SNES, Genesis, and NES emulators (basically any emulator for a console before the PS1) will always run at 240p internally and then scale it, and most of them can be configured to scale it correctly, for 3D console emulation you would need to configure it to run at native resolution before scaling.
Did you say it’s an Apple studio display? I thought they needed OS 8 or OS 9 and a special utility to change the resolution? And CRU don’t work?
You need os9 to change the geometry and gamma. Everything else handled by windows 10 as a generic monitor.
Is there a reason you don't do CRT timings automatic?
@@BumboBoy i like to center my screen
@@BahnYuki could you not change that in the OSD of the CRT itself?
@@BumboBoy only on a g4 mac.
HDMI to component or HDMI to compost?
I really want to fdo this but in a crt tv, not a monitor. Any consideration or configuration I need to do in order for that to work?
Do what? I'm not understanding your question
@@BahnYuki I want to output 240p from a modern windows pc to my crt tv. I hope CRU can help me to do that.
@@exeacua windows doesn't really allow 15khz output, but you can try using crtemUdriver if you have a compatible AMD gpu. I used to do that, but Mister FPGA really makes it obsolete these days.
How do I set this up without a CRT and just use my laptop hooked up to my 1080p TV?
just connect your laptop to the tv with an hdmi cord.
If you want a crt filter just look on youtube for a crt shader tutorial for retroarch
While it looks nice when everything is still
I don't agree that it's the pinnacle this technique has a major downside that noone talks about. motion. 60fps games on a 120hz impulsed display (crt) causes double images in motion. which pretty much ruins the beautiful motion of a crt. The only way to counter this is by using black frame insertion which will half brightness.
Try vsync interval 2
@@BahnYukiThe only thing that can cancel out the bad motion is bfi unfortunately. It doesn't matter how you slice it showing double frames is never good on impulsed displays.
@@brett20000000009 I know what you are referring to but when I put vsync interval it's pretty good
@@BahnYuki Sure it's fine not trying to shit on it. I just thought it was worth mentioning, I have tried both and ended up just preferring scandoubled 240p.
@@brett20000000009 do you have a good example of double image?
hi thx for your video it's really helping me out rigth now in setting up a crt monitor myself. i just can't get the picture to look right, would you be able to say whats wrong if you see it? would really appreciate the help
edit: got it working now with 60Hz not 120Hz
also tested for 640x480 but then i got a vertically doubled picture on the crt. can this be fixed with the right porches and sync values? i was surprised to get a picture at all to be honest at 480p on this crt TV (not PC monitor)
You have either an ED CRT or HD CRT, compatible with 31khz, that's why you can get 480p content to display on it. A regular SD CRT would not be able to do so.
@@ttenor12 oh wow thanks, no way i figured that out by myself in 3 years
What converter did you use? I've got the hdmi to rca adapter and this doesn't really work.. I've tried so many things.
Using a Sony FV28FS20U 28"
What about ps1 games that switch between 240p and 480i?
What are you asking? Interlaced resolutions might not be fully supported on newer graphics cards I believe
Thanks !
Swap chain at 2 is at least 2 frames of lag :/
You recommend 1?
To smooth out the image, I thought it was recommended to use black frame insertion.
Remember 2 frames of lag at 120Hz = 1 frame of lag at 60Hz
@@BahnYuki I'm going to try out 2 more but from what I've played so far yeah it is smoother than on 1. I did a blind test for input lag and I couldn't tell the difference in sexy parodious on beetle saturn with no runahead. With runahead on an emu that supports it I imagine it may help those who feel this lag.
Edit: I want to emphasize that it is smoother. 1 was still good but 2 looked as smooth as my crt tv.
My monitor worked on 321x240 120hz
1 pixel more than standard HA
Which CRT did you use for this?
He is using an Apple studio display
This is a very innscurate guide, not show every step and not show where to find exact values and where to find them for other monitors...or yours works for all? Also you not show how do you have setting up RetroArch when it looks like sh1t (before resolution set), there is a way to do it?
And the most important thing ..how do you f return to original resolution after switching? You can't read nothing on desktop.