I’ve never seen good CRT physical emulation. But I also suspect it’s been long enough, that I just wouldn’t be able to tell the difference unless I had my old childhood bedroom Sanyo CRT to compare it to.
I’m not sure these come close because there’s some sort of physical element that would be hard to replicate unless you mapped the DPI of a screen to the “DPI” of a CRT.
Otherwise you’re just creating a weird facsimile in the same way that a lot of indie artists don’t produce pixel art that is actually pixel aligned. It’s ugly.
> there’s some sort of physical element that would be hard to replicate
For a truly authentic CRT experience you need a faint smell of ozone, the crackle of a static charge on the screen and a high-pitched screaming/whining noise right on the edge of perception.
Spot on. Reading that sentence I can almost feel that static on my skin from when very young me would curiously get way too close to the TV for reasons I no longer remember.
The thunk of turning off my CRT+VHS combo after a late night watching reruns as a tween. Nostalgia is hell of a drug.
When I was a kid, my CRT sometimes switched to a wrong resolution (it got narrower, so squares became slightly rectangular, for example). I say "my CRT", because that was a hardware, not software issue. I know, because kid-me solution was to smash the (hard, brick) wall with that CRT. And it worked. I still don't know why, I was too young to investigate - and hey it worked so why bother.
My parents were less impressed, when after a few years the screen was moved and the wall was scratched everywhere.
I have a fully working vintage arcade cab from the mid eighties which I still play on. I know. Most of these shaders and techniques exaggerate way too much what things really looked like. There's a tiny blur and there are tiny scanlines (or whatever these little black lines are called) but things... Mostly looks pixelated.
And that's an old, used, CRT I have: probably one of the blurriest one. Back in the nineties we already had fancy Sony Trinitron CRTs and these were flawless. Pixels just looked like pixels, not like all these blurred things nor like all these exaggerated shaders. Many CRTs were really crisp.
Do games from the eighties look better on a CRT? Definitely. But it was subtle.
Pixel art is pixel art and it's not pixel art because it was shown on a CRT and suddenly it wouldn't be pixel art anymore because it's shown on a modern monitor.
Things were really just "blocky" and pixelized. That's really how things looked.
Quite tangential, but it is sort of funny that we’re still doing this nostalgic pixel art thing. I mean, no complaints at all, good pixel art looks nice. But the snes came out a long time ago.
I wonder if we will ever get a nostalgic style that emulates all those flash games. Reasonably high resolution components, but only 10 or so pieces per character. Geometric shapes with gradients.
Yeah a big reason I started doing pixel art back in 2009 was because it enabled me to do lots of trial and error by changing pixels until I got it to look good. It's much harder to do that with more traditional art, because there are way more options. That's not at all to say that pixel art doesn't require skill, but the skill floor is definitely lower.
I thought it was nostalgia, but I see teenagers that love pixel art games, even though the art style is twice as old as they are. The style aged way better than, say, the PS1 era, where most games just don't hold up, and most of the ones that do happened to still use pixel art.
When it comes to old pixel art games though (as opposed to the new ones), it's a matter of accuracy. There's plenty of articles and videos showing how different it is to try to use a naive emulator on a modern, upscaled OLED vs how the very same game looks in a surviving old Trinitron with a SCART cable. If you are looking at, say, old Atari 2600 games, there's no reason to try to pretend to be a Trinitron. But for SNES? Sonic in the Genesis? Reproducing the screen with square, perfect pixels often looks worse.
Still, flash games are getting emulated, and so do Quake-era FPSes. Sometimes we rediscover older gameplay, or more readable art. Other times it's only nostalgia. But pixel art in itself? It's just effective. Modern games just throw away some of the limitations that didn't make the games better: Go look at Sea of Stars. We couldn't have made that game work in a SNES: Too much memory, too wide a palette, more animation we could ever fit in that hardware. And yet, it's a descendent of the old RPGs stylystically, and it looks absolutely fantastic by any standard.
Pixel art was certainly out of fashion for a while, but it came back in the 2010s because a) nostalgia, b) a counter-reaction to soul-destroying AAA game business, and c) the rise of indie games thanks to Steam.
Have you seen some of the display options offered by the RetroTink scaler? I think some of them look pretty good, but I'm not a hardcore CRT enthusiast, so maybe my standards are just lower than yours :P
If you want to emulate a CRT you have to emulate a specific CRT with a specific input. You can't have a general CRT emulation because they all look a bit different.
I’m not sure these come close because there’s some sort of physical element that would be hard to replicate unless you mapped the DPI of a screen to the “DPI” of a CRT.
Otherwise you’re just creating a weird facsimile in the same way that a lot of indie artists don’t produce pixel art that is actually pixel aligned. It’s ugly.