How Games Used to Look: Why Retro Gaming on a CRT Looks WAY Different 

While you are correct about the usage of CRT screens back in the day, most modern CRT filters amount to little more than scanlines that do not otherwise function the way CRT screens did back in the day. There are some genuinely good filters out there which function correctly on modern screens, but few emulators and even official releases include them. Personally, I'm more of the mindset that while the inclusion of good CRT filters is something to be appreciated whenever they are there, I'd rather see as many re-releases as possible remade to resemble how they appeared on CRT screens, such as adding new colors to the color palette and replacing dithering with additional shades to smooth things out. Effectively, the lack of old hardware limitations should be taken advantage of to faithfully redesign the pixel art in games with modern hardware in mind. Take Sonic Origins for example. The games are full remakes in that collection, yet simply reuse the existing pixel art for the graphics. They missed out on the chance to fill in the gaps in the waterfalls and make them actually transparent, adding shades to the sprites and backgrounds to smooth out the dither shading, etc. As such, the collection generally looks more ugly than it should.

@@Crow_Rising Which filters would that be? The genuinely good ones

@@maggo1003 I don't know any by name, but I do know that someone posted some really good reshade filters as a mod for Sonic Origins, replicates several types of old screens to give you your favorite CRT look. I'd also look into Shaderglass. I think there's also some good filters someone made for a Genesis/Mega Drive emulator, but I don't remember which one.

Yes. It is somthing i nver thought about untill a little bit ago as i still use all my old crts, even for newer consoles. My only modern moniters are for my pc. I hooked my old SNES to my lcd screen when trouble shooting somthing and was horrified at the loss of "quality"

​@@maggo1003 Magabezel in retroarch and arcadeview, can find the later on Emuline is based on the reshade

I use reshade to add scanlines to every pixel games like terraria,old skullgirls(the encore uncensored and no pantyfilters),final fantasy on gba emulator and pixel piracy

Isn't the high voltage needed for sharpness mostly? Our scope is blurry in comparison because it uses electrodes to bend the beam. Hmm. bending happens before the main voltage. Stil, I guess that you need to accelerate more directly after the gun to spread out the charge.

@@mr.cantillasz1912How can you get that version, was it an old one you had saved? I thought they scrubbed all of the pre-censor stuff from the internet

Exactly. a perfect example is the Secret of Mana title screen. It translates horribly to LCD.

Yes and even back then we complained the pixels was to blocky. While we also parodoxally complain the CRT TV image was not sharp enough. Basically we wanted higher resolution with more colors.

I actually hate the cheap CRT look because it reminds me of being almost the poorest kid in school, among other reasons. It seemed like every other kid had a Trinitron. If it wasn't because their parents were loaded then it was because their parents worked at the local Sony CRT factory. And I have absolutely no nostalgia for VHS because... 1. I didn't have a VCR until just before I started high school. 2. I saw far more movies in theaters than I did at home. That was mostly split between US Navy theaters, second-run double features and drive-ins. Even awful theater quality just demolished VHS.

I still prefer 2d over 3d, old or new 😃

I see a similar problem with the way younger generations of people think of the graphics of old portables. Those gameboy screens were generally not meant to be backlit cast to an external monitor. So when people emulate gameboy games they don't get that natural soft ghosting or that hazy green hue from an original screen. On Gameboy Advance, the colour on games look badly crushed and saturated on modern TV screens, because artists creating those graphics tried to deliberately overcompensate the colouring, knowing that the non-backlit displays are harder for gamers see the image in poor lighting. So when that GBA image gets played on a bright backlit screen with big contrast, it looks all wrong.

Dude I'm a camera technician I can attest to what he is saying, what the hell are you talking about ? Make sure you don't have it wrong before calling someone else out for being wrong, it makes you look like a complete idiot lol

I've got 8 or 9 in storage. Ranging from real budget but most are near professional quality. CRT's are still really easy to get, especially TV's (monitors not so much, especially good monitors) But realistically speaking the difference between a good one and a bad is not that great, outside of inputs. It's noticeable sure, but not "I pay 300+ euro for this over the 5 euro one" level of difference. I'd say upwards of 95% of people wanting a CRT are perfectly well off with any random CRT as long as it has the input you want (or you have the ability and knowledge to mod it). This fetish a load of people have with PVM's and other high quality CRT's is rather silly. As the vast majority of users back in the day used cheap sets with poor video-out with nearly all systems. It only get a bit different when you get in the realm of Amiga and such, but most people hunting for CRT's are going to play some NES and Megadrive on it. In most cases the high end CRT obsession is akin to the obsession some people have for getting "fresh" fries at McDonalds.

my goal was to explain the principle of the light going on and off and the trailing amount of light that is left over after this. I probably could have explained it better, so you're right there... but I also didn't want to devote an overwhelming amount of time to it and confuse people who do not want too many details. If you want a separate video where I go into detail and explain TN, IPS, VA, and OLED technology, we can do that... but you probably already know all about it, so the video wouldn't really be for you.

Even back then it was known, lol.. the move to lcd and later led with only now quantum led finally bringing us back in line to CRT was not instant and for most it was just annoying since compared to decent crts the quality was obviously worse, we still had eyes in them good ol days haha. The problem was and still is the sheer size and weight and complete waste of manufacturing materials to produce them combined with the ever increasing need of bigger tvs and monitors made them simply unfeasable to continue with as a mass produced tech. The reason CRTs in most countrys where LCDs took over and became the world that we now live in were destroyed were the reason they were so annoying and unweildly and just a giant pain in the a$$ even to store them, lol... like think about it, I can easily pick up my now old and "fat" cheap but nice 43" not so smart panasonic tv that I use purely as a monitor these days and can carry it up and down stairs and room to room on my own, it got delivered by a single dude where it took up a tiny portion of his van, to get to his van it went through many shipping centres and countries etc, all where a single person could lift it up like it was nothing hehe. CRT tvs / monitors kind of maxed out of the ability for one average person to comfortably enough carry them without putting your back out at around 19-21" hehe, and that hasn't changed. There are still countries where CRTs are widely used and I don't think that the technology has changed in any significant way to alleviate these issues. I would not be surprised if they were the countrys that manufactured the ones that we all used to have such fond memories of due to the actual shipping costs it makes zero sense to have one "giant" crt tv or monitor delivered internationally now. Like a whole 32" or so takes up the space of something like fifty 40-50" lcds in a shipping container and still weigh an order of magnitude more that needs a foklift for each tv at every point, and multiple people to get it on and off delivery trucks, and then even more at the other end to try and get them into your house etc, lol. Not to mention the physical size limit of silly things like doors where it started to become common for houses to be built with the big ass tv inside it hehe... great until.. well.. you need to replace it hehe. I still regret taking my old IIyama 19" crt monitor that I loved to hell for work for so many years down to the skip, but hehe... it was literally taking up a large portion of storage in my parents house that was better suited for toys for my sisters kids etc, lol. And honestly it hadn't been touched once in who knows how many years... it could handle every resolution up to 2048*30hz I guess if you wanted your eyes to bleed, with the refresh increasing significantly the lower you went hehe.. sigh. I also wish that I still had my old sony trinitron 21" hehehe... but what can you do... giving up things like that pained me but heh, you couldn't even give them away for free since .. lol.. the same reasons as above, just someone paying the shipping for things that fragile and heavy made zero sense to anyone at the time. For years I would accept everyones old CRTs, but then it just became stupid also, rofl. Especially since my eyes had started to see the refresh lines on them all even before they became scrap after so many years of lcds combined with using 166 hz / 200 or whatever or so on my one crt that I kept hehe. Ultimately they died out for a reason, and the planet is a hell of a lot better off for it I guess.

@@teksyndicate you could just send people to the slow mo guys vid from years ago if they want to see exactly the differences at camera speeds and aperatures that nobody else can hope to achieve hehe, unless you have extortionately expensive cameras at hand :) I like your way of looking at it in this vid, it does make me feel nostalgic. How artists worked on these old games was also how I would have to work for cg projects made for tv adverts etc even 5-10+++ years after them, lol.. like yes eventually we would have fancy high res crt monitors and even early lcds etc after a while, but always to get any idea of what we were doing we would have just normal cheap crts since that was literally the target audience and the final output, somewhere... It was very different and difficult to keep in mind sometimes, especially when things started needing to be made in 720p also heh. It was difficult to not notice the aliasing artifacts that are blaringly obvious on your monitor that you spent 99.99% of your time working on when looking back no tv would have shown haha :).. that and also interlacing and de-interlacing etc when combining cg with cameras made for crt tvs etc, lol.. ugh 🤭 Still, I think much of my early production tv work was done on 14" 65hz crt monitors now that I think about it.. seems impossible now with hindsight.. I do remember doing one job completely on my 21" sony trinitron since my monitor had died and I had to finish the job with any hopes of replacing it.. I think that was when I got the iiyama. sorry, emm.. sigh.. drunk nostalgia ☺🤫

Yea... I picked up on that too. I'm sure he knows the ins and outs of LED and LCD displays. When he said "LEDs" I think he was just relaxing his language a bit and trying to lean on the concept of an LED status light or something like that, which less technically inclined viewers may have an easier understanding of.

@@wesplybon9510 If that was the case, he leaned way to close to misinformation for it to still have value as a learning analogy.

It drives me nuts that modern LCD screens are marketed as "LED screens" just because they replaced the old cold cathode fluorescent tube backlight with an LED backlight. Its still an LCD screen

LCD are non emissive displays (doesn't produce its own light)

OLED do turn on and off and make their own light though.

talent is not art

@@alejandromoran4590 semantics is not an argument

it is not semantics, it is differentiation@@Pensive_Scarlet

@@alejandromoran4590 You're nitpicking at the semantics of my statement. I mentioned talent as one of the many elements involved in what people usually classify as "art". At no point did I say talent and art are the same thing.

Video games are transactionable products, a piece of marketing, and follow a bussiness model. They ARE DESIGNED AND CREATED to be liked and purchased. Art is something meaninfull for the human mind, and does not want to be liked, or accepted. Art is mostly transgressive and proactive, not just a fine piece or work with a lot of talented work put into its creation. It's not about semantics.@@Pensive_Scarlet

Analog Antialiasing… love it!

And if you add random static noise the photo will take even more space. The more grainy the image the more space it takes. Complete static will compress way worse than sharp, clean lines and shapes.

Me too. I remember getting a "portable" CRT for xmas in like 1997 or 1999 and I loved it, had a VHS player built in because at the time all my movies were VHS and I kept it and used it until like 2008 and it had zero issues. I used it with my PS1 and then used it with my gamecube and xbox 360 and from what I remember everything looked great, but I did remember noticing blurry image with the 360, it had a scart connector in the back and an RGB connector in the front. I use to take it to my dads with me every weekend, to play games on my gamecube but I dont miss the weight of them. In 2010 me and a friend was moving his big CRT up some steep stairs, by the time we did it we all threw our back out and we were barely 20 at the time lol it was heavy af!!

You missed how CRTs got color. I think that even the Trinitron technology was sold from USA to Japan before your birth. The evolution you got to see was digital technology in the TV and just sticking with flat windows glass for the screen ( super heavy ).

CRT displays have been around since the 19th century

Early LCDs sucked and were worse than CRTs in every manner. Even HD CRTs were leagues better despite that they couldn’t do 240p

Video compression on RU-vid then also butchers the image even more, creating artifacts that weren't there on the original video.

Mattias CRT shader in retroarch I think is the closest you can get to CRT. Combine that with Mdapt for a transparent waterfall in sonic 1 (all passes of mdapt should come first in the shader passes list, and remember to apply settings to see the difference. Sometimes shaders don't apply properly, so you might want to do it again if this happens, or even apply shader passes one after another). You might want to change the shader scale on mattias shader. I use 5x, but set it to your preference. It looks pretty close to me. Yeah, setting shaders in retroarch is a pain, but look online on how to do it, instead of asking me. I'm sure online tutorials can explain better than I.

crt royal is the best shader that can replicate this look

@@GURken I have the sf2 collection but prefer the shaders on retroarch, CRT royal is definitely one of my favorites.

Just use reshade with some filters, it does wonders

@@hihosh1 Combining gdapt or mdapt with 6xBRZ frescale is my favorite way to play megadrive and snes games. I know it wasnt you who suggested it, but I can't stand CRT royale lol. It's mattias for me, if I want CRT shaders.

Did you try the Cyberlab shader?

👀 a fellow shader like myself. We need to talk so we can play around with these shaders I think I have the perfect “global” shader settings but I want to experiment and play around and see what I can get but there are just so many shaders and then options and ways to pay more than one on top of each other and depending the order different results etc it’s a lot

S Viideo filter is the best for PS1 games like Mega Man X, Castlevania. While Composite is great for games that mix 2D pre rendered assets with 3D models or backgrounds, even more so if models are jagged.

I FUCKING LOVE DODONPACHI

@@gars129 nice! I haven't tried those yet there's a stock shader that if you set it to nearest it makes everything look better just don't use it on psx or N64 as it seems they have a built in shader? I'm not sure maybe you can get different results. I'm going to start playing with combos and taking screenshots and uploading them keep in touch so I can show you what I get

i've never bought a trinitron but you can find lots of good working condition crts and plasma tvs at thrift stores or on places like facebook marketplace locally for $50 or less, sometimes with component and s-video input. they can look surprisingly good, provided it matches the aspect ratio of the console you're using. my ps2 for example stretches the image like a bloated whale if i use it with my plasma, but looks just as good as any other way of using it with my 4:3 crt.

CRT Royale Fake Bloom is the best CRT filter on Retroarch.

@@Bubba__Sawyer Aside from CRT Mattias, of course.

Modern games sync to the frame rate. On low detail you can run 120 fps. So even with double buffering, you have less mean latency than on a perfect 60 fps 2d game. See RU-vid video about 60 fps games on N64, PSX, and Saturn. The nintendo DS needs to transform vertices, but then renders on the fly, just like in the old days. I was amazed when I found out that this Texas Instrument VDP chip could filter out all sprites which overlap the next scanline. Like you draw 40 chars or tiles of background and meanwhile the circuit picks out up to 8 sprites for the next scanline out of 40 on screen. So you have like 2 scanline latency max. The slowest thing on old consoles was game logic, collision detection and physics. The "Behind the Code" videos explain how this adds a frame of latency to NES games. Blast processing on genesis was better.

A bit of horizontal interpolation makes this a non-issue.

I have a feeling you're talking about the nes and snes's aspect ratio as those systems, while designed with 4:3 in mind, had a really square resolution kinda like a scaled up gameboy. I noticed that when I started getting into emulation as a kid. Only way to correct it on ye olde ZSNES was with the crt shader in newer versions (kinda funny since everyone in my family used a crt monitor back then lol). However, when I first read your comment, I ended up thinking about old Commodore 64 games and Sierra's older adventure games for DOS and the fact that due to the tiny resolution used non-square pixels that looked squished and stuff yet always turned out making nice looking images without distortion. Now, if I played those same C64 games or a copy of King's Quest 1 on a widescreen monitor that doesn't have aspect ratio correction, I'd get an actually distorted image and it'd bother the living CRAP out of me.

@@ArmandoDoval LOL no it does not.

New shaders use 4K displays and HDR. I think that is enough for a fair simulation of a standard resolution of a CRT. Off course that does not mean is perfect, and those shaders are always evolving.

@@krnivoro1972 do you know what shaders and hdr are?

It makes a lot of sense! I loved watching the screen closely, watching the light move on the screen. It was indeed something magical about it, like fairy dust.

I have loved video games for as long as I can remember, I'm a Software Developer and was born in 1993 - I might be your Grandpa reincarnated.

Yeah, it looks much more "natural" on a CRT.

It depends a lot on the console too. Sega Master System and Genesis relied on composite color artefacts far more often than NES and SNES; on the other hand each of those consoles had multiple revisions with varying video quality so that's also a factor. Almost every single N64 game had really low res textures and anti-aliasing built in while PS1 didn't, so composite on N64 just made things double blurry. Composite could help 3D PS1 games but wasn't going to do much for you in a 2D game like Rayman. The Saturn could also benefit from composite for 3D because it had limitations around transparency so it often used dithering to fake it.

I'm with you on the small crts because whenever I'd go to my grandma's house, she'd have a small tv set up on the wall in the kitchen near the breakfast table and me and my brother and cousin would always play our Gamecube games on that thing back then. My cousin would also play his ps1 upstairs on a bigger tv in grandma's computer room, and then a ps2 downstairs in the living room when he got that. I especially remember playing Yugioh: The Falsebound Kingdom on that tiny kitchen tv back then alongside those plug-and-play Atari games. I was always weirded out by how different the plug-and-play Atari games sounded compared to the games on grandma's actual Atari 2600 as I used to play that a lot too when I was a wee kid when I went to her house. As simple as Atari games looked, they tended to look pretty neat on a crt compared to a flat screen.

I mainly use a trinitron PVM for retro consoles and I always use the best signal possible, RGB or S-video, because the image quality loss when stepping down to composite is massive. The fact that there are some effects that work best on lower grade signals, like the waterfall in Sonic the Hedgehog, doesn't make up for the quality loss. I don't buy the "worst signal on the cheapest and oldest tube" narrative as some sort of choice, even though playing the games like that is perfectly fine for the CRT benefits of low lag and motion clarity. The sharpest, cleanest analogue signal rivaling a digital signal on a trinitron tube is simply the best of both worlds and will be never be matched. I also strongly dislike how some people laud filters as some sort of CRT-killer, when they are not even remotely able to replicate the motion clarity, luminance and perfect presentation of lower resolutions without scaling. It's very important to stress how CRTs and only CRTs can give you the complete CRT experience, even if CRTs too differ amongst themselves. Now that's not to say I don't play retro on modern displays but when I do I never delude myself into thinking it's as good as the CRT experience.

Just an afterthought: perhaps someday in the case of resolution upscaling old SDR 8bit content to 4K or 8K, maybe there could be some kind of upmapping interpolation used to convert it to HDR 12 bit, giving some of the colour diversity and additional perceived dynamic range seen with how CRT's produce an image.

When i plugged my megadrive to a CRT again i was shocked by how great the colors looked. Almost like if they were out of the range of what my LCD could do. 16 bit games are also very colorful (especially Sonic), so colors are even more impressive

Vinyl sounds worse than digital. Objectively, by every measure.

@@TheTrueNorth11 Vinyl sounds worse than 192kbps mp3? lol ok brainlet

@@kekethetoad Yes.

You don't need those commas.

@@LordAteag You're correct. I've really gotta cut out the comma overuse. One would've sufficed.

​@@Enol666 not to be "that guy" but really no commas in that above statement are necessary. For example; you could've said "I'm glad you're still around and making cool videos...after all these years." This would give pause to the first part of the statement, while it's sinking in then the second part of the statement hits to finish off the sentence. Seeing as it's just one sentence composed of two different statements and you use "and" to join them no commas are necessary at all. Now, I 💯 agree with your first statement! I'm really glad to see he still exists; I found some cool info and music from watching through the years. I don't check in as much as I used to...but it's nice to have that reconnect comfort.

@@QuantumCairo Thanks for the feedback man! I always like to keep on top of my writing and grammar and sometimes feedback's the only real way. Definitely don't feel like you're being "that guy". I agree that my statement reads far smoother with the single elipses than another comma. Thank you for reminding me that I don't need commas to connect two statements when I'm already using "and" to accomplish that. Big ups! Have a good one brother!

@@QuantumCairo You're both awesome. I'm going to smoke a bowl to you dudes.

Not enough of a market as well as the facilities that used to make them are shut down. Plus they’d be quite expensive to make as well as trying to decide which audience do you want to make them for. You can’t have super high line count monitors like PC CRTs otherwise they suffer. Plus they aren’t being made due ti them containing led in the glass to shield them, although this is just on the inside and isn’t dangerous

We're now getting there thanks to 4K monitors, and there lies the reason: resolution. There's a lot going on to create the look of a single pixel on a CRT from bloom to smoothing and scanlines, and replicating all that in detail on an LCD requires a ton of real pixels for each pixel of the original image. That, and it's just hard to design such a complicated filter. There are still some things that are just straight up impossible replicate too. OLEDs are very good, but nothing can match a CRT for motion clarity and response time even now.

I once helped move a widescreen Trinitron (I forget the size) but it was staggeringly heavy. 2 people and we both had to take it easy. I found one on the side of the road once, but I had to pass it by because I didn't have help. I have a 27" Trinitron now and it's heavy, but I can move it myself. That widescreen set was unbelievable.

@@volvo09 Yeah we had a lovely 32 inch set we gave away had to help them load it into the truck... moving that thing up stairs was torture.

I used to wipe my arm on it for that

😵‍💫yeah,😵

Also wouldn't sharp scanlines burn in and create ugly Moire patterns after some time? You drive CRTs interlaced, to avoid this. Or have this weird NTSC refresh rate and some 60 Hz magnetic field nearby to slowly wobble the image over the screen.

Im the same way lol

They do. OLED’s do the same thing as well

A very natural extremely high dynamic range, to be matched only recently by the most expensive OLED TVs :/ It's one of the reasons I always go back to my actual CRT for a lot of games; even with the most authentic looking CRT filter on an LCD, the actual *brightness* of a CRT can't be easily matched, and together with the smoothing, the deep blacks, the motion clarity etc., it really does make early 3D games with lights in the environment look a lot nicer. I always compare how the pre-rendered wall sconces in Resident Evil 2's Police Station Main Hall look on CRT vs say, an OSSC or Retrotink 5x -> LCD monitor/ TV, and that particular difference is a real clincher for me. Adds a lot of depth and 'pop' to the actual dimensionality of an image, which for earlier 3D (especially those with pre-rendered backgrounds) is quite important.

​@@null140 Dunno if you ever noticed but when you play some retro stuff on LCD the image is a bit darker, that's because of the intense light of CRTs that just bring balance for that. Retro stuff are made for CRTs IMO

@@condor.67 oh yeah, good point! coz the bright spots pierced through better!

Give up this "hope" its hopeless. Just get a crt.

I had very found memories of the last crt tv and it was a Samsung 31 in widescreen full 1080p. Unfortunately to get to move down into my basement at the time it took literally my uncle and my best to help.me. Now.I.have.oled and honestly I really wouldn't go back. The picture and response are amazing!

PC CRTs are great for that

@@crestofhonor2349 yep they are incredible. But even a standard set limited to 480i is still great too. I use a 20 inch CRT in the spare bedroom to watch dvd's on a PS3. And the RU-vid app is still supported on the ps3 too. It's quite an experience watching RU-vid on that thing. Looks surprisingly good when hooked up with component

Why don't you turn on TV-mode of your LCD for motion in 24p movies?

In Europe only higher end TVs had S Video. Low end stuff all had RGB SCART.

🤓☝️ oooh

response time for gray to gray should be near zero and better than any LCD... plus the black that is there in between illumination cycles helps our eyes see more movement... as for the speed of light. Yeah, you got me there. They do have mass.

I remember always getting bothered how with monitor CRTs a lot of people use to leave them on 60hz and at that refresh rate to me the image didn't look stable in a desktop environment... once in a game though 60hz was fine... still I always was trying to raize the frequency to at least 85-100hz.

Retroarch + CRT Royale.

UK had zx spectrum with digital RGB to a CRT?

​@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt That's a good question. I don't recall if the ZX had RGB out without some physical mod, I'd guess it probably didn't and would only support RF. TV's in the UK didn't have anything other than RF support I would say from the very late 80's but became incredibly common in the early 90's with the advent of other tech like Sky TV, decent VHS and later on DVD players.

@@judgewest2000 I confused this. BBC micro and Amstrad CPC had RGB output. I still think that I have seen computers which got power from the flyback in the monitor. Like a Mac, but with a cable. Arcade were RGB.

Yeah, I too found this distracting. It's one thing to explain it this way to a layperson as an illustration, but unfortunately it was not portrayed as an illustration. Whether Tek Syndicate's intended it as an illustration or whether it was an honest mistake, it still comes across as an authoritative voice on the subject while stating something that is inaccurate. That said, he does do a great job explaining why the image displayed on CRT's looks very different. This part was well stated and accurate (other than saying latency on CRT's is 'instant'... technically no, but it might as well be, so there's really no issue with that statement imo). He might have left out the 'unnecessary deinterlacing' issue on modern TVs (i.e. they assume composite input is always 480i, even though 240p through composite was a supported signal on CRT's and other SD TV's), but perhaps I just haven't gotten to that part of the video yet.

@@Brad-cb2dt Agree!

The main problem with sharp pixels was the non 1:1-ratio pixels! The SNES is 5:4 on a 4:3 display, so everything looks stretched. And in low res screens you have to double some pixels and get a blurry line every few lines, it was awful. 4K screens can do a great job, with high chances of getting integer multiplication of pixels and very tiny blurred lines, so that's mostly a part of the past which I don't think anyone wants to bring back ever.

@@ratone1983 still with 4K and perfect upscaling it looks blocky. And that is they issue. 320x200 or so looks better on CRT. A pixel Art game made in say 640x400 or higher look good on a LCD with 4K you can emulate the CRT or use other interpolation filter that make those games look better or at least more as they was designed to look. Something that was pixelated on a crt often looks better there. While stuff píxeled on LCD usually looks good on LCD

Apparently it needs to be explained even to many who grew up in the CRT era... Many people are so caught up in the "newer = better" mindset they don't even believe their own memories or eyes.

@@todesziege Exactly I mean I got caught up with the mid 90s craze of having everything be 3D and 2D for a time was 'boring' and 'archaic' haha.

It can happen if the demand is there. But there is a lot of pushback from the tv companies themselves to discredit crts

Some things that helped me out when I was looking for PC crts was checking out old electronics recyclers, going to college campuses to see if they were getting rid of old computers, and especially office spaces that haven't gotten around to getting rid of stuff.

For a PC make sure to get a VGA CRT as those are best for PC usage. Plus they look amazing at 480p and above as well as being sharp enough for proper PC usage. Some great ones came from Apple(although they can be a bit odd), Sony, Dell, Mitsubishi, and some diamondtrons. Horizontal refresh rate is super important as well as dot pitch

@@crestofhonor2349 do you have any specific recommendations?

@@lanpartylandlord6123 You'll have to see what's around you. I highly advise against any shipping and reccomend picking up locally in order to avoid anything breaking when being transported. Some of the companies I listed earlier make great VGA CRTs. My reccomendation is to stick to late 90s and early 2000s sets for the really high resolution tubes.

@@crestofhonor2349 thank you! glad i didnt buy a trinitron on ebay and pay the hundreds of dollars in shipping ;) hahaha

He isn’t really that far off though.. you’ve called him out but not then given the correct explanation.

@@LaurenceReeves agreed dude gonna call out out old boy but to ignorant to explain what exactly it is that he is off about. Everyone loses

It doesn't matter much. RetroArch has ~pleeeenty~ of Shaders that can replicate CRT style.....

led and oled screens work with micro leds, lcd screens have an array of colored cells with liquid crystal technology, controlled electronically, that block or let through a large white backlight. he shouldn't have called them leds, but the "small light bulbs" analogy was perfectly fine.

No need to be so rude.