What Are Scanlines and Why Do Retro Gamers Love Them So Much? - Retro Bird 

Thank you for sharing all of this. Very interesting to read about. Would you feel comfortable sharing which games you worked on back then?

Retro Bird sure. Assisted a little of fuzz ball for amiga and made graphics for combat cars for mega drive. Still most pixels was done for fun in the amiga demo scene.

I'm happy you've shared this.. But the concept of sharp square pixels not existing? Black box nes games had sharp pixel art right on the box

@@EmperorMAR I think he meant in gameplay on a monitor

Also, often modern screens "rescale" the pixels so it looks HORRIBLE!!! so it's not even pixel perfect, say it's just the worst thing ever, and a tear of sadness rolls down my cheek, and I drink when it gets to my mouth :-( it's important to stay hydrated

Yeah, I'm typically the same way.

Me too. Many British people didn't grow up with scanlines at home due to PAL picture being compressed. Only when a game had a 60hz mode you could see it. But as a kid I always thought they made games look far better. I saw them in Arcade games because they had scanlines.

@@alexojideagu PAL had more scanlines in the same space plus at home people were typically about 8 feet away from the TV while in an arcade you'd be about a foot from the screen

Every time I use a scanline overlay, I get some weird stupid "imperfection" effects like black flickering etc that try way too hard to "look old". Same thing also happens with VHS overlays - those overlays always have a million lines wandering across the screen, or appearing and reapparing on a specific part of the screen. I hope that I will some day be able to find some overlays like this that actually look like "back in the 90s", instead of "today on old worn-out televisions that were made way back in the 90s".

Same, but I didn't realize the trend until I picked up my neighbors old crt he left out abandoned. Then I realized I liked and kissed the old style.

Cool to here your first hand perspective. Did you work on commercial projects back in the day? If so, what are they? I'm very curious.

That's something I've thought about too. Indie developers leaving out scanlines. They should at least have an option.

Yeah. I always feel like indie games that go for the 8 bit look always fall a bit short when it comes to being accurate.

What 2D games are you guys playing? Owlboy and Blasphemous have lots of scanline options, for example. That being said, as a PC gamer I always associated scanlines with excessively low resolutions and I much prefer integer scaling. I would assume many indie developers were also PC gamers as kids.

I've noticed that artificial scanlines can look a bit off as well. Some are better than others, but yeah...

@@RetroBirdGaming I hate the bad scanline filters that put horizontal banding blocks. I've found some filters that don't if you tweak the settings. However even many commercial games with scanline filter options have this nasty banding instead of clean scanlines.

Yeah, there is an argument to be made for composite video. The waterfalls in Sonic are probably the most famous argument but it goes much deeper than that. I may cover it in a future video.

Yeah, it would be really strange for me to suddenly not have them anymore.

Good to hear!

Thank you. Glad you enjoyed it!

Yes, the way the scanlines fluctuate in thickness is a good point and something that can be easily observed if you look closely enough. Your point about scanlines not always being visible is a smart thing to point out as well, since the bigger the tv the more visible the scanlines and blanklines become (in most cases).

Wrong, retroarchs scanline shaders do add a blankline in between every line of pixels. So nothing gets lost there. There are probably cheap scanline shaders that does what you say thou.

Oh and also the thickness can also depend on the brightness. Heres two examples forums.libretro.com/uploads/default/original/3X/b/5/b5d40ae510b2074c960c796de931528a77805f0b.png forums.libretro.com/uploads/default/original/3X/9/0/901fa9ac363aaa595d9851e81cd49a07a846d735.png

@@vinnievincent85 That must require a really high res display and alot of resources to achieve that effect. Does Retroarch allow fluctuating scanlines based on brightness?

@@GoodVibeCollecting Some shaders is better at 4k. But I run it at oh something like 746x567 or something wierd like that because my 10 year old lcd tv refuses to not autoscale on other resolutions. Looks great! Would not look much different on higher res. However you want a bright tv cause scanlines tend to darken the image alot. Preferably a hdr tv with high nits. How much cpu and / or gpu power it needs depends on what you think is much. If you game on a pc you probably have enough. I dont know what the minumum reqs are but I dont think you need anything special. However new emulators can be heavier than one thinks even for old consoles. Because today most of them from the 64bit era and downwards are LLE, wich means almost perfect emulation but more resource intense. I recomend you to register at retroarch if you have any questions. You can even hunt for achievements in old games today :) Retrogaming makes me puke at modern games.

I can't play retro games without scan lines. It amazes me how people don't get how essential they are to a sharp picture on retro games.When I see sharp pixels I want to scream. That's not what the games looked like.

@@alexojideagu totally agree!

@@alexojideagu They aren't even slightly essential. I play SNES on TVs form the 90s and TVs from 2020. Zero difference. Equally functional. Except now I can actually move my TV without pulling a back muscle.

@@Synathidy Functional but ugly as hell on LCD screens without filters. I refuse to play 2D retro games on any LCD device without filters.

Yeah, and I find that there's also a certain depth to the image distinct to CRTs as well. It's hard to explain, but it feels like the picture sits back into the screen a little more.

Yeah I agree. I think NES games with scanlines can look beautiful even on a modern OLED 4K screen. However it's really only when the image is still. The image gets blurred and you can tell the scanlines are software when there is motion.

The thing is that what you'll get from the emulated scanlines really varies too.

Depends on settings. I use Mednafen (for 80's and 90's consoles) and FS-UAE (Amiga) and with scanlines the low-resolution of these machines looks better on LCD. For Mednafen I also enable the Bilinear Interpolation that adds soft blur effect to the image. I tried the both emulators without these filters and it looks too sharp and pixelated. Low resolution and razor sharp image of modern displays makes these old games look painful. Even dithering in pixelart graphics is useless when image is too sharp. Back in 90's many people had consoles plugged into 14" TVs and now when you use a over 20" display these freaking pixels get huge when image gets streteched.

Interesting philosophy. I don't quite follow, though. Bear with me for a moment while I level-set: The blank scanlines on a TV are from the fact that the raster is scanning 240 odd lines, followed by 240 even lines (offset by one.) ... Except that 240p resets that counter so that the 2nd interleaved lines are never drawn, leaving a "hole" between the lines that are. I.e., the blanks are from the 480-line resolution being cut in half. It's almost like CRTs have a "native" resolution, but it's an artifact of the beam spot size vs. the phosphor / grille and its inherent resolution (as in, ability to resolve detail), and not "pixels" per se. On a CRT (computer) monitor, it depends on the resolution being driven by the video card, and dot pitch of the screen. If you look at a DOS PC running on an SVGA monitor, for example, you'll see "scanlines" as well. That's from the old 25-line text mode having an effective resolution of 720x400 (80x25 characters, with a 9x16 font), while the screen itself is usually capable of resolving 800x600 or higher. The electron beam can only be one fixed size, so if it's small enough to resolve detail at higher than VGA resolution, it will leave un-scanned phosphor at lower resolution. (Let's ignore CGA resolutions for now, since we're probably talking more about the early-mid-90s.) OK, so, that all being the case, the graphic artist would probably either be pixel-doubling (zoom 2x) the artwork to match VGA or higher resolution monitors, or would be using DOS applications running at higher-color VGA resolutions (possibly 320x240 @ 256 colors, for example.) If the art was pixel-doubled to match the (full-screen) scale you would see on a TV, then there would be no scanlines, but it would be super sharp chunky pixels instead. Is that what you mean as the "not downgraded" way? OTOH, if they were running at common DOS graphic resolutions, then there probably _would_ have been visible scanlines, just as there were in 200/240-line PC games of the time. In the NES, SNES, Genesis era, Windows was not a given, and a lot of work was done in DOS, so either is likely. Either way, there would NOT be as much color blending from low-bandwidth composite or RF video, though, so no masked dithering or fake transparency. It would be very much equivalent to using a professional-class CRT TV with RGB input instead.

Thank you! Glad you liked it :)

hahaha all hail the CRTs on this channel

Bonk! That game specifically is "Bonk's Revenge".

Thank you. Glad you enjoyed it.

Just to be clear, you're saying that you don't like Scanlines?

@@RetroBirdGaming yep

But are you not talking about the blurriness and distortion that often was on old ass TV. that made it a blurry mess? Have you ever had a really good CRT “arcade” monitor. That did not have those artifacts but still has scanlines with softened up the image and made it actually look higher resolution and less blocky? We do not miss the artifacts we miss the “higher” resolution.

FINALLY! Someone who agrees with me! "Crystal-clean" is definitely the right thing to say here if you ask me.

Personally, I'll take the screen being covered in squares over being covered with black lines any day.

They're awesome!

@@RetroBirdGaming its also nice to see that others do too! ^^

I rather buy an old CRT for my old retro games because those old games picture quality looked better on a CRT than on a HDTV. Those retro games aren’t built for HDTV. That’s why the picture quality looked ugly on HD.

The advances in emulation definitely make for a nice alternative.

It's just a regular Raspberry Pi that I got an unofficial case for.

That's interesting. I've heard such great things about OSSC

Well said. I have a similar preference where those consumer TVs just feel "right" to me.

Scanlines improve the image quality by a lot. Pixellated 8bit and 16 bit games look like trash. Scanlines break up the blocks. The problem is people today are only seeing poor quality filters on LCD screens and not seeing how much better they make games look. The problem is only a few LCD filters are accurate.

@@alexojideagu i think you are mistaken and probably experiencing a placebo effect. What you mean "scanlines break up the blocks"?

@@MarianoDevourment Did you watch the video? It's not a placebo effect. Millions of retro fans say the same thing. The Scanlines break up the pixels so the blocky effect of pixels is removed and it gives a sharp defined image.

@@alexojideagu thats placebo effect, this video got it wrong that is why I made the clarification... its more technical but I think I made a good sum up on the subject. I actually experienced first hand what today is called retro. I had lived atari onwards, back in the day, with real hardware and crt tvs used back then. You may like it more... but it was a tech limitation, not a special effect. Developers had this in mind and one solution was to cut the frames into stripes rastering in sequence one row raster, the other black (no raster). Otherwise the image would be incorrectly be stretched vertically. Even could cause flikering and other undesired glitches.

@@MarianoDevourment We're not talking about the technical aspect, we're talking about how it LOOKS. Without scanlines the pixels look blocky on LCD TVs. Scanlines divide the image horizontally and remove the blocky pixel look. A TV wasn't designed to do that, but it looks much better.

Haha I believe you :)

Retro Bird yeah, my PS2 using the AV cables displays some fuzziness that goes up the picture. Initially I thought it was scanlines as well until recently when I realized that it’s just fuzz and I may just need to replace the cables. Like I said earlier, my friend is convinced that those are scanlines and is trying to get me to use component cables even though I should probably test another AV cable (easier to hook up than components. I don’t have to go behind my TV since I have AV Switchboxes.)

Haha. I've noticed most of my viewers agreeing with you.

I use that shader on my Raspberry Pi

Scanlines are often hard to notice unless the TV is at least 27" and you're sitting close enough to the TV. So, there's a chance some of us didn't do either of those things growing up.

@@RetroBirdGaming I definitely played on a big screen TV back in the day, and I didn't see prominent black lines like that. In one of my oldest videos, you can see the CRT TV that I used to have. Those black lines simply show up more prominently on camera than they do to the naked eye because of how cameras work with rolling shutters etc. Technology Connections made a video on how he records CRT and adjusts the shutter speed to make scanlines show up more prominently.

That's a fun way to think about it!

That would be Metal Slug 3.

They don't look like that on a decent CRT. What you're seeing in the video is from scan lines being added from an external source outside of the screen, which despite the claims of this video saying they "look" about as good as what you would see on a Sony PVM monitor, they absolutely do not in motion. At all.

Oh, so you use scanlines for modern games as well?

@@RetroBirdGaming Yes I use scanlines for few reason in modern games if allow.

I like the way you think. Very open-minded and accepting.

Interesting. I've never used CRT PC Monitors.

Scanlines on projector screens?

@@RetroBirdGaming not as far as I know. Of coarse it was possible but I just just referring to the few mentions that CRTs were all we had back then. There was also LCDs and other display technologies

Well they would work on art either by paper in the early days or by using professional monitors that were much higher quality than what was available to consumers. For early consoles I’d say yes they relied on the CRT to blur and soften the image because most TVs of the time had only RF or maybe composite. Later on during the mid to late 90s much better connections came to consumers in the form of S-video and Component video. Both of these would provide a much better signal and was closer to the pure RGB signal that developers would of used on professional or PC CRTs.

That sounds awful. Are you describing 2D games without scanlines?

They do look like that if you display them on a big HD TV from a console without an upscaler.

Amorphous blotches is what they look like _with_ scanlines. Rigid blocks of color is what they look like without scanlines.

Nice!

Those two sound like monsters! hahah

I wanna start with a basic CRT and then save up like crazy for a BVM. I _think_ widescreen BVMs can run in 4:3.

Works for me!

Arcades in the 80's and 90's ran with scanlines, they made games look much better. if you have a PAL PS2 console on an RGB Scart TV, play games like Dead or Alive 2 in 60hmz mode. You get full screen scanlines instead of the standard 50hz mode, it looks SO much better. PS3 Era it wasn't needed.

@PyreManic Pyremanic on PAL systems the scanlines were not noticeable at 50hz, that's probably what he means. The picture looks higher resolution and more "clean" but it's not full screen or as smooth. If you run a game with a 60hz mode on a PAL CRT TV the scanlines pop out as the picture stretches to fill the screen.

@PyreManic no tv I ever owned or played has had noticeable scan lines unless your standing 1 inch away from the tv

@PyreManic A great way to see the difference is PS2 PAL games that support 60mhz mode. When you switch to 60hz mode the picture quality completely changes as the scanlines appear bigger due to the picture stretching. The 50hz PAL picture quality is a lot higher but you don't see clear scanlines.

@PyreManic 60 Hz PAL games with RGB scart were actually the highest quality available. They look great. Far better than NTSC with S-video.

Yeah, I definitely find myself liking scanlines with games that display at 240P.

I think lots of 240p games look fine without them, but having the option is always nice.

I’ve seen scan lines for 480p and to me they look great although I’m using a PC CRT so it can produce much higher resolutions and give better picture quality than CRT TVs

@@crestofhonor2349 but 480p on a flat screen is essentially blinds. You can only remove every other line. 720 is the best as you get 2 lines of data and one scanline. Retrotink 5x does amazing 1080p scanlines apparently.

hahah