I still remember Taran campaigning for adobe to add nearest neighbor scaling, and asking viewers to vote for that feature request in the adobe forums or something.
That was merely a tweet, not a request on an LMG channel. But, here's the request: adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911233-premiere-pro/suggestions/37024072-nearest-neighbor-scaling-sampling-simple-and-v -Taran
well yeah wii are very old... only people still had it in tv shelf is old people who just want so swing in front of tv... which not that many... well swich can do the same thing but alot of people just do fit ring... sad...
I guess I'm in the minority here; I remember the old, bulky CRT's these games were meant for, and just how blurry those things could be (especially after decades of heavy use). Bi-cubic and higher do still blur the image too much, but I find that a simple bi-linear algorithm, paired with a basic scanline overlay for 240p, can provide a rather convincing effect. Those games weren't meant to be blurred into oblivion, but they weren't made for sharp digital displays. 480p (and even 480i) games, while not HD, were sharp enough to look decent with the default upscaling methods but still, ironically, look much sharper on blurry analog displays.
Not sure what you're trying to explain. The reason CRTs look sharper is because at low resolution, the electron gun literally skips lines when drawing frames, and that's known as "scan lines". When you draw an image with scan lines it creates the illusion that it was originally twice as sharp and then cut in half
Great video, but even if you have perfect pixel replication it won’t look like your memories. Why? Because TVs in the 90s couldn’t replicate perfect pixels. They could do native resolution, but you often had scan lines, comb filters, and other issues associated with CRTs that would cause a natural blur to the games. This made the art look smooth, which developers knew about when they designed the art. In essence, a bit of blur on the pixel art was expected. Don’t believe me? Play an SNES game on a good old fashioned CRT with S-video and then play a modern pixel art game.
I'd settle for modern retro gamers just accepting dithering as a way to extend a limited palette, and not something most of us ever saw. Also, it'd be great if they'd figure out how to display Capcom arcade titles in the correct 4:3 aspect ratio. Or if they'd realize that the warm glow of CRT scanlines doesn't make an image darker.
This has why it annoys me so much when I hear retro games complain about all the filters when playing pixel art games nowadays. Sure, I think some of these filters grossly overdo it (like in the mobile versions of Final Fantasy 4-6), but there absolutely WAS filtering when playing games back in the day. You did not see every individual pixel! Do people just not remember what it was like to play games on a CRT?
@@km_studios Yup, this exactly. Actually I think it's the opposite with early 3D games like N64, these look way better with modern enhancements like 60 fps and sharper resolution, and a modern screen. But it were the CRTs technical limitations that made pesudo-3D games like Donkey Kong Country look like magic.
jvalex18 plus everyone has moved over to the ossc, retrotink 2x and framemeister for retro console scaling because they are superior in EVERY way to ANY TV’s scaling, yes, even for vhs tapes! Framemeister makes an INCREDIBLE job with 480i content, it is low lag and the result is stunning for PS2 for example as well as VHS tapes! (OSSC is pretty trash on 480i, uses bob and bob isn’t, well, pretty?? and the difference is of a milisecond so why bother with ossc 480i? Retrotink’s 480i scaling is okay at best to me), but all three options offer less than 1 ms of lag for the scaling, and they support 240p, 480i, 288p, 576i, 480p, 576p etc.... (too many supported resolutions without problems!)
The comment about nearest neighbour giving you the sharpest pixels "which make pixel art look good" made me cringe. Games of that era were designed for CRTs where at least some blurring would naturally occur, and the art was often designed around it. I find pixel art tends to look its best on an actual CRT or through a decent CRT shader. The blur from modern TVs does look awful with older games, though!
@@frogger1555 yeah he was there, but how many videos were just him as the main host? in other vids it was just, hey its taran, he edits videos, and uses crazy shortcut and hotkeys to do it
@@MrMediator24 Nope, that's light rays hitting multiple photoreceptor cells in the back of your eye instead of converging at a single point because your eye is misshaped.
It's very interesting and informative, however for retro gaming specifically, it would have been prudent to mention that as a gamer you were almost certainly playing these retro titles for the first time on a CRT monitor. Those pixel sprites would never appear as crisp as the images ripped straight from the code you see displayed in the modern era. In fact, some artists for NES/SNES games accounted for this CRT phenomenon and used sub-pixeling to make better graphics. Playing with ultra crisp sprites is fine, but its only a preference, and should be understood to not really be the most authentic experience as to how the game would have been consumed on release.
The crisp sprites are what were hiding behind the shadow mask of a CRT all along. And yeah, it's a charming look. I considered talking about CRT scaling, but chose not to, as we have other videos about CRTs. With all the "backlash" in the comments, now I wish I'd at least mentioned it.
Totally agree 👍 I hate ultra sharp pixels, I aim to get it as close to a CRT as possible, as originally intended... But if your into sharp pixels, that's your decision 👍 all the power to ya🤙
@@TaranVH But no human ever saw that behind-the-shadow-mask version. The graphics of games designed for CRTs were designed to be viewed on CRTs with all the artifacts inherent in them. Super blocky pixel art is a fine aesthetic, but I disagree that it's a more authentic experience.
@@TaranVH But they were never intended to be seen that way. Sprites and models were made specifically under the idea that there were gaps that the CRT's blurriness would fill in. Ultra sharp pixels, whilst preferrable by some, are not at all the intended form even from the development standpoint. The crisp sprites, to the developers, were incomplete.
I was going to say exactly this. I really don't like the super sharp square-shaped pixels that are so razor-sharp it pierces my eyes. That's why I play retro games on a CRT monitor, as it looks and feels much smoother, responsive, rounded and still not as blurry or pixelated as modern TVs, emulators or other solutions make it look like.
@@BitcoinIsGoingToZero Yeah but it still isn't blurry or fuzzy so much as it is slightly tapered. Like the pixels bleed over the blank scanlines and each other's phosphers slightly based on intensity, they don't just blur together. They aren't supposed to be super sharp, but they aren't supposed to be blurry either. Soft is probably the best word for it. Nearest neighbor with a filter like HLSL properly configured is about the closest you'll get.
@@BitcoinIsGoingToZero I wouldn't interpret it as a misunderstanding on the grand scale. Digitally, that's how pixel art is supposed to be (crisp). But an inferior analog connection to a non fixed pixel display consumer CRT TV with low TVL count forces developers to work around that and so the pixel art of certain games would be optimized for the displays of CRT TVs (and so technically I would call it more specifically as "old TV art", or simply just 8-bit/16-bit art (which can technically also embrace 3D graphics that can theoretically benefit from certain non-nearest neighbor upscaling methods), rather than pixel art). Pixel art can be taken advantage of by LCD displays, such as that of handheld consoles, which in my opinion looks excellent, and can even give the CRT look a run for its money (e.g. Game Boy Advance, Neo Geo Pocket, WonderSwan Color). When ppl thought of home consoles, they didn't think of pixel perfect in the way ppl would've with handhelds due to using non fixed pixel displays with analog inputs back in the good ol' days. Now it's a different case since we're in the era of fixed-pixel displays and LED/OLED for everything. The problem is that the displays we use today are HD and UHD with very high pixel count rather than low pixel count, which means it's not exactly ideal for an authentic pixel art in the way we remember it to be, considering that fixed pixels on LED displays these days are barely visible to the naked eye especially with 4K displays, which makes upscaling almost mandatory. Running emulations of early 2000s handheld games on an LED display on PC still looks excellent as long as it's in the native pixel count, though games will look very tiny on an HD screen and barely visible on a 4K/UHD screen, sadly. I would assume that aesthetically, the black unoccupied scanlines isn't exactly ideal especially for an era of higher TVL count on large CRT TVs, but they chose to continue developing games that way until the sixth console generation because it was the only way to imitate progressive video on an interlaced SDTV. Pixel art in its most faithful form is, at least imo, on a fixed pixel display without using any upscaling (that means no nearest neighbor) while the display's fixed pixels are large enough to seen with the naked eye.
If you want to play tetrogames correctly on an LCD you need a scanline filter and a slight blur filter. Also, scanline..2s are different between PAL and NTSC screens, the NTSC ones are bigger. It's true that who babbles about "sharp pixels" gemerally has no idea about how retrogames should look. The slight bleeding of the phosphors and the almost halftone effect of the scanlines were taken into account by people that designed the sprites. Sharp pixels is NOT the correct way to look at retrogames. The best is of course a CRT with an RGB cable, my SNES never looked so good (especially because back in the days I used the RF cable).
Good call on the My Life in Gaming shoutout. Their RGB series is fantastic for anyone looking for the best picture with their retro systems, be it CRT or modern TVs
i still remember when i fell into the deep rabbit hole of purist retro gaming. its an expensive hobby and gets old fast when you arent nostalgic for most of the old games..
@@unlovableshinshin If you're in Europe using microcomputer (for the Amiga or MSX for example) screens with SCART input are just as good for normal use, and WAY cheaper and easier to use. PVM's and BVM's are overrated. Even a good Sony frame is great for normal use, and if you know what models you look for they can often be gotten for free. (again, if you live in europe, seeing as SCART is quite important)
Bicubic looks more like it did on those old TVs. Remember the old TVs were 480i, fuzzy, a degree of motion blur due to the fade time and the way the CRT scanned the image across the screen. Most the blurring functions of these TVs and emulators make it look like it did back then. We couldn't see the individual pixels on old fuzzy screens.
Motion blur is actually more of an issue with modern flat screen TVs. If you have a chance to do so, just compare a smooth and fast side scroller on both. On the CRT you can easily 'lock onto' details while they are scrolling, on the flat screen they become doubled/ghosting/blurry/smeary and hard to lock on to with your eyes.
@@Usabell I'm not talking about motion blur I'm talking about the fuzzy nature of the screen itself. The screen was energized by the electron stream and that actually takes a moment to fade. Motion was smoother on CRT than early LCDs for sure, I'm talking about a paused screen with Mario or Sonic the Hedgehog on it, you could not see the stair stepped spikey hair on the CRT TV, you could on the old computer monitors.
I've seen this a lot lately, the idea that the "best image" for old console games like SNES is razor sharp pixel images. However, this isn't how we experienced these games when they came out. Practically everyone played these games on a CRT of some sort, and CRTs did not present these games with razor sharp pixel images like modern flat screens do today. There was some rounding and blurring of the image that caused the graphics to look, well, less pixelated. You see, back then it wasn't considered a good thing for games to look pixelated in appearance. It was better for them to look smooth and blended with some sharpness, but not too sharp to look pixelated. Nowadays, though, it seems that everyone into retro gaming thinks these games were made to be viewed in as sharp and pixelated a form as possible, but this wasn't generally possible or desirable back then. When I play an SNES game on an emulator on a flat screen with the game perfectly sharp and pixelated it's just not the same experience as it once was. I feel bad for kids growing up today who only know flat panels and pixelated art. They don't know what it was like back then, unless perhaps they watch some video or look at some game magazines from back then like EGM, Game Pro, Nintendo Power, etc.
Yep. The very reason why back in the day i prefer gba emulator than nogba. The blurry make it feel like blended image and more pleasant to watch. I think old crt each pixel light overlap each other so the dark line of dot become thinner. and bright line more visible.
Completely agreed. I felt like cringing when he said that the sharp pixels is what makes pixel art look good. Pixel art for home console games in the analogue video era was always expected to blur to at least a certain extent. Even with RGB SCART or component you still benefit from some softness, and details which otherwise look like discrete blocks on an LCD or OLED will end up blurring together to give a more natural image which implies more detail. There are arguments to be made among CRT enthusiasts as to whether you should chase after RGB/component output or composite, seeing as some effects like dithering patterns almost blur entirely away with composite and give a more subtle-looking image (and water effects look their best on composite or RF), but using an LCD or OLED without an appropriate shader is so far removed from how the developers expected the games to be displayed. Sharp pixels on a handheld device is fine thanks to the size, but when blown up on a 50 inch TV it just gets too much for me.
@@bwood2572 Yeah, that's kinda what I was saying... He's not a tech guy, just a gamer... He does get some things wrong for sure. I just appreciate his gamer oriented view on this subject...
jarod atkinson metal jesus doesn’t use great equipement at times and really doesn’t explain a lot about it, he mostly talks about color, design, functionality but not scaling, integers, lag and overall playing experience.. and he doesn’t really know how the things he buys perform most of the time, I’d rather avoid metal Jesus and reach over to retrorgb, MLiG and others.
There are special HDMI adapters you can plug to your Wii to get a better image for more modern displays. That...or hunt down a second-hand Wii U. Getting component cables for it and switching to Progressive Scan might be the cheapest solution, however. Or you can watch My Life In Gaming for more info on the subject. You have a ton of options.
@@Ashton000 I have a Wii2HDMI adaptor and while it has some problems (occasional dithering) overall the picture is plenty sharp. It was totally worth the 8 bucks I paid. Component cables to a CRT are preferable of course, but if your monitor only has HDMI inputs like mine the adapter is plenty good.
@@flameshana9 I had one, and it ended up putting out red over black or something. cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/408366253611155456/714818722560475136/wii2hdmi_red.jpg
Well, yeah, that... plus you're talking about games that were written in an era of CRTs. To make them look right you don't want zero blur, you want the _right kind of blur_ that mimics screens from the era.
@@SolomonsProxy ACTUALY. a LOT of Games back in the day(especialy NES and SNES era) where designed with so called Color Bleeding in mind, where do to the way a CRT draws the picture colors "cells"(its not actualy pixels on an CRT) directly next to each otehr blended together, correctly used this could give Sprites more colors then they actualy had, and make them look more detailed
@@weberman173 I really miss CRTs... at one point, Toshiba and Canon had partnered to develop SED displays which would have an electron source for each pixel, allowing them to have screens similar in thickness to LCD displays but with all the benefits of a CRT, but then Toshiba jumped ship for oLED and the dream died :(
You still get some. There is always going to be input lag, whether it be the slow transfer rate of copper cables, or the time it takes for the beam on the CRT to sweep back around, you always will get input lag. It may not be noticeable, and it may not affect anything, but it will always be there.
@@voxeltek6624 I'm guessing he meant "lowest possible" input lag. I see "no input lag" thrown around a lot and I always assume they actually mean "lowest possible" because a CRT will grant the lowest input lag experience. (Although some great alternatives have been made in recent years like the retrotink2x paired with a low lag monitor and what retroarch emulation is doing.)
CRT softening is different than hardware/software softening on modern LCD displays. Thats why games look great on CRTS, but look crappy with "scanlines" and bilinear filtering turned on.
Yeah. This video makes me think that he's either only played these games on an emulator and thinks that's what the games looked like when they came out, or its just been too long since he's played on a CRT and forgotten.
Yeah softening on a CRT is unique. Genesis games on an emulator look razor sharp while CRTs round them out. Since I use RGB cables for the Genesis the picture is sharp, well-colored, and rounded. That's why N64 games look great on a CRT while not performing well on modern TVs, despite having tons of mods for that issue.
Many people are very accostumed to the emulator look like the vídeo shows, problem is that old games were never intended to be THAT sharp either, they used a lot of tricks to make the sprites look more natural than pixelated like a emulator. The biggest offender is Sonic's Green Hill Zone. The waterfalls were intended to show in a transparency look, using oversharpened filters like emulators do make the game reveal its tricks, you can see clearly the "chess" pattern which you were never supposed to see. Even though i kinda got used to pixelation on emulation to minimise visual processing and lag, i hate how many articles and stuff tell "how the game was supposed to look" with modern techniques like this when it is not true at all.
I have been following the emulation scene from the very beginning, and over the years, thanks to increasingly advanced filters, we have now achieved really good results in the upscaling of old games. I still own old consoles with a crt tv, and trying side by side the same original games on CRT and their emulated counterpart on new screens, I can say that now the performance is better on the emulators, or at least I prefer it. As mentioned by others, in the 80s and 90s programmers created game graphics aware of the blurring that CRT screens applied to pixels. You did not see the naked and raw pixel on old TVs, there was no concept of pixel art that is in vogue today, on the contrary, I remember very well that the reviews of the time rewarded the graphics when it was not too pixelated, the visible grain was considered a defect . If you want to see an example of what can be achieved today with modern emulators, try watching this video (preferably at maximum quality and on a 4K screen). There are those who like to see pixels, but I prefer it like this: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-9ipx2T8Jczc.html&ab_channel=IlNiubblog
This Neo, Gen Z, pseudo retro, love of Pixels drives me nuts. I absolutely hate pixels. Only people who didn't grow up with the games think that's what they look like
Yeah I honest hate this video because it represents a gen that doesn't get the concept and with my ignored postings in the past really goes to say something about it. Pixel art is nothing but fan-boi works by folks who don't know low res. It's a shame @#$% like this is dominating re-releases to classic games on the digital markets. It's such a great way to destroy a hobby.
Thats one thing thats always bugged me about playing older games on high resolution displays is that some displays and/or graphics processors just dont provide nearest neighbor/integer scalling which seems like it'd be a simple thing to add, just mutiply the size the pixels to larger square blocks and you can keep the "pixelated" look of old games when upscaling them.
The sharp pixels are not what you should want. Older games were designed for CRT TVs, which smoothed the pixels and made it look closer to bilinear or bicubic.
unless the crt is super old or low quality it'll look blurry, but in a way that still lets you tell apart of the pixels. i did see a video about how there's a transparency effect created on a waterfall that only works on crts, but i think it was more about the pixels moving really fast.
@@tokenslol I work with art, including pixel art. No, you are not supposed to see the raw pixels. They are supposed to be smoothed out by the TV. And some textures look hideous without a proper filter or a real CRT.
@@AzureSymbiote I mean maybe I've been looking at the wrong footage but bilinear and bicubic just aren't close enough to what the CRTs do for you to want to play with them.
The funny part is that these games were not meant to look sharp at all, the fact that crts sort of blend the light between pixels was what made these sprites look more detailed; most sharp sprites just look.. weird, as they weren't designed with that aesthetic in mind (modern pixel art games on the other hand, are meant to look sharp).
Just like the old statues weren't meant to be white. Imagine a Highlander-like Greek or Roman seeing this - "No guys, we painted them. It would have been crazy to leave them white."
I bought a component cable and Gran Turismo 4 looks pretty good in 1080i on my 1080p screen. Resident Evil 4 also looks pretty good in 480p. You have to know the correct button combination to change the game's resolution right after the console's boot logo. Some of them include the options on settings.
@@cekan14 Unfortunately my old Samsung LCD TV broke and can't be fixed. It had Component input for DVDs and Gaming consoles. My new Philips LED TV doesn't have component. The only way I can connect my PS2 or any old console is with RCA. The irony is that my CRT TV bought in 2007 works perfectly, and the LCD TV Bought in 2010 broke in 2017. Looks like CRTs are build to last.
@Andy Young Space is a big concern that many don't want to talk about. I'm crazy so in my one bedroom apartment I got a 32" Trinitron. Now the apartment is moderately sized and I have no kids so it's fine. The issue is not everyone will be in my situation. Some might have studios and have no room whatsoever. Some might have a house but the kids' stuff take up everything. That's why I'm glad scalers like RetroTink exist.
They don't do nearest neighbor because composite doesn't allow you to do that. There's no resolution to go off, so it can't possibly do nearest neighbor scaling. It is literally impossible. Also, since it's not processed pixel-by-pixel unlike digital signals, and due to the inherent noise of composite, even if you could do nearest neighbor it wouldn't look any better than standard bilinear filtering on an LCD.
The other main problem here is most TVs also interpret 240p as 480i. This essentially means that the second 240p frame is interpreted as the first even field. Then that gets deinterlaced. Oh, and to suggest more series and channels that explain analog video, I suggest Technology Connections and his series about television in general, and Displaced Gamers and his many videos that go really in depth about the signal(s) that go to the TV, and more console-specific scaling problems.
Nope, huge misconception. Pixel art was never meant to look sharp and pixelated. It was designed with the natural blur and scanlines of a CRT in mind. When your TV applies a blurry upscaling algorithm, it's actually closer on paper to the original look, but because the blur isn't the same as how it worked on a CRT and it doesn't have the scanlines or perfect blacks to make the details really pop again, it just looks like ass.
When I see a video with Taran I automatically like it. I’ve been watching Linus for so many years now and I feel like I watched Taran grown into a man from a gawky kid.
I hate sharp pixels on retro games displayed on modern monitors. The crt tvs from back in the day had natural scanlines that slightly smooth out the harsh pixel edges and stair step effects. When I play old school games on an emulator I always use filters to get it close to the old crt tvs as possible
There's another BIG problem with TVs as well that is the part where the upscaler is not programmed to deal with 240p. The "tv standard" is that you send 240 lines, 60 times per second, and those lines are either ODD or EVEN, as in you send line 1, 3, 5, 7 then on the next frame its line 2,4,6,8... But old consoles don't do that, they send just the same field over and over, while keeping the other field black, and this works fine on CRTs as you get twice as bright lines etc.. So ideally, the televisions should detect when this is being done and either keep one of the fields as black lines or double the lines, but instead they try to force the picture to be 480i and you get awful artifacts like the combing you can see on this video.
Actually, the blurring of the pixels is how it's _meant_ to be seen, the graphics were actually designed with degradation of signal in mind, particularly for Composite video, and actually _created_ shading and transparency effects using the flaws of the CRT to their advantage, though techniques such as Dithering, with sometimes amazing results.
you should have also mentioned how some older games relied on the older scanline bluriness to produce the image they wanted to see. There was an image i remember seeing a while back of an orc from an RPG that looked shite on any LCD regardless of how it was displayed, but on a CRT, because the color was displayed and blurred properly, looked really good.
@@gamecubeplayer I guess so, but in my case the problem is finding space for it. In my living room there's already a TV and in my desktop 2 monitors. And even though I love old games, many people like me don't want to look funny playing on those antiques. I rather buy a GOOD upscaler or even use emulators, they have pretty neat upscaling options.
Listen, this video is explaining why it doesn't look so good if you do that. And plus, maybe he doesn't have an old TV that he can use, or a secondary output device other than his TV, and may not be able to get one. For most people, they wouldn't care about a 100% retro gaming experience and may just want to play the games. People may want to use a modern TV to play their games, or maybe they just want to test out their old game consoles to see if they work or not. There are many reasons why people may want to hook up their old consoles to a modern TV. For most of them, you can't call them idiots for doing so.
I'm old enough to remember playing those games on CRT when they were new. I actually hate the "perfect pixel" look because it does NOT look like the way graphics used to look. Those old TVs and consoles used interlaced graphics, so the look was more like bi linear than pixel perfect. Pixel perfect just makes the edges look way too jagged compared to the other methods. If jaggies were so desirable anti-aliasing wouldn't be used. The hope back in those days was to get rid of jaggies, not make them more apparent!
I disagree on the quest for sharpest nearest-neighbor pixels, is not at all how the games meant to look, but I like how you show a quick look at the RetroArch options, where the true quest for perfection begins
Well, I'm old enough that a "retro" game for me is Pong on a black-and-white, coin-operated table. That being said, I've kept many of my old consoles including an Atari 2600, NES, SNES, and even a Genesis happily pumping out those pixels without extra adapters by simply keeping my old, 2006-model Sony Trinitron CRT TV around just for the purpose. It's 21-inch screen was plenty big for the time and for the graphics that the games offered. It keeps my experience real. No upscaling, no worry about added hardware, no frustration. Meanwhile, my PS4 Pro is hooked up to my 48" 4K-Ultra TV.
Of course, there are emulators that use much better upscaling algorithms, like HQ4x and XBR4x: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel-art_scaling_algorithms#/media/File:Pixel-Art_Scaling_Comparison.png
LED talvez HDR pior Samsung TV 3k.4k.8k Ruim diferente 😑😑😑😕😫 AV cego feio Ruim composite On HDMI talvez On Samsung TV mod 21 ❤👀🤩👌 AV CRT off 👀👌 AV CRT 2X off 👀👌 Scanlines AV off 👀👌 Verdade Super Nintendo AV
Cause TV/monitor manufacturers don't care about upscaling tech and investing time and money into R&D results in higher prices in an already saturated and stagnant market just to make a tiny % of customers happy. They rely on GPU/CPU manufacturers to do the heavily lifting for them which works amazingly for PC games and consoles *if* devs/console manufacturers decide to support older games by releasing them on newer hardware or support backwards compatibility. Reality is Devs/ Manufactures of console games are often in the same boat as Monitor/TV manufacturers. Saturated industry with little to no incentive to support a small % of players / users. The *Only* way to get old games of any resolution to amazing quality is with high end dedicated upscaling hardware for $200+ Most older consoles have amazing, clean quality video out signals so this type of hardware can make even 100x100p games look amazing at 4k. There is a niche for everything, you just need to know where to find dedicated manufactures to get what you want.
we just moved into a larger place and my teenage son has been enjoying a few older games on my old PS2 (mix of psx and ps2 games)... he requested a CRT for his room for his retro gaming play because of how bad some of the games looked on our big LCD tvs... a little time watching FB marketplace found a curb alert of a decent late 90's 27"... I'm keeping my eyes open for a trinitron still though...
As good as it looks, it still looks different from the original game. Scanlines make that "retro" look as it was in the 90s, that is, if you were using true CRT TVs. AFAIK those games do not look as good on any projection TVs. Even on the GBA port, you will see that each pixels of the game corresponds to each physical pixel on the GBA's screen which has a bit of a visible gap due to the extremely low resolution, and the fact that you're playing it up close to the screen since it's a portable device with a small screen. This is not a look you can just recreate by tweaking some settings in your 4K smart TV.
if you want to play an old console, get an old TV, it's that simple. A CRT has tons of more charme because it also delivers the exact way you've seen and experienced your old consoles back in the days. You'll be shocked how much of a difference it makes. But don't open up the CRT or you'll get shocked differently. If you want to emulate, there are also many ways to do this on a CRT, like a Raspberry Pi via composite or with a PI2SCART board for RGB. (there are also many other brands like RetroTink etc.)
Anyone with a 4K screen and a gaming PC, check out Retroarch's CRT-Royale shader. You're welcome. It's probably the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
Nearest neighbor is a form of 'zero order hold' filtering, which consists on just holding the received value (the color) unmodified until the next one arrives. There are many cases where zero order hold is visibly and even mathematically superior to very expensive and 'intelligent' filters, especially when those filters make assumptions (such as the continuity of the signal) which are not true in the source. Pixel art is just an example, Amiga music is another: when playing ancient MOD files using proper Paula emulation at the intended rate, ZOH produces a clearer sound and is closer to the original in comparison to the typical linear or cubic filters.
One time I went to a convention where one of the booths had a PS2 plugged into a plasma TV. They played a game I played like twice, Marvel vs. Capcom and the graphics sucked. I remember it looking a whole lot better on the CRT that I played it on back in the early 2000's.
What about for PC games on a TV? They look terrible when in 1080p on a 4K screen, I know some games have a built in resolution scaling which is awesome, but what about older games that do not? Is there work around for those? Maybe something in the Nvidia settings?
The Wii isn't that old. My opinion on what makes a console "retro" is if it was released before 3D videogames, so things like the SNES, Amiga, or Master System. The Wii had plenty of great 3D games like Mario Galaxy.
My Techquickie idea is the rise and fall of WiMax and how 4G LTE defeated it. Towards the end WiMax did a 4G but if I remember correctly Sprint bought Clear to kill off the competition.
Old games were _not_ intended to be seen as pixel art. Techniques like dithering and banding counted on the natural blurring of the CRT to produce transparency effects, expand the color palette via blending colors, lighting effects, and more.
This is actually a very divisive topic, whether pixels should be sharp and visible or not. To me it seems that younger people, who likely played these games on emulators, prefer sharper pixels, likely due to the overhead required for better-than-nearest-neighbor scaling. That is, they're old enough to have emulated the game on a pentium ii or iii, but not old enough to have played initially and mainly in actual hardware. Older generations, those of us who went to arcades in the 80s and had ataris and played using the included rf switch for the nes on a black and white 10" screen actually prefer bilinear filtering. Trust me kiddos. We really couldn't see sharp pixels on crts back in the day.
Blurred pixels aren’t necessarily bad, a CRT blurs pixels in the right way. Older pixel based games look best on CRTs, as that’s what they were designed on.
So we're going to ignore that old CRT TV's used to suffer/benefit from the pixels bleeding together slightly, thus blurring the image and colors? Allrighty then... smh
Another reason not mentioned here is that most modern TVs misinterpret the 240p as 480i, so they try and deinterlace a progressive image. That’s why there are weird line gaps at 0:12
Many people are very accostumed to the emulator look like the vídeo shows, problem is that old games were never intended to be THAT sharp either, they used a lot of tricks to make the sprites look more natural than pixelated like a emulator. The biggest offender is Sonic's Green Hill Zone. The waterfalls were intended to be transparent and using oversharpened filters like emulators do make the game reveal its tricks, you can see clearly the "chess" pattern which you were never supposed to see. Even though i kinda got used to pixelation on emulation to minimise visual processing and lag, i hate how many articles and stuff tell "how the game was supposed to look" with modern techniques like this when it is not true at all.
I like his style. Seems to provide higher quality content. The B list LMG content has become just dinguses goofing off on camera and content has become secondary. New talents “quirkiness” now is in the way of producing something good. This does not seem to be the case with Taran. Time for some of the other talent to stay behind the camera.
