Is it actually REQUIRED to play retro games with some scanline or crt filter/on a crt tv?

[χKai]

Yes, it is mandatory, there is no opt-out and we have armed guards at the door.
We'll have Cid instruct you shortly.

 

[Leifang]

Absolutely not required, and if you play retro handheld games, they wouldn't have been seen on a CRT in the first place. Gameboy Zeldas or Castlevanias weren't designed for TVs or to be played on them (even if you could emulate them on one.)

Also, PC games didn't have visible scanlines since they used double scan (plus PC monitors had sharper pixels than a TV), people adding emulator lines to Doom or Fallout are... unusual. DOS games would be always more authentic with visible pixels than with scanlines.

So CRT filters, technically, only apply to arcade games and home consoles linked to TV, and even those often used games that had PC ports, and looked normal back then... Sorry, I didn't see no scanlines when playing DOS version of Golden Axe as kid. Ditto with Final Fantasy VII/VIII on PC.

CRT filters can help smooth out details and dithering, but I feel it's usually better off using dedither shaders with a scaler on top instead. Alternatively, you can ignore shaders and use BLARGG NTSC filter for slightly noisy look and composite for fixed transparencies. But it looks kinda meh, and again, wouldn't be authentic on how games played on Pal/SECAM TV (no good filters for those). And of course, VGA ports never had TV artifacts.

Yes, you can absolutely play with sharp pixel-perfect graphics, and it will look great on a phone screen, but on a modern TV or large monitor, it might be hard to make up outlines or read the text with sharp scaling. That's where shaders help:

Personally, I like ScaleFX (hybrid is even sharper), or some softer CRT filters like modified sh1nra358 or RetroCrisis presets based on Guest CRT (you can remove the black lines and/or add more realistic mask too, importantly it adds glow, afterimage and smoothing). CRT-Royale looks nothing like I remember games used to look IMO.

Kawase-glow is great for vector games, and Antialiasing/FSR (or nothing) for 3D on MAME (for 3D console emulators, just set internal resolution higher and decided on texture filter, scalers are mostly designed for 2D images). For games that use crosshatch dot pattern for gradients or transparency, Prepend a dedithering shader like mdapt or sgenpt.

If you're on Retroarch, go to shaders_slang/presets folder and experiment, see what works for you and your setup, even older scalers like Super 2XSai or Super Eagle, HQ3X or xBR/XBRZ can look pretty good. You can save your own presets per-game or in general. Good luck!

 

[dragonlee]

Also, PC games didn't have visible scanlines since they used double scan (plus PC monitors had sharper pixels than a TV), people adding emulator lines to Doom or Fallout are... unusual. DOS games would be always more authentic with visible pixels than with scanlines.

So is double scan another way of just saying Progressive Native Resolution? Or is this a way of making lower resolution games use the full resolution without interlacing? I'm not familiar with how old PC monitors works in regards to resolution.

 

[Leifang]

So is double scan another way of just saying Progressive Native Resolution? Or is this a way of making lower resolution games use the full resolution without interlacing? I'm not familiar with how old PC monitors works in regards to resolution.

Not the same thing, progressive scan means no interlacing, that the entire frame is drawn fully every frame instead of rows alternating every other frame. Consoles can also do that, i.e. PS2 or Gamecube had many games toggle between interlacing or progressive scan. But they still connected to a TV with all that entails.

VGA monitor's double scan has nothing to do with framerate, it means that when a game with 320x240 displays in 640x480 VGA, there's no vertical gaps between pixels and each pixel is doubled. Same for 200p games stretched to be 400 pixels tall. So when people add emulator lines that round pixel edges to these games, they look nothing like they used to. We always had visible pixels and yes, they were ugly.

So, 480i is interlaced, 480p is progressive, double scan is basically 240p DOS games on 480p monitors, which get double scanned instead of showing on native resolution (so you get two lines per pixel). What it means in practice is that there's no visible scanline gaps on the screen and it "looks like LCD".

Also, old sprites made from digitized photos (claymation in Doom, Mortal Kombat, Road Rash, Area 51) or screenshots of 3D renders (Diablo, Fallout, Baldur's Gate, Resident Evil backgrounds) aren't pixel art and there's zero reasons to pretend the conversion artifacts in them is super complex design to take advantage of old displays. That's utter bull, everyone had a different screen. Games were just designed around hardware limitations. As they still are, it's just less obvious now (we still got things like texture pop-in or draw distance).

And nobody thought in pixels back then, see actual dev interviews. They knew it won't look the same on every screen, everything was eyeballed. The deliberate design around old screens defects is largely a modern myth. Dithering to simulate shadows and half-tones predates CRTs, it was used in bloody Medieval gravures! in somes consoles, PS1 for example, dithering isn't even intended, it's a side-effect, like polygon wobble.

*** *** ***

Side-track about PC gaming:

Personal computers always had multiple display types and tried to run on as many things as possible, so when VGA became the standard and superceded CGA, EGA and whatever else, you would heve majority of games AND monitors run through it (it's that blue connector with 2 screws on the side), and it would support tons of modes and resolutions including higher ones, like SVGA and XGA and even HD.

My 1080p 24 inch widescreen monitor still has a VGA output (in addition to HDMI), so did my 14 inch curved CRT that only went to 800x600, or larger 19 inch flat CRT that supported 1600x1200. And you are running a PC game on any of those natively. It already looks how it was intended to look. There's no need to simulate a different display. And none of them have visible scanlines. Or composite/sVideo/SCART input artifacts that shaders often emulate.

I.e. a PC port of Sonic would not blend waterfalls with the composite output computers don't use (VGA, DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort are all superior), but it also will most likely have built-in smoothing shaders to toggle because why the hell not? It's all part of PC gaming (Sonic CD version on Steam is great!)

To add to it, even before flat liquid crystal displays became mainstream, flat plasma and early LCD screens already existed on computers... ever played Heroes of Might and Magic on a laptop that had more kilograms than it displayed FPS? We did hotseat multiplayer like that at a friend's. Good luck viewing that from any angle that isn't starting directly into the screen. But at home I had a CRT monitor running the same game. Which wasn't designed specifically for either, but to be ran from everything possible. Most of them had multiple resolutions to choose. The argument that "games had pixel art designed specifically with CRTs in mind" that OP was told quickly falls apart on IBM-compatible personal computers.

*** *** ***

You can use whatever you want, of course, but when I see people saying there's an only "good and correct" way to display 2D graphics and end up watching people add... CRT shaders... to an actual CRT monitor that doesn't show these effects on its own, I wince. Insert that overused SOTN picture of Dracula portrait made on emulator with modern shaders as an example of "this is how games used to look back in the day" for extra pain.

The latest trend was scanline fetishists unironically telling people that to display some old games "correctly", they need an 8k OLED HDR display, I am not even joking, they're that deluded. Seeing a comment that said that he dreams of a 16k monitor to play Prince of Persia (200p resolution) "as it was intended" broke me. This game was played on blurry 480p monitors and ancient ghosty plasmas that are older than most commenters!

Sorry for the rant, I just burned out on every emulator messageboard and YouTube comments having those cork-sniffing scanline connoiseurs saying "the art needs scanlines to look correct and good" after claiming that Donkey Kong Country is hand drawn pixel art (it's not), here's the short:

tl;dr: for games on PC, CRT shaders are adding tons of things that weren't there. Anyone claiming it's the "correct" way to play them is LARPing. If you like those, sure. That's the point of computers, tweaking things how you want, but scanline purists aren't even being authentic, they're trying to make everything look like a NTSC SONY Trinitron, which looks nothing like majority of TVs used to, let alone any handheld or PC display... or a PAL TV with shadow mask (which yes, absolutely can run 30 and 60FPS NTSC games).

Even for consoles it's questionable, later PS1s, for example, had a BUILT-IN LCD, yet you still have people claiming the console that had a physical liquid crystal display embedded into it "needs CRT effects". No, just no. It doesn't.

 

[dragonlee]

VGA monitor's double scan has nothing to do with framerate

Never said it did.

 

[Leifang]

Never said it did.

you asked if it's related to interlacing, which is related to frame rate, so I tried to explain the difference...

 

[IyoTheHelpfulWolf]

Play however is fun for you. Scanline or no scanlines. I personally don't use scanline shaders for most consoles, as they just don't look convincing to me, plus I have a big ass Samsung CRT for that purpose anyway. If I'm playing on an LCD, I usually play without filters or a light blending filter like the one that's on by default on Robert Bragalia's emulators.

 

[tigg]

I don't think so, I never mess with filters or anything with emulators and I play all my retro consoles on a LED tv and I don't see anything wrong with it. Granted you don't get that foggy style picture that a CRT would give, but to me thats a good thing.

 

[Mortem_Kage]

No.

I play with them sometimes because they make some games look nicer (e.g., Donkey Kong Country).

Is that..Ariga’s Megamix I see?

 

[fake-kun]

Is that..Ariga’s Megamix I see?

Huh? Where?

 

[ShibbyDealer]

Personally, I can't stand constantly viewing a shitty CRT filter unless it's a game that aesthetically fits with it, like Megami Tensei.

 

[Xdqwerty]

Is that..Ariga’s Megamix I see?

What's that?

 

[Mortem_Kage]

Huh? Where?

Your profile I mean. Is that Megamix Bass?

Post automatically merged: Jan 21, 2025

What's that?

A manga series written by Hitoshi Ariga, that follows Mega Man 1~8, more or less.

 

[fake-kun]

Your profile I mean. Is that Megamix Bass?

Post automatically merged: Jan 21, 2025

A manga series written by Hitoshi Ariga, that follows Mega Man 1~8, more or less.

No. My avatar is from Rockman 8 manga by Kouji Izuki.

 

[Ikagura]

No.

Sadly most of the shaders aren't fully accurate.

 

[Parasite_Steve]

I think the emulated scanlines usually look like crap. They don’t mimic the real thing correctly and they‘re way overdone.

 

[Sumea]

For me retroarch's default of bilinear filtering was just good enough until I wanted to play Policenauts that seemed to just need a good CRT filter to make it feel and look as pretty and nice as it could on a modern screen. It is depending on niceness of the shader or filter about best universal upscaler a retro game can have.

Scanlines is something I do not care about myself personally, I think European TV's were just certain way where even my Widescreen Trinitron will not produce any visually discernable scanlines even with a Mega Drive or PS1 hooked up with RGB. I find them a distraction myself though I seen actual scanlines happen on a SF3 3rd Strike cabinet, so I at least first hand know it is not some fake story I grown without.

 

[ZombieFish]

Pretty much just agreeing with what most have said, but yeah, play however feels good to you. I even indulge in widescreen SNES hacks where available. SMW 16:9 is great.

I will advocate for playing in S-Video or Component/RGB on a real CRT, if you get the chance. There’s really no substitute for that raygun/phosphor glow, certainly not a filter that dims the image, and zero-latency feels super good in early platformers.

 

[Egg (McMuffin) Man]

A lot of the filters look nothing like what games actually looked like on a CRT. Yes CRT's had scanlines but they weren't especially thick or anything, and oftentimes you couldn't see them without paying very close attention because they were so thin. My personal recommendation is to try playing on a real CRT (A consumer model, not a pvm) and then find whatever resembles that the closest. The scanlines are just a visiting, they have no impact on the game. However, CRT's naturally blur the image slightly, and this was important for many visual effects in old games. Unfortunately most of the CRT filters in emulators don't blur the image at all, so these effects do not work - great examples of this are the waterfalls in Sonic or the trees in the background of Wood Man's stage in Mega Man 2. The other benefit of CRT's was the high refresh rate and you could use light guns, but neither of those things can be recreate with a filter.

Recently there is a new type of filter that emulates how the images were produced with the electron beam on CRT displays, but using such a filter requires that you use a display with a very high refresh rate.

 

[The Missing Link]

Nah, that's just for the aesthetic sometimes.

 

[Ajderniz]

The real sleeper is playing games with pixel graphics at 1:1 scaling, as in, the pixels in the sprites match your display's perfectly. The issue is, of course, that essentially all computer displays nowadays have unnecessarily huge resolutions.
Those old HP Compaqs, the ones who have a stand which supports both the case and the monitor, have monitors perfect for low res gaming.

 

[Gaz]

So, I was playing Mario World on snes9x and I wanted to try playing the game with a scanline filter, and then with a crt filter because I wanted to know how it felt playing the game back when it released. For a while after I started playing with those filters I felt like they were very disorienting, but people still say that's how you're supposed to play old games, and thus I conflicted since I wanna concentrate on the game itself but in the other hand play the game the "intended" way.
(Sorry if I don't express my point well)

Nope.

 

[Xdqwerty]

If you're on Retroarch, go to shaders_slang/presets folder and experiment, see what works for you and your setup, even older scalers like Super 2XSai or Super Eagle, HQ3X or xBR/XBRZ can look pretty good. You can save your own presets per-game or in general. Good luck!

I think those look pretty ugly

 

[merzbun]

crt filters are only that, filters. they are not at all necessary especially considering they wont actually portray the look of a crt, only a vague aesthetic approximation. the actual construction of a crt monitor operates very differently from modern monitors, without that real mechanical operation you wont get those images that people visualize. just play without. a lot of that hubbub regarding crt monitors being somehow more authentic is mostly short-sighted nostalgia talking anyways. if it aint an actual crt monitor then it aint a crt monitor, simple as. something something simulacra

 

[Jambhala]

So, I was playing Mario World on snes9x and I wanted to try playing the game with a scanline filter, and then with a crt filter because I wanted to know how it felt playing the game back when it released. For a while after I started playing with those filters I felt like they were very disorienting, but people still say that's how you're supposed to play old games, and thus I conflicted since I wanna concentrate on the game itself but in the other hand play the game the "intended" way.
(Sorry if I don't express my point well)

The intended way to play retro games is to play it how you like. If scanlines aren't your thing then don't feel like you have to use them. The most important part is to enjoy the games.