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

[waterxwraith]

Personally, I like scanline filters for games that were released in before HD and I find it makes the games feel... I don't know, more natural looking? However, you really shouldn't care what other people like and if its something you find yourself not enjoying I don't really see why you'd worry about it. Do what you like and what makes you comfortable. You'll never catch me stretching a GBA rom to a wide aspect ratio but if that's something YOU enjoy doing then you should do that. Emulators these days add so many options and toggles to play with and you're doing yourself a disservice not customizing everything to your own personal enjoyment. Play games the way you want to play them.

 

[PKT]

No, not really. Maybe if you want to see an approximation of how it would look on a CRT but besides that nah. It is just a personal preference thing.
Me personally, I like my pixels sharp enough that they slice my corneas. I sometimes add a filter but more often I really don't care as much. I also have a HDMI to A/V Composite converter and a CRT TV from my dad's basement if I really want that old shit (TV whine and all)

 

[Azuris]

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

That new Overlay Software makes a great Job.
One Picture shows the Lion King on a real CRT below and above on a modern Screen.
The other Screen shows the Game on a modern Screen with the Filter.
It clears the Dithering pretty good.

Thats the kind of Filter i want.

I also tested with a modded Final Fantasy VII.
It makes a good Job to merge the 2D Background and the 3D Models.

 

[Xdqwerty]

That new Overlay Software makes a great Job.
One Picture shows the Lion King on a real CRT below and above on a modern Screen.
The other Screen shows the Game on a modern Screen with the Filter.
It clears the Dithering pretty good.

Thats the kind of Filter i want.

I also tested with a modded Final Fantasy VII.
It makes a good Job to merge the 2D Background and the 3D Models.

I dont want games I play to look blurry

 

[Cheela]

Play pixel perfect then is completely fine. I ve seen soo much pokemon content in the years that use that trashy 3x filter in VisualboyAdvance that i can handle it …

 

[Xdqwerty]

Play pixel perfect then is completely fine. I ve seen soo much pokemon content in the years that use that trashy 3x filter in VisualboyAdvance that i can handle it …

Portable console games' sprites were never intended to look like that

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

Yes. It is mandatory. Not only for smoothing the dithering effect. Not only for the scanlines and slot masks. Back in the days we had settings on CRT for color, gamma and contrast and they are completely different than the setting we get now on modern screens.

Shaders are used nowadays the same way you would calibrate a screen for a game. It is literally night and day of a difference.

 

[Xdqwerty]

Yes. It is mandatory. Not only for smoothing the dithering effect. Not only for the scanlines and slot masks. Back in the days we had settings on CRT for color, gamma and contrast and they are completely different than the setting we get now on modern screens.

Shaders are used nowadays the same way you would calibrate a screen for a game. It is literally night and day of a difference.

Even with the CRT filters I can still sorta distinguish the pixels.

 

[Graw]

I don't really like scanline or CRT filters. They don't usually look like an actual CRT tv. Scanlines don't look like static black lines. It's hard to describe but the image on a CRT feels like it's always moving, even with a static image. Modern TVs feel very still by comparison. Like I said it's hard to describe but if you've ever seen what a CRT looks like on video that hasn't been synced to the camera, that movement is detectable to your eyes even if it's not visible. Crt filters don't really replicate that. They just warp the screen, change the colours and add black lines.

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

With CRT shader :

Raw pixels (aka a grey mess with broken gama) :

Post automatically merged: Saturday at 3:01 AM

Raw pixel, EGA 16 colors, dithering :

With a CRT shader, it's almost like a palette extended to VGA 256 color :

 

[LightningmanEXE]

It's only recently I've appreciated them. as a vast generalization, a lot of them were poorly implemented or don't do it right. adding lines and smearing things is not the same as having a crt like display. There are some I've played with on my batocera that seem to get the balance I was looking for with them. I've yet to run into an official "classics collection" of any game that wasn't just lines and blur slapped on

also, gba needs the slight pixel separation to be authentic.

 

[mistymermaid]

The majority of games were more created on RGB monitors. It was rare for a developer to plan and conceive an entire game around the artifacts of composite video. (perhaps Earthworm Jim on MD/Genesis, from the look of things)

 

[Sumea]

With CRT shader :

Raw pixels (aka a grey mess with broken gama) :

Post automatically merged: Saturday at 3:01 AM

Raw pixel, EGA 16 colors, dithering :

With a CRT shader, it's almost like a palette extended to VGA 256 color :

Yeah, there is a number of these types of techniques that would make a CRT monitor or a good CRT simulating shader a requirement for officially designed look.

Sonic 2's trick for rainbow illusion transparent water, and Castlevania Symphony of the Night's Dracula eye effect where the one red pixel is meant to cause a bleed over effect.

For me, the moment I started to use CRT Shaders with everything I emulate was with Policenauts. That game is just 2D art in scenes but the pixelation of them is so heavy I wanted to find the most tasteful way to smooth it out for modern monitor, which was a heavier form of a CRT shader.

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

That's the same with music and sound, any hobby really. At some point you learn how to set things up properly to get the best out of your gear. Shaders are tools to do that. Equalizers and compressors are tools to do that. Plugins and mods. Etc.

Is it mandatory to tune your guitar before playing it? Yes. Yes it is.

At some point people need to stop making excuses for being lazy not having even tried to use them correctly. I guess they'll rather complain that Super Contra is too grey and too dull and cry about that, when there are free tools and options to correct that.

 

[rugal]

if you want the true experience of the old games than yes filter is a must
though you need to figure out your setting and for each game you need to change you settings to get the best graqphic and experience

if you just want to play the game you do not need to bother with scanlie or crt filter

 

[Parasite_Steve]

Small reminder why most crt filters look bad and are generally very inaccurate:

This is what the shadow mask of most crts looked like, they worked differently than modern displays. Emu filters usually just add a black checkerboard over the image which doesn’t have the same effect at all.

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

Small reminder that If you want CRT shaders to look like that with subpixel RGB it's perfectly doable.

 

[Yankee]

"Required"? Of course not. It's not like the game doesn't boot up without them.

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

Not long ago I met with friends at their place and we re-watched Blade Runner. My buddy had a brand new TV with all the bells and whistles he was eager to show, but he left the settings by default. Frame smoothing and auto brightness ruined the movie atmosphere for me, it looked like crap. We went from glorious cinemascope to everything looking like cable news by default. Sounded like crap as well.

People need to stop paying a fortune for last gen tech, just to forget to read the manual so it just looks objectively worse than before. It's a complete waste. Start respecting yourself. Shaders are free and well worth the time to set them up. You can get the best of both worlds.

 

[jul]

Shaders are a great improvement IMO, but it depends on the shader you use and on your machine, shaders often come at a performance cost... I used to be a purist, like no shader, no antialiasing at all, just clean square pixel rendering, because for a long time scanlines "filters" in emulators were just a shitty overlayed image painted on top of the final rendering, with a blend mode, it was lame, but then things improved over the last decade.

On PC (Linux), using MAME, I typically use that filter below (CRT-geom-halatio), it's really great and comes at a modest performance cost which doesn't impact emulation speed on my machine which has a modest config:

mame -audiodriver auto -video opengl -nowindow -unevenstretch -noautoframeskip -frameskip 0 -throttle -waitvsync -nokeepaspect -gl_glsl -glsl_shader_mame0 ~/.mame/glsl/CRT-geom-halation genesis -cart "/home/jjrambo/.mame/roms/SMD/Barbarian - The Ultimate Warrior - AMIGA.zip"

This example is with a sega genesis rom btw, in case you wondered. A port of the Amiga version of Barbarian to sega megadrive, I changed the original name of the rom for personal reasons http://barbarian.1987.free.fr/download/index.htm

If you want to keep aspect ratio you replace the option "-nokeepaspect" by "-keepaspect" but if you want something in between, like something larger than the original 4:3ish aspect ratio but smaller than the 16:9 apect ratio of your monitor because that would render things too stretched horizontally, during game you press tab, then go to "Slider Controls" and set "Screen Horiz Stretch" to 0.800, that's what I do.

Here's a preview of the result, but you have to test it for yourself to see what the screen curvature effect does for example since it's not that obvious at first glance on screenshots (look at the bottom of the ground, it's curved, same deal with lateral borders while it's less obvious in that example). The entire rendering is curved, even the "scanlines" themselves, it kind of add a depth effect, it's not just a lame overlay, it also slightly "rounds" pixels around their edges.


With shaders:

Without shaders:

If you don't want to do it via the command line, you can set it via the mame.ini file

GLSL Filters for MAME​

GLSL filters for MAME are used to simulate the look and feel of old CRT monitors, enhancing the nostalgic experience of playing retro games. To enable GLSL filters in MAME, you need to set gl_glsl to 1 and gl_glsl_filter to 1 in your mame.ini file. Additionally, specify the path to your GLSL shader files using glsl_shader_mame0 and glsl_shader_mame1 options.

GLSL Effects for *nix, OS X, and Windows — MAME Documentation 0.276 documentation

I can't find the github repo where I've found those shaders I'm using, so I added them as attachment, see "glsl.zip"

You have to unzip it and put the "glsl" directory in your mame directory

On windows the command line has a slightly different synthax, but it's roughly the same, it should be something like that (not tested):

"C:\Users\jjrambo\mame\mame64.exe" -audiodriver auto -video opengl -nowindow -unevenstretch -noautoframeskip -frameskip 0 -throttle -waitvsync -nokeepaspect -gl_glsl -glsl_shader_mame0 "C:\Users\jjrambo\mame\mame\glsl\CRT-geom-halation" genesis -cart "C:\Users\jjrambo\mame\mame\roms\SMD\Barbarian - The Ultimate Warrior - AMIGA.zip"

 

[Trix_]

I hate scanline filters because they mess up my eyes (I have astigmatism).
I think they're unnecessary but some people swear by them.
I also got used to seeing raw pixels on emulators, or at least a slight smoothing effect, because that's how my brother would configure the programs.
However, I would say that some games are meant to be played on a CRT TV. Not just because they look better, but because it adds to the experience.
Here at home we still have one of the TVs we used for years, I think my mum bought it in 2004.
I have some horror games for the PS2 here, one of them being Silent Hill 2, and it's much cooler playing it on an old TV instead of the computer. It can be scarier, too.

 

[Matricks]

NO, acient tech were forced with lines, cant get rid off those times, if they could cheaply they would done it.

Now in this advanced tech I play on my pocket Anbernic RG353P 3.5inch/124Hz display in bed anytime everywhere.

 

[Yankee]

NO, acient tech were forced with lines, cant get rid off those times, if they could cheaply they would done it.

Now in this advanced tech I play on my pocket Anbernic RG353P 3.5inch/124Hz display in bed anytime everywhere.

Would look 10x better with a filter that recreates the screens the game was designed for. Look at those awful, blocky raw pixels and then look at this lovely scene. Notice the smooth gradient of the early morning New York skyline, how the lights from the buildings actually look like they're glowing, and how the shapes in the water blend so well.

It's not REQUIRED to use Shaders...but you should because it takes five seconds to apply the Preset (the one I'm using here is CRt Easy-Mode) and you deserve it.

 

[Xdqwerty]

Would look 10x better with a filter that recreates the screens the game was designed for. Look at those awful, blocky raw pixels and then look at this lovely scene. Notice the smooth gradient of the early morning New York skyline, how the lights from the buildings actually look like they're glowing, and how the shapes in the water blend so well.

View attachment 55426

It's not REQUIRED to use Shaders...but you should because it takes five seconds to apply the Preset (the one I'm using here is CRt Easy-Mode) and you deserve it.

Should I use the blarrg's crt filters in emulators that have them such as snes9x?

 

[Yankee]

Should I use the blarrg's crt filters in emulators that have them such as snes9x?

Give it a shot. I haven't used Blarrg but I've seen them a lot in lists. If you don't like it you can edit it probably through the same menu as applying it and spend a couple minutes customizing to your liking using Blarrg as a base.
I sincerely, very much recommend using one. The difference is night and day. There's a whole thread about filters with comparisons and stuff here.