The retro gaming insurgence seems as strong as
vinyl these days, but you don't see as many people looking for a CRT monitor to complete the set. More likely, they're playing a
HD remake or the original title on a digital screen in more detail than the developers ever anticipated or intended. A group of Georgia Tech students are looking to change all that by modifying open-source
Atari 2600 VCS emulator Stella to give players that good ole fashion analog vibe. As highlighted by associate professor Ian Bogost, key attributes such as color bleed, "burned" afterimage, RF-engendered signal noise, and texture created by the phosphor glow have been imitated here in recreating the effect. Hit up the gallery below for pictorial examples while we wait anxiously for video and / or the mod itself to rear its blurry head.
posted May 4th 2009 6:15AM
First of all, I'd play Crysis with this mod!
wish i could bury you twice.
Why? To priceless words in a first comment: FIRST and CRYSIS, all I missed was "will it blend" and perhaps "can it play doom", but other than that, it's an epic win post in my books! ;D
I, for one, think that in soviet russia, memes forget you!
what a pointless waist of time.
everyone was happy with lcd's who wants to make their games blurred and hard to see.
It's called nostalgia. You should check it out sometime.
"To recreate the authentic experience" or something like that. To me, it seems like purposefully scratching your vinyls.
CRTs do have advantages - less flicker, and arguably a better refresh rate.
Also, they have an infinite viewing angle, something you definitely can't emulate on an LCD.
i see you didn't WASTE your time learning to spell either
@Taylor: CRTs invariably have more flicker than LCDs, not less. And I can't think of a single LCD screen with a slower refresh rate than a CRT.
I'll give you the viewing angle... but that's why we have plasmas.
That post suggests that JB grew up with LCDs....
Dont you remember when you had to strain your eyes to read a word 98 document?
@Taylor, i cant view a CRT from the back
Everyone has hobbies, dude. relax.
Just to be clear, you're sitting on a website, take the time to read an article you think is a WASTE of time, take the time to enter a username and password, take the time to comment, and presumably take the time to read the responses. Some people would consider that a waste of time.
But, like Lou Reed once said, "I don't like nostalgia unless it's mine"
The original developers counted on the technical limitations of the CRT's to give their graphics a somewhat blurred look. It rounded the hard edges of the graphics to give them the look they wanted. Removing those effects make the games look crisper and cleaner..... a look that was never intended and doesn't remind old school gamers (or developers) of their favorite games.
@Greyseal
lol what? CRTs don't have refresh rates...there "refresh" is based on the image that is presented to them. However most high end screens at a high resolution would look "smoother" then any LCD monitor until recently. Which i think is what they were trying to say. CRTs don't flicker unless the V or H hold is bad, the phospers are changed from one color to the next, they don't have to "black out" like a LCD does" The only flicker you would get on a CRT was when your computers graphics card wasn't sending images fast enough.
@dan2600
Your understanding of CRT technology is incredibly flawed. CRTs do have refresh rate. What you are describing is framerate; these two terms mean completely different things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refresh_rate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_rate
These articles should clear up the difference. BTW, CRTs also have the advantage of generally higher gamut, dynamic range and contrast ratio than LCDs.
Read "Racing the Beam" (its an excellent book). The Atari 2600 was developed with a CRT in mind, and the games built for the platform were built for the limitations of the CRT. Many effects that the games relied on were not generated by the system itself but by the TV.
And actually the 2600 was hardly the last system like this - even the PSX/Saturn relied on the blurry old CRT to generate some free anti-aliasing and to hide some artifacts, dithering, etc. It's just how it is.
The way the game is shown on a modern LCD is not the way the game was meant to be shown.
@rawrawrawr: it's more analogous to adding hiss' and pops to audio files.
*sigh* I miss my old tv
Strangely awesome I think sums it up nicely.
CRTs also create deeper, blacker blacks than LCDs. So why is the supposedly CRTish area grey where it should be black?
CRTs had the potential to produce deeper blacks, but the signal feeding them was almost always poor (at least in the 2600 RF switch days). Blacks never looked black.
That said... this is a very silly project. Maybe it'll have some niche uses, but I kind of like the crisp and blocky look of retro games.
This all sounds a lot like audiophiles insisting that CDs sound too "clean" compared to vinyl. A bunch of nostalgia-tinged hogwash. We like the sound of old records because they remind us of old days.
@Greyseal
I don't think it's silly. In the games those image defects were used to blend colors together and smooth edges to get a more realistic effect. Just look at the image with the horizon. The programmers designed around this. I think it's great that they created this to add to the Stella emulator so people can play around with it if they like. Sure, it's not rocket science or curing cancer, but looks like it was a fun little learning exercise for the students.
@Greyseal:
of course... EVERYONE knows the Beatles sound so much better in stereo than mono...
But getting back on topic, when people play their older systems on newer TVs, a lot of people complain about how crappy they look compared to a CRT screen, and that's not just because the technology is dated. There is a valid explanation to this phenomenon, It's how CRTs scale images vs. how LCDs do it.
When LCDs resample images and video, it's fine; but when you're looking at something that's composed of hard pixels, the resampling oftentimes fudges up the picture, which degrades how it looks. With CRTs the image was never perfect or of a fixed resolution, so nobody noticed when the image gets scaled up a bit horizontally or vertically, the scanlines and the brightness of the CRT just blurred it by a bit. Not so with a fixed resolution LCD, and while 1080p is great for 360 and PS3 games, resampling (or even hard scaling) an image that was only 190 pixels wide (which I believe was the 2600's resolution) have horrific effects on the sprites. Of course, there are quite a few people who don't realize this, since they've only played classic games on emulators.
"of course... EVERYONE knows the Beatles sound so much better in stereo than mono..."
That's because the stereo mixes were poorly done. They are two totally separate mixes from the original source. It has nothing to do with mono technology versus stereo technology, unless of course you're implying that mono sounds better than stereo in 100% of cases.
"We like the sound of old records because they remind us of old days."
Vinyl sounds better because of aesthetically pleasing harmonic distortion.
Better refresh rate? Its an EMULATOR ON AN LCD you can have a better refresh rate than the hardware even supports...wow
Might be good for emulators....
10 years time the headline will read:
"Students create LCD emulator, hope to recapture that pre-OLED gaming vibe of yesteryear"
Comments will read:
"Ah i'm going to play fallout 3 on my xbox 360 emulator with this"
"Man thats dumb, look at that tacky picture"
"Apple sucks"
Sounds great... does it include dead pixels?
You bet, ive got a sucker of a dead pixel on my 22"
what can i say, i bought Hanns G...
Loving the Apple OT comment! :D
I have one old CRT standard def TV still hooked up in my house that has an NES (top loader), SNES, Genesis, N64, and Dreamcast hooked up to it. I generally refuse to hook up anything to my HDTV sets that doesn't support at least component output, and I sadly don't have any VGA inputs on any of my HDTVs so that leaves the Dreamcast stuck in SD land.
I had an OLD Sony Bigscreen (the kind with three light guns projected off a mirror bounced onto a concave reflective screen) and it had a wonderfully blurry screen that smoothed out even the harshest edges making Mrs. Pacman look awesome.
When playing retro games now I've often thought "did these games really look this bad back then?" and the answer is no, not when they were displayed on the imperfect display technology of the time, making them appear less pixelated.
this news is a week old. joystiq got it a long time ago
Silly course of action.
We used to see movies in really bad quality too, but but no one is smearing Vaseline on any projection lenses for that good time feel.
Mame has a great mode that adds tiny lines across it which I remember from the CRT's in the arcades, it makes it much more authentic but also hides the fact that the resolution is somewhat similar to VGA making it appear a higher res.
I'm surprised they did it to a 2600 emulator though, I had one of those, and while it was fun, I don't think there's anything I'd go back too. It'd been great as part of a display driver though and I'd certainly use it.
There's an OS X Terminal app that does this, and you can even set the curvature of the CRT
Nice, but where are my rounded screen corners?
But will it play Duck Hunt?
nope!
Thats exactly what I was wondering. I bet they could find a way to make it happen
This is exists in emulators for years, ZSNES already have a NTSC filter you can choose both rf, composite or s-video signal filter.
Kids, kids, kids... you have so much to learn!
Best to stop moving your virtual mouths for a minute and listen up.....
Back in the day, the 'natural' CRT blurriness / noise / etc acted as a kind of accidental analog anti-aliasing. Early 80s games generally looked god-awful but by the mid to late 80s, graphic design in video games had evolved to make maximum use of the limited color palettes provided by most 8-bit systems and were also ,in effect, designed around the aesthetic provided by the capabilities of those fuzzy CRT screens.
Thinking about - just as an example - how later C64 games showcased great use of shading with the limited 16 color pallet: shading with black, white, 3 shades of gray, 2 blue shades, 2 shades of green (but both blue and green can work so well with cyan!) was used to great effect in game graphics. That shit just doesn't work when made crisp running in an emulator, displayed on an LCD (or interestingly - displayed on a more modern CRT). The colors need to 'bleed' together for this to work well.
So it's not just about nostalgia - though that is also a perfectly valid reason for this.
Or I could just hook my Atari 2600 up to my 21" RCA TV...
yawn...
Yeah... Mame, blueMSX, and a bunch of emulators have a slew of options like this one already.
Personally, I enjoy playing retro games mostly on my LCD with the most optimal connection, no filters.
Sure, it's not the way they were intended, but I love everything being so ridiculously crisp, excellent contrast, high brightness, etc. etc.
I enjoy the huge pixels and the artform of the classics that was created out of necessity and function.
Maybe I just have too many memories of the local news transmission coming in on top of my 2600 or Colecovision's signal, or trying to play arcade games on a horrible, dark, glitchy, burned-in screen at pit stops, amusement parks, and other "non arcade" arcades (i.e. places that don't actually REPAIR their games).
BTW, my LCD only goes up to 57 Hz, my CRT monitors go WAYYYY higher, which is especially good if I'm running 3D games with shutterglasses, which aren't tolerable unless the monitor is at 120 Hz (and aren't even compatible with my LCD because of polarization issues). Also 90% of my light guns need a CRT to work.
So CRTs still have their (very specific) uses.
Yay GT in the news again :)