I’ve been dying for a video like this for a while and this was awesome!! I really like how you formatted and talked about all the smaller details and intricacies. Awesome video!!
It really is a huge difference Playing something like Super Nintendo or Saturn games on a CRT vs a flatscreen really feels natural. It’s a warm feeling I guess I describe it as, Earthbound on a TV thru S video is immaculate 👌✨
I think the CRT effect on old pixel art games is the reason why you hear people say "I remember it looking way better when I was younger" when they try the same game again but on modern screens or emulated.
At least people are more likely to be playing them on a 4K TV instead of a 1080P TV. Whoever decided on that resolution to become a standard should be slapped.
@@shadesoftime 720 and 1080 are bad cuz they aren't a multiple of 240 and 480. 240 doubles into 480 nicely, but 480 doubles into 960. If you play, say, 480 content on a 1080 display, then it'll be blurry, becuz going past 960, you've got 120 more pixels to duplicate. But that means 120 pixels get duplicated while 360 pixels don't. If you play a DVD on a computer with a 1080 display, then try comparing full-screen and a x2 mode. Most video players have that feature.
@@Schwarzornyeah we got stuck with 16:9 when 16:10 was so much better. Today we should be using 21:9 at least, but somehow we still have 16:9 and 1080p as the standard. 4k is how I assumed 1080p was going to look when I was growing up back in the day, but sadly 1080p looks bad unless it’s a small screen.
Graphics artists optimized their work for the medium they expected it to be viewed on, this doesn't mean any of them would be upset if you used a different display medium.
Games that use pre-rendered graphics like Donkey Kong Country 2 and Killer Instinct look surreal on a CRT TV, it really gives the illusion of a game that uses 3D models, but on an emulator or on a modern TV the illusion simply breaks because you can clearly see the pixels and that everything there is just 2D sprites.
I was into 3d graphic back then, and I swear donkey Kong country 1 2 3 were indistinguishable from a Pixar movie on a Sony trinitron, it was jaw dropping. Emulating them without shaders sucks -_- Prerendered background games have the same problem (ff7 8 9, resident evil 1 2 3, and so on), lately I muself found some nice mix with the shaders found in RetroArch: scanline/dot is a must (I prefer dot for my taste), kawase-glow for the pixel bleeding effect (it works wonders by itself, although I would like to be able to tone it down a little), and some light upscale blur filtering, hqx or bzr are overkill imho, although fsr has positively impressed me, otherwise just bicub. I then found an ntsc filter still in retroarch that seem to do all of the above by itself, but it was too dark and the green seems colorless... I couldn' fix it. If anyone has its own mix please post it :)
I never really got the hype behind CRTs. I could see why competitive scenes liked them, with their better input lag and such. But this video really changed my mind. I came into it expecting to watch maybe 10 minutes before I got bored, but the very detailed and well-supported way you laid out your arguments really sucked me in, and before I knew it the video was over. Thanks for this!
Hey, to be fair even us growing up in the 90s with these TVs everywhere we kind of took them for granted because most of the time the smaller TVs didn’t look that good, most of us is Kids couldn’t afford the larger or higher quality CRT’s because they weighed a ton, and cost a lot. We were all waiting for LCDs and lighter flatscreen TVs to come out just so you didn’t have to have a 200+ pound box sitting in your house that you could barely move without 2 to 3 people. But now that we’ve had 20 years of bad LCD TVs to deal with, and are now only getting OLED that compared to the image quality that Good CRT’s had, we’re looking back and appreciating what we did have. If you really want the best though try to find a good Sony Trinitron or something a person is throwing away, or a good CRT monitor for Pc’s and hook up with what you can. I still miss playing older 3D pc games like Doom 3, Half life 1 and 2, Dawn of War 1, on a real CRT monitor, they weighed a lot but looked so incredibly good. We wanted larger screens but that made the weight of CRT monitors and their size way too high, so we were stuck with tiny screens. At least now you can get a large OLED that looks great too and does not weigh much at all. But I still have 3 CRT’s I found in my basement, the 32 inch 160 pound Sony Trinitron is what I use to play old game systems because they look and feel so good to play on. If you have the means try to get one for free or cheap. It took me about 3 years to find what I wanted but it is nostalgic and nice to watch things on a CRT again. The image feels different because it has actual depth, it’s not just a flat panel with lights, it’s real glass with an image that comes through a screen, and it has a glow that OLED’s are now finally bringing back that gives a feeling of life LCD’s just didn’t have. We had LCD’s back in the 90’s and early 2000’s but they sucked and were only used for tiny screens and handheld gaming devices (and they always looked worse in comparison).
@@ChristopherAndersonPirate P'reciate the suggestions, if I decide to pick one up in the future I'll keep your advice in mind. I grew up in the 00s, playing my PS2 mostly on a tiny ~12" screen CRT in my bedroom. Thing's long gone by now, so I have no idea what it was. I do remember, though, being somewhat disappointed at how Kingdom Hearts 2 looked on our big flatscreen when I went back to play it one day. I'd chalked it up to my rose-tinted glasses, but who knows now...
My dear, dear dude, This was the single greatest, most comprehensive video I've ever watched on CRT TVs, retro games, and everything in between. You somehow helped me learn something new even though I already understood the theoretical aspects of everything. Like, you actually showed how 480i works compared to 240p and why flickering exists. You covered so many things that I had never seen using actual examples. I can't imagine how many weeks it took you to make this video. I shared this with about 15 people and I hope more people will like, comment, and subscribe your stuff. I have a retro room myself (which you can see in my latest video from a few months ago) and somehow watching your video made me even feel better about it. If you're ever in LA, reach out and lunch is on me. Also, you have a particular tonality and enunciation in your voice that makes you come off incredibly sincere and honest. The closest other UA-camr I can compare to is The Proper People. They narrate their urban exploration videos with the same exact type of inunciation you have, which I find downright charming. Thanks so much for producing this gem of a video and I look very much forward to more amazing content from you.
You know... I hate most of the misinformation about CRTs on UA-cam, but you got it spot on. A lot of people even those who work and repair CRTs say that "NTSC was only 30fps" but there were other content that were in 60fps and most of it was Live content.
That is just a symptom of general misinformation about framerates, people genuinely think that 60FPS is relatively new(people were shocked to discover the GBA runs at 60, lmao), when 30 FPS was actually rarer at some point. Most old games up until the Wii primarily either used 60 or 50. N64 being an exception since despite it aiming to render 60/50, with being early 3D and having memory bandwith problem, most games couldn't run full speed due to poor optimization.
I have NEVER seen anyone say the ntsc standard was 30. We all know pal is 50hz, ntsc is 60hz. Maybe channels that aren't tech related but it's known by almost everyone playing retro games.
@@lpfan4491the gba CAN run at 60 fps that doesn't mean games actually do that. Plenty of games are 30 or even 20. It all depends on the complexity of the frame being generated. The screen is essentially 60hz, but games are under no obligation to run that fast. Frames are generated independently of the refresh rate of the screen.
@@lpfan4491you are absolutely incorrect about the frame rate of old games. N64 games run at 17 frames on pal, 20 frames for ntsc, with few games hitting 30 and basically only f zero x hitting 60. Screen refresh rate is not the same as frames generated by the console. Edit:I mean MOST n64 games run like that. As I said, frame rate is variable depending on the complexity of the frame. Just play Mario 64. Lag everywhere. Absolutely not running at 60.
I honestly think you might be thinking about people talking about certain types of media. Not at all tvs, or the ntsc standard. You'd be laughed out of chat if you said ntsc was 30hz. Frames per second is related to the generation of frames from the console. The screens refresh rate is independent from the actual frames per second you get while playing a game.
the lacking detail of older technology used to force our brains to fill in, what made them look magical, immersive, personal even, because everyone could have a different perspective on a scene, and every tv had its own quirks, colors and glitches. I played metal gear solid 3 on a crt a long time ago, it's still my favorite game and super nostalgic, it just looked so real to me, realer than any graphics nowadays look
That’s definitely part of it. When I draw sometimes I like to use a blurry brush so I can play with my imagination a bit. But I also think that they knew how to take advantage of the low resolution.
There's a name for that: grid effect, it is even on Wikipedia. It also masks the jaggenes of diagonal lines and text smoother, as addressed by the video, but the "mind filling the black lines" is an actual thing.
not who you're talking to but I did, cuz I thought this was coming knowledge in the retro game community. was probably more of a guffaw than a laugh@@Hugme778
We've had a huge 34 inch CRT in our basement for nearly 22 years, still works thankfully but hasn't been plugged in for a long time, simply because CRTs aren't really "Energy Efficient". Which is why the moment you turn those suckers on, you're extracting at least 800 watts of power just to turn on the TV. Although what I do miss with modern displays compared to CRTs is the tingling feeling you place your finger on the CRTs and you can feel the statis as you glide or rub your finger side to side against the screen (felt so good back in the day).
Finally, a much-needed video that explains in depth why CRT is very relevant in retro gaming, even down to the minute details that tend to get overlooked from the bigger UA-camrs. I'd like to point out that there's one use case worth mentioning that wasn't covered in the video where the raw pixels look trumps over any kind of CRT filter, and it's for uploading/streaming to video sharing platforms like UA-cam. Here, all videos go through the compression algorithm to get people watching one video without having to download a hundred of GBs worth of lossless video data. This includes chroma subsampling from RGB 4:4:4 and YCbCr 4:2:2 to YUV 4:2:0 that causes some detail loss crucial to conveying convincing CRT effects. As a workaround, you could use 4K camera to capture some gameplay footage offscreen, but that might take the gameplay focus away from the viewer's attention. I'd like to see the ability to append an uncompressed CRT filter overlay through the .png file on top of the video that has raw pixels look, or even better, one that also pull the Black Frame Insertion trick whenever 120FPS becomes available on UA-cam. Also, the part where Minecraft is output to a CRT seems like the end result is a progressive 240p video, which certainly isn't ideal. Had the source 480p/720p/1080p signal properly processed into an interlaced 480i, I bet that the otherwise cropped-down text would become more legible.
Devs absolutely used specific pixel placements to generate effects and blending that can only be seen on on CRTs (or sometimes with a CRT filter). If we had LCDs back then the raw pixels likely would have been different. Cool stuff.
CRT images are pixelated, their resolutions are low, but that's how old games are supposed to look. They can break easily too, they're big and heavy, so you don't want to drop one. I've went through many CRTs, and they all died except one. But as long as you're using component, s-video, or RBG cables with one (basically anything better than composite), the picture quality is great. Especially older media, they don't look right on LCD, but they look exactly like how they should on CRT with good video cables. So yes, CRTs need saving. I hope a company tries to actually manufacture new CRTs because CRTs are going to become extinct unless new CRTs are made. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when.
Retro games are not supposed to look pixelated. When you emulate them on modern TVs it shows all the blocky pixelation, but when you play them on CRTs the image is naturally smoothed out by the scanlines of the CRT
@@trinidad510 That's not true. If you play on a CRT with component cables, or s-video the picture is quite sharp. Scanlines don't smooth out anything, in fact as the video proves, most of the time, you don't see even see them, it depends on the TV and the video settings. If you use composite cables, the image isn't "smoothed" out, it becomes degraded and blurry. This can help dithering effects achieve a partial transparency effect (in theory), but it's a crutch, and I wouldn't call it ideal since everything else is degraded.
As someone who studies film and video games, I think that your use of the term "grain" is extremely relevant, even if technically inaccurate. CRT scanlines and phosphor bleed are, in my opinion, truly comparable to film grain for movies on actual film. Something about the feel of the media is lost when either are absent where they were historically.
They add CG "grain" to a lot of modern digital movies to try and make them look better. Digital looks lifeless and too video like for me. Nothing beats actual film.
It's not complicated. It adds noise to the image, where there previously was none. You know.... Noise. That stuff that you see literally everywhere every time you look at anything in the real world.
You may have been disappointed by that first 13" CRT, but that is how most people experienced gaming back then. THAT is the true, authentic experience! People weren't gaming back then on expensive studio monitors.
Yeah, one of the best and most thorough videos I've seen about CRTs, if you wanted to be really pedantic, there are a few minor errors here and there, but nothing too serious and would probably only distract most people from the main point if he were to pick all the nits and be precise on every minor point.
Another good thing about the interlaced video formats are, that they keep roughly the same perceived refresh rate, while requiring half the pixel fill rate. Something old hardware was a bit more limited at.
I have waited a long time for a video like this, as more and more people are streaming or making retro games, it hurts to see games now NOT the way you did when they were out fresh. Old games don't need to look worse than they did. Thankyou sir1
I think a problem raised by this ehole retro CRT thing is with all the focus on premium sets and PVMs people are forgetting and some dont even know the truth of what its really like back in the day. 99.9% of the time, we were playing over RF, not composite. Pixels were blurred with RF noise, and scanlines went unnoticed. We were just happy to play these games on the sets we had regardless of input. That's not to say we didn't see the finer points when we returned to our old consoles later on though. That rad 3d effect of Ghosting on early Atari 2600 games, the cool look of getting your NES hooked up to a premium Sony Trinitron or Mitsubishi specimen from the 80s only rich people would have.
Yep, screw in the RF connector, switch to channel 3, and enjoy. Oh, and turn on the VCR since you know your console was routed through the darn thing because moving your huge cabinet-size wood-paneled CRT to get to the back took too much effort most days. I think it's interesting that even most magazines used literal 'screenshots' -- pictures of the screen -- rather than raw pixels. Even they advertised the games as you'd be expected to see them at home. That was how they were intended to be viewed. Seeing these old games without the quirks of RF/composite is like listening to a remaster of Nirvana's "Nevermind" that polishes away all the grunge and distortion. Distortion is objectively 'degrading' the sound, but art isn't about objective perfection.
In the 80s sure, but by the 90s into the 00s composite became more common. Saying 99% of the time is absolutely untrue. The only time I remember using it was for our NES attached to a tiny tv, with fake wood grane pattern. Turned out it did have composite inputs so even that little tv had what we needed. By the time we got to the 32bit get RF was out.
@tubeguylee-gf1tu took it too literally, dude. Not everyone was born after 1990. Depends on the timeframe you were gaming. Before the Playstation, composite was only on premium sets for the most part from the SNES on back and so 9/10 we were playing on an RF connection. While the NES and SNES had composite, not all parents (who did most of the connecting) even knew WHAT composite was. The real point to my comment was to point out that not everyone's gaming childhood was on a 15k refresh capable SCART/Composite/RGB capable tv with visible scanlines. If you had that, you probably had parents that were rich or had more debt than sense. In a way, I'm trying to deflect potential gatekeeping and snobbery over video quality. I see this in some CRT groups on the internet. I say rock what you got whether it's a 25" PVM with RGB or a 13" RF only - all experiences are authentic - just depends who you talk to. But
@neogohanamv Yep. I appreciate both modern composite and old-school RF with its character having grown up in both eras. And those big console sets were the reason even if the NES had composite...we didn't use it...either that or our parents didn't even know such "rich people tech" existed on the livingroom TV.
Fun fact, many of the pixel art in these older games were made on a CRT.. the tools they used showed the pixels up close as they drew them, while also showing the original size elsewhere on the screen.. so the art was designed with CRTs in mind.. they intentionally looked at what they were doing. It's just a matter of the art being formed around how they would display on a CRT. They didn't have the tech we have now days.. Also i can explain handheld games.. for one the GBA came out WAY later.. and the screens were smaller.. but again, it was the same thing for handhelds as it was CRTs, they intentionally designed the art AROUND the display the games would be viewed on.
There were no issues seeing per pixels on a pc's crt. But play testing your artwork to intentionally make use of blending was done by devs. Just not all dev's cared about that or gave as much thought to it.
Hey Godpuu...Great video. Thanks for all the insight it was very helpful. l just got back into retro gaming myself just last month. l already got a 27" CRT TV, and luckily still have all of my original games/consoles!! lts like being a kid all over again!! Having a blast at 48!! Gaming the past 15 years has taught me, substance, depth and charm beats shallow eye candy every time!!
congrats on getting chosen by the algorithm! On framerates: there are people who don't just not know, but REJECT the idea that older consoles and displays could even think of doing 60fps. I got in a facebook argument a while back with a guy who used GameBoy Advance Video cartridges as an example that "old consoles couldn't do high framerates". I told him that the videos were heavily compressed to fit on a cartridge and that actual games ran at 60, hell the ORIGINAL Brick DMG GameBoy ran at 60fps. His response was "no it fucking doesn't 😂" Like dude, you could just google that. takes 5 seconds.
Brick Gameboy might run at "60fps", but how well that came through on its slow as molasses LCD was a different thing. Still, as an Euro it was neat to get a CRT TV back in the early 2000s that supported "NTSC" mode, that is, 480i 60hz, and get those 10 extra frames with some games.
RGB SCART can be found on likely over 99% of European TVs from the nineties and 2000s. SCART became mandatory on all TVs in France from 1980 (I think), and it eventually became standard to put it on all TVs in Europe. There was basically no reason to not turn on RGB functionality as it didn't really cost extra and the set wouldn't be very competitive if it couldn't offer RGB, so only some very cheap portable sets from the nineties onward in Europe didn't have RGB.
Thanks for clearing that up! I know that you can find SCART/RGB on old TVs everywhere here, but I didn't know if that was the case for every country in Europe. (although I was expecting it)
@@KonaKonaKaabisteru RGB definitely makes a very nice difference! Would love to get my hands on a decent Trinitron someday, but I am very satisfied with my Bang & Olufsen MX4200 which I lucked into getting. It gives an incredibly sharp RGB image.
Love this video. I've been trying to explain all this to people I know and they just weren't getting it. I would just end up showing them specific examples, since that's easier to get the point across. But now there's your video that goes over all of it really well.
Excellent video! Keep it up and your channel will be a big one. I lived through all the CRT shenanigans in the 80s and 90s and your retrospective is on point on everything. Great work!
One things is that emulators are still great. There are two reasons. For one you can hook up a PC or any device up to a VGA CRT and run them at 480p. That gets rid of the discrepancy of low res UI and videos and still allows you to benefit from stuff like upscaling. By running the game at a higher resolution and then downscaling it to 480p, you get cleaner edges because you are essentially Super Sampling the edges as it's a form of anti aliasing. For 6th gen games this is fantastic and it can look even better than real hardware. Some consoles could do this natively like the Xbox 360 and Sega Dreamcast as both have native VGA out. The GameCube and OG Xbox also work great on a VGA CRT as both can be converted from component to VGA and then can be displayed on them. It's so nice looking and you still get those nice scanlines on them. The only issue is that they must receive a 480p signal or higher otherwise you won't get a picture. There are relatively few VGA CRTs that accept a 15khz signal like 480i/240p.This can be mitigated either with modded software which can force 480p in all games or an external upscaler of a high quality. The other point with emulation is that CRT shaders exist. There are some extremely high quality CRT shaders out on the market and I love to use them. They can almost become indistinguishable from a real CRT from the right distance and if you have a high enough resolution monitor. High quality CRT shaders at 1440p and higher are extremely nice and I don't play emulated games without them when they're 240p.
This sounds like a lot of effort that needs to be put in to do what CRT TV's do natively. I understand that CRT TVs are difficult to find now but if you have access to one, it is definitely a much simpler option.
@@mmpsp693 I'm not a big fan of VGA crts for emulation since they can't output the low res for the majority of platforms. They are stuck at a minimum of 640x480 60hz without some niche hacks that require certain video cards and software combinations. Most retro consoles operate at 240p 15khz so everything will have to be upscaled to be displayed on a VGA CRT which at that point, why bother with a CRT if you are gonna be getting the same type of upscaling (line doubling and such) on an LCD or other digital display.
@@theenemy333 you can use fake scanlines and still get the motion clarity, no artifacts for games that use "non square" pixels, fast input and response, etc. Also, they can run at other frequencies, which are required for some arcade, old pc, and even the wonderswan color.
This is the best CRT video so far! Finally, I understood the meaning of progressive vs interlace signals! The slow motion guys have a great video about CRTs too, when they show line by line, how they are shown in microseconds. Excellent!
This especially goes for DS games on DS, as well. Playing pokemon pearl feels great; the pixel art is amazing and the music playing through the speakers it was specifically designed for leaves me speechless sometimes. Gameboy too! I've emulated games for these systems and the experience is just not the same.
I'm glad the kids are starting to understand the beauty of this literal artform. One of the most impressive uses of it at 33:46 was the waterfalls in Sonic; on emulator it looks like blue lines over the background. On CRT it looks like an alpha channel over the parallax background. Amazing.
I’ve been speedrunning crt’s over the past 9 months and have gotten extremely lucky with finds and pickups and I’m done searching unless something amazing falls in my lap. With $195 spent, here are my keepers: Sony 34XS955 16:9 HDCRT Trueshiba cinema series 35AFX54 Panasonic BT-H1700 PVM I also flipped some TVs to cover money I spent, so these were basically free. I did get rid of a D-series, which maybe I should have kept, but I’m extremely happy with my collection. Awesome video brother!
This video was perfect for me right now. Thank you! As a kid I was enamored with the raw pixel look. I even made some cross stitchings of sprites to display in my room. Even though I played these games on CRT screens I still loved the raw pixel look and did not understand the difference at all. But recently I've been interested in the CRT image because I see the benefits of it now. So when I get a job a small CRT television will be on the long list of things I'm going to purchase, right below a new apartment that I can actually fit one in to.
Ironically, I think this is why I became fond of cross-stitch or Perler beads representing pixel art. The 'texture' you get from the medium goes a way to replicating the effects you get from a CRT. For example, the Perler bead pixel art that isn't 'flat-ironed' (so you still see the holes in the beads and gaps around them) makes the pixels rounder and looks like the 'scanlines' with the mesh from the shadow mask. It's neat!
I have done so much damn research on this type of stuff in the last four years, and I knew like 95% of everything here, but dude, you explained everything so well and so clearly and in an easy-to-follow way. Excellent job. Loved this video.
CRTs rock for visuals, even when a game wasn't designed around it. There is just something about its quirks that really looks phenomenal in-context, like the colorwarping giving depth to solid colors, the colorblending being the coolest anti aliasing ever and certain colors coming out more vibrant and saturated. Sadly, the technology is very much dying and people like me barely grew up with these displays due to their physical issues that made LCDs the new standard and it is unlikely that there will be many to be found in even 20 years, as old units can easily break. And that is honestly why I love the current era. While we aren't quite there with getting the perfect retro gaming experience or even replicating the visuals of most CRT televisions 1:1, we are getting ever closer almost every single day and there is a little something for everyone. For example, CRT filters in emulators are intended for native res as that is what it would have looked like originally, but I really love the look of it in upscaled HD. Much sharper overall and yet still doing wonders for the parts(Like UI or some backgrounds, etc) that otherwise would look blurry or pixelated by comparison because they don't upscale. Kirby's Return to Dreamland is a magic game that always looks good regardless of what you do, but combining it with any filter and one of the three original colorspaces genuinely blew my socks off. I hope newer emulators eventually get CRT filters and color space correction for fun, I'd really like to experiment with using it on games that never natively had access to it, like 3DS games and such. If the games happen to jell well with giving them the "retro TV experience", then that may as well be a remaster of sorts.
I always feel odd because I don't have that strong CRT nostalgia a lot of people seem to. I *love* the look of raw pixels on a clear screen. Even though I did grow up using CRTs up until well after the xbox 360 launched(I remember being unable to play FF13 because I couldn't read the text on a CRT), I still prefer looking at unfiltered pixels in emulators.
A high quality connection like component/RGB hooked to a CRT will give you that “raw pixel” look. It’s not exclusive to only emulators. I believe he shows it in the video at one point. A CRT image is not a fuzzy one, it can be incredibly sharp and defined especially if you consider PVMs and BVMs which are so sharp you could poke your eye out.
It's almost 11 pm. I am 10 minutes into the video, and it already blew me away. So much information that I didn't even know of. I was always wondering why some video game VHS recordings looked smoother but people said it wasn't really 60fps. This video has so much information that made it easy for me to understand. Its so in-depth
check surplus sites near you, medical company bankruptcy auctions/liquidations, trash sites of an obscure place lol, calling into areas that have outdated equipment but can’t throw away (local radio/news stations, school IT departments, churches too lol) There’s def a ton of possible methods. Just requires a fair share of effort put into it. I got mine for legit $5 dollars on a medical surplus auction site near me. OEV-203 (reskinned PVM-20M2MDU), and it’s damn good. Only luck of the draw for these sorts of places if it works or rather works well. Be sure to test it with something before the purchase if possible.
I really loved this video. I appreciate that you gave composite video its fair due. Ultimately it's a limited and flawed format but many game developers worked around or even exploited the limitations, and you highlighted that very well. On online forums I often see newcomers to CRTs get almost coerced into thinking that their composite-only CRT isn't good enough because of how much hype there is around RGB... No question, RGB or Component on a CRT can look amazing for some games. But for all the reasons you talk about in this video, composite is fine and people should enjoy their TVs. Great work!
not if you had a shitty TV to play on with only RF connection. Playing n64 through a RF adapter made things look pretty bad. Seeing a large TV that finally had at least composite was insanely good by comparison.
@@scikoolaid my TV had composite/av as well as RF my TV was a 1981 Pioneer front projection 60" TV which had 3 RF inputs, 4 composite inputs, composite audio input and output and 2 power plugs for your VCR or whatever built into the unit. It was the best TV I ever had IMO.
I was a very late adopter of modern TVs, I kept our family CRT alive for as long as I could afford it, got it repaired when it really shouldn’t have been worth the effort, because I just hated modern TVs and how games looked on them, it felt uncanny.
I also have to throw this extra comment, if you want to make a video about the state of PCSX2, please make sure to grab the latest version (2.1), as what you used in this video seems to still be the ANCIENT 1.6... PCSX2 has radically changed both visually and performance wise, by adopting the Duckstation Interface ( thanks Stenzek ), and by making is so convenient to have per-game profiles for nearly everything.
I'm an old man who's first console was the SNES. Back in the day we'd usualy just use composit, because that's the cables that the consoles came with. Firstly, as kids we didn't really know any better and secondly, even if we knew, the better cables were another expense, money a kid doesn't have, especially RGB or component cables, thirdly, neither were they readily available because they were often produced in small numbers (original Gamecube component cables cost crazy money). But I'd definitely recommend using S-Video for SNES and N64, new cables are being produced and available. For PS1 and 2 there's great RGB cables. It ,of course, always depends on how much you can or are willing to spend. On PS1 they'd use the trick to switch from 240p to 480i in menus to make small text and items more legible, for example in the Resident Evil games or Squaresoft RPGs. On a CRT you wouldn't notice since it's an analogue signal and the switch is instant. A low to midrange upscaler (RetroTink 2X/5X) will then drop the signal and you'll get a blank screen for a couple seconds every time, the RetroTink4K won't. If you've got the money to spend the RetroTink4K is also great for upscaling 720p or 1080p content. Luckily I kept all my old stuff and expanded my collection with all the mainstream stuff I didn't have back in the day, such as the PS1. Thank you for the great video.
As someone who's old enough to have experienced CRTs back when they were not just dominant but pretty much the only popular tech for TVs let me tell you that the average TV was kinda crap when it comes to image quality, a good chunk of your opinions seem to be colored by experiencing mostly nice TVs but back in the day you'd have been stuck with something similar to that first mediocre CRT TV you picked up, at least most of the time. From what I remember the nicest experiences I had with CRTs were PC monitors rather than TVs since those tended to have higher (sometimes significantly higher) resolutions and much better picture quality, when I emulated SNES games on a PC in the early 2000's I was genuinely taken aback by just how good they could look after messing with the emulator settings for a while. And let's just say that emulating Neo Geo games on a CRT monitor is something I actually miss. That said I moved away from CRTs as soon as the chance presented itself and never looked back, for all the nice features they had they gave me horrible headaches after using them for a few hours that simply don't happen with modern displays even if I sit in front of a screen for hours on end. But that might have to do with my specific type of astigmatism.
I have a Samsung Syncmaster 955DF, it's a real 4:3 1440p (1392p) CRT monitor. Motion clarity on current displays is garbage, and colors are way off on LCDs and any OLED that isn't QD-OLED or AMOLED. I dislike CRT TVs. 480i is worse clarity than 480p, there is color convergance and geometry issues. My 32 inch Sony Trinitron KV TV from 2002 looks like crap vs my Syncmaster monitor. My Syncmaster is so sharp that text looks way, WAY better than a 1080p LCD i have.
I played most of my games especially my PS2 and PS1 on my new Sony 4K TV along with an HDMI upscaler for them. Strangely enough, when i fixed up my old room. My dad wanted me to make use of the excess of FD Trinitrons I kept using as a kid, so I put one them in my room again and man. PS1 and PS2 games just look so much better in a CRT. I thought that they'll look so much better in a plasma or a led screen but I was wrong, the colors pop, the picture looks better and some Sony speakers which were packed in Trinitrons back then just blast your music. Makes me glad that I decided to clean my old TV up again. It adds a retro aesthetic to my room so if ever you have a good CRT in your house along with your old games. You should give it a 2nd chance.
There's just such a warmth, a vibrancy of colour and visual charm that is like a chef's masterpiece when playing somethinh like Super Mario World 2 on a CRT. Turn off the lights and it's just wonderful watching the shining crydtals in the caves, the beams of light peaking through...perfection.
I love when people talk about CRT's. There's something about them that is charming, and old technology in general. I get tv's now being flat and better image, but nothing replaces the feeling of gaming with a crt
I will put out there really fast.... 4:3 HD CRT sets are actually really great for viewing broadcast anime or just shown in general off of an HD source such as blu ray.
Super interesting video! You explained everything about CRT vs modern, pros and cons per console, cables etc so clearly, first time I've watched a video like this and really felt like I could understand and follow along. Thanks!
I always like the "unorthodox", so I'd love to see how black & white CRTs play with these games, or how GB and GBA games work on a CRT, or how high definition games play on lower res displays.
I played Pokémon on my diamond which is a Samsung Syncmaster 955DF PC CRT monitor at 480p, (i can do 480i but i would need a shader for interlacing, as for 240p i would skip lines). The coolest thing is the fact that my gem of a monitor can do real 4:3 1440p, it's also a dot mask. At 480p the pokemon sprites look painterly, with the GTU component shader from Reshade it's basically the OG artwork.
Still midway through the video, but here are my two cents: Most crt sets are fine Composite on a crt is good enough for the majority of consoles Motion clarity is the reason to get a crt CRT are almost required for games with non 4:3 "pixel aspect ratio", such as nes, Snes. Wii are awesome on a crt because it can emulate tons of consoles Play however you want to, just enjoy
In the UK and I would assume other Pal regions "RGB" or as we called it scart, Was pretty much the standard from the mid 80's. When I originally got a PS3 we hooked it up via scart on our old sony 1080i plasma TV. That TV played excellently with legacy devices as well so for me at least the transition was (expensive but) relatively painless. I just laugh looking back at how we worried it might fall over, being "so thin and light". Thing was a monster. Also apologies I don't recall the model number, I will have a look and may edit it in if found. Sony KDE-P37XS1. I think not 100%. Had 3 scart no hdmi and is chonky so close enough.
25:22 it’s worth mentioning that there are a few old consoles known for having rather “clean” composite output as well, and this can often sidestep issues if your TV otherwise doesn’t handle composite so well. For those of us weirdos who actually *prefer* the soft look of composite, when it’s filtered right, consoles like the PS2 and the Wii are a godsend in this department, at least at 240p. 480i can still come out a little messy. It’s also worth mentioning that the Wii can emulate most older generations and output them at 240p via virtual console and RetroArch… which can give you a cleaner composite output from the Wii while playing these games than many of the consoles they came from 🙃)
I use my PS3 on composite. It is one of the HD ones but a pro of that is that the composite cable recieves a clean image that displays in borderline component like quality if good composite cables are used. As a huge fan of the soft look of composite, it's the cleanliness of 480p AND softness of composite. And this is how I was converted into using my PS3 in SD 😂
13:26 for anyone new to this topic, Gen 6 consoles are all capable of outputting 480p. The Xbox can output 720p on some games, and a very limited number of Xbox and PS2 games can even output 1080i. None of these can be displayed on a consumer grade CRT, however. The Dreamcast could play most of its games in 480p over a VGA connected to a CRT computer monitor. A few older consoles could output 480i as well. The N64's "hi-rez" is 480i. The Sega Genesis could do it. The Sonic 2 split screen multiplayer is 480i. The Sega Saturn had a bunch of 480i games. Early PS3 models and I think all Xboxes 360 support analogue out and will play on a CRT in 480i since HDTVs were still not the norm when the 7th gen dropped.
All PS3 models support analog. I use my superslim in composite. It is great to play PS1 games in actual 240p not get disgustingly stretched to fit even 720p.
@@mscottjohnson3424 Same goes for all 360's. Also the PS3 outputs analog even through HDMI. If you have a pre HDMI 2.0 cable the TV will have analog artifacts, just less obnoxious because it's HD. My old af hdmi cable had the same analog artifacting as my PS2 does with the PS3 but not the PS4. And also looked worse on the 4k than the not even full 1080p oldie I main as expected from an analog situation.
@@mscottjohnson3424 Yep. Launch 360's did not have HDMI. And the PS3 was sold with composite cables even later in it's life. The HDMI cable was whatever that rando laying around is.
Ive always thought about this in the same way i think about how to view paintings. If you get too close or are seeing a painting through very hd pictures, sure, you'll really start seeing the very fine details, but you'll begin to miss the whole and focus on the individual strokes or lines. But many paintings are meant to be viewed in person, from a distance. Thats when you can truly See them, as they were intended. Retro games on their specific hardware (or emulated as close as you can get) are designed to look a certain way FOR that hardware. To judge them otherwise is deeply unfair. A wonderful and very helpful video, and i learned a lot! Thank you so much. I will say in the future, even just some quiet background music will go a long way to keep things flowing better, so i hopw you'll consider itnin the future!
I really appreciate this video because you showed the way CRTs look compared to raw pixels without necessarily declaring the effect to be "intended" or "better" even going so far as to show how that CRT pixel bending looks on Composite vs S-video vs Component. I honestly think it comes down to preference in most cases. But we also can't deny that some of those profile icons looks so much "cleaner" in composite.
As a Swede.. I am happy to use RF for my Nes, because I think it looks nice and "soft". And for my Snes.. A Original Snes RGB Scart.. It is so sharp that my eyes pops out. Haha. Glad that you have found your way in to crt gaming..
I grew up with CRTs and still own nine of my own, ultra neutrons. Although the soft picture of a CRT looks great, I still like to play with Pixel perfect visuals a lot of times. Now that I'm thinking about it, it probably comes from our association of Sprite based games with the Game boy color in The Game boy series of consoles. Certainly, the original Game boy had a lot of smearing when displaying movement but even all those years ago, It was using a digital screen instead of cathode ray tube. I have a great appreciation for both and the only way I won't play them is on my 80-in 4K. Great video. Edit: literally 10 seconds after I wrote this comment, you brought up the handhelds. I should have figured you'd get there, I really appreciate this video. Edit Again: since you brought it up several times, it might be fun for all of us to know that the original Xbox was capable about putting 1080i.
This was a pretty awesome video dude! CRT appreciation has been slowly creeping up in the past few years. Glad for you to be a newcomer! One thing you didn't mention is higher resolution content on high res CRTs. I know that your main focus was higher res on consumer CRTs. But Digital Foundry has shown that even high res CRTs like HDCRTs and VGA PC monitors can make modern games look absolutely stunning. My new craze atm is using the RetroTink4K CRT filters on modern games up to 1080p. The CRT filters already make modern emulators more appealing, but even slapping a CRT filter on a 1080p game can make it look stunning on a 4K TV. Frankly a lot better looking than any upscaling technique i've scene. The magic of a CRT is all about "perceptive" quality. Where the mind fills in lost detail so any game no matter the resolution can look amazing on a CRT display.
Great break down of the different qual;ity you can get out of CRTs! I have a decent CRT that I use for my retro gaming, its probably not the best set up but when it comes down to it I think the biggest factor is really gonna be personal preference. As far as emulation on modern displays go, its really nice having all the filters to help recreate that old CRT feel.
The CRT TVs scan line display would essentially blend the pixel art making it look more balanced. Us kids of the day didn’t think much of it at the time as that’s all there was. I remember being a bit disappointed giving Final Fantasy VI on an LED screen, the scan lines of the analogue tv profoundly brought it to life.
Very insightful video. Thanks for all the info. It's unfortunate that the younger generation believe that 80s media looked like pixel art or low-res, and not having many CRTs around, most of them will never experience how beautiful it looks. I have three CRT TVs by the way.
The CRT thing is honestly why a lot of modern pixel games can look amazing, I think; a lot of really detailed, well done *modern* sprite-driven games create art that gives you a similar feel to the rich smoothness that CRT had visually, if not in the raw pixels. So they end up looking "better" when compared to older games - unless you display the original games on their intended screens.
Love your video! Thanks a lot for that :) I am in the CRT and Monitor game since 4 years now, and I am in love. Old tech in general just is amazing, been doing analog photography and scanning for long time now as well :‘D Thanks for sharing your appreciation and joy :‘) take care 🐈
Awesome video man! I grew up with wonderful memories of CRTs and their myriad of unique phenomena like the fuzzy channel, and the weird static glow of being close to it but I never knew the precise science behind how the images were being created.
Since I never owned a console in my life, and my dad was a programmer, my own "retro" gaming is the 1988-1998 era of PC games though, and things there are completely different. You definitely had 480p CRTs as PC monitors, and PCs had graphics card related oddities like standard VGA 256 colour mode being 320x200 stretched to 4:3, rather than actual 240p. As you can imagine (and somewhat mentioned at 43:44), there's a completely different set of challenges involved in making those look right on modern monitors.
Yeah I collect vintage PCs as well. The best modern monitor I have to display 200p is a dell with 1920x1200 resolution. With it, I can display a 4:3 image (which would be 1600x1200) which is an integer multiplication of 320x200 *and* is also an integer multiplication of 320x240 ! However I wish there was a 4k version of this resolution (3840x2400) as this would allow me to display 640x400 and 640x480 with an integer scaling too ...
Excellent video. I'm 44 years old and I still play my Super Nintendo and GameCube . I absolutely love the way my games look on these new modern televisions with the smooth movement or natural movement Clarity on. I'm so used to looking at blurry fuzzy VHS and games on CRT TVs that these modern upgrades make it feel like I have all new video games. I even like using that smooth movement feature on heavily CGI implemented movies it just makes it look so surreal that it Blends the real life characters in with the CGI
this is a great place for this. Ninja: Shadow of Darkness on Ps1 was designed for CRT. the wiretraps on chests seemed almost invisible but on emulation are super obvious. After the first checkpoint it had this river sequence, everyone I ever watched play this on CRT avoided the water, eventually realized you could walk into the water then die to a pit INSIDE the water. it forced you to basically "minecraft crouch walk" this invisible river path and they have the AUDACITY to add a CRAB JUMPSCARE and MOVING PLATFORMS YOU CANT EVEN SEE amazing how half of the BS traps are lost when being emulated.
This video is probably the most nuanced take on CRT TVs I've seen. I'm sure every developer had a different opinion but I know for a fact Square Soft (Square-Enix) definitely had CRT blur in mind because not only everything they made from Mario RPG to Vagrant Story look better but also the PC/Mobile ports of Chrono Trigger before the patches and classic Final Fantasy before the Pixel Remasters, they tried to upscale the art (I'll be it poorly) and didn't have options to change to sharp raw pixels at the time. I believe there's interviews of devs being surprised by people's preference for sharp pixels but I can't seem to find these anymore. I'd also like to give my take and a bit of context on the Super Mario 1 & 3 box art, the Japanese box art for Mario 1 is closer in style what we got with Mario 3 here in the west, the reason early NES box art was in the raw pixel style was a marketing strategy to show "What you see on the cover is what you get in game, we're not like Atari where you get an amazingly detailed sci-fi illustration on the box only to realize you play a literal dot, a stick figure or... what ever E.T. was supposed to be" I think once Nintendo became a household name and people knew what NES graphics looked like this was less an issue and we got stylized covers again.
I have no idea why I watched this whole video even though I'm already heavily invested in this and know the outcome 😂 Great video though, it is very informative. Kudos 👏
Same with handhelds. Emulated 3DS and PSP for example have ugly blocky pixels on the edges of everything at original resolutions. On their original displays they look so much better. Though I noticed a CRT shader also gets rid of the weird looking blocky pixels on emulated PSP, which is interesting as these games weren't intended for CRTs in the first place.
The original artists worked with those original pixels, in conjunction with the dithering effect , to create shading, more colors, transparency, and rounding. At the time no, raw pixels were not meant to be viewed.
I only use RF for my old consoles. Though, I have every single type of connection including RGB. For myself personally, I certainly prefer the RF look over all others. I even run my RF through my VCR's just to get that extra blur and dirty look. I love it man. Viewing gaming through any CRT, HDTV, or even emulation is what is cool about retro gaming in general I think. We have so many choices and certainly are living through a golden age of gaming. Play it loud, play how you want, and enjoy yourself with how you want to play these old treasures. It's the only life you have, so make it a good one.
No space for a CRT currently, so just opted for the RT4K. *Really happy with my purchase so far...* Procrastinated about buying one for so long, when the 4K with it's vast features, I finally realized I had to do it.
That's why I have spent extra effort reproducing to insane accuracy a digital image of the Sony Trinitron KVM1620B, that we've owned since 1991, but got stuck in a boot loop recently and needs repairs ontop of a faulty color mode in composite input... That CRT supported PAL, Sécam and RGB up to 60Hz, but not NTSC ( needs parts soldered ), and the phosphor coating contains 443 continuous RGB triads vertically, and a screen aspect ratio of 1.3645:1 ( 300x220mm ). To replicate it natively on a 1920x1080p monitor, all I have to do is ensure that the drawn space is upscaled by 3 exactly to make each pixel column deal with 1/3rd of a triad. Results a resolution of 1329x972. Then I can draw the CRT around that screen size and crop to 1080p at the end ( in a 4K monitor, the whole CRT becomes visible ) Sure, the relatively small size and triad count means this CRT will usually downsample the horizontal resolution of a lot of games, in 5th and 6th gen ( specifically those 512x256 PS1 games! ), but that's exactly how i remember my games and VHS looking in my childhood. In practicality, I use Reshade with my crt overlay as a png on top, then i use various shaders to resize the contents to match available screenspace, compress the sides to give a cylindrical distortion that matches the CRT shape even more and finally CRTRoyale itself to create the triads ( and thanks to the png exacly 443 will be visible, regardless of overscan ) If i'm also playing a low res game in the 216-288p range, i'll add a little scanline shader to show those seams. in higher res, the lines are so densely packed you don't see them. Still, it's important to note that being from 1991, that CRT was powerful enough to display 480p60 signals, unlike standart definition CRTs from before. This was mostly observed during the last decade of CRTs. Extra for 21:00 -> Yes, for the USA, RGB is rare, but is extremely common in Europe! The plug itself is called "Scart" or "Péritel" and doesn't necessarily mean RGB ( you can send a composite signal through a scart input on a CRT with an adapter if you want, and ths signal will not be RGB ). This also means that european releases of consoles like the SNES and Gamecube ( see 49:00 ) also support RGB and 480p ( more like 528p for the GC itself ) without having to use the Digital Out, you can just opt for Scart RGB. Same for the PS2! All in all, it's a very well detailed video, at least when it comes to the NTSC side of the world. Some comparisons with PAL or at least mentions of differences would be helpful too!
When I discovered how s-video looked in the early 90s, I could never go back to composite video because of the clarity it provided. I believe it was the SNES that had it and then again with the Sega Saturn. Everyone says component is superior to s-video and it may be true but my TVs only had s-video, so the better color separation of component wasn't even available to me. In fact, I had never even seen component inputs on a TV until HDMI had already become the next thing for HD TV output in the mid-to late 2000s. I think a lot of us missed the component boat at the time because nothing we had even came with component cables except for maybe a cable TV box that my dad had and that was the only one I ever saw.
As you said, the artists did work with the individual pixels. But also as you alluded to much earlier, since the most common displays were CRTs that also meant the monitors they used to *make* the pixel art were still CRTs. So effectively what they were seeing at creation time is closer to what people were seeing playing it at the time than they are to people making pixel art now. Barring the artists making their pixel art on a CRT as well.
Hi, this is a very informative video, and I really enjoyed watching it! My take on the subject is that Crt's would be the definitive way to experience these older games if they weren't so difficult to get. This is heavily dependent on location but where im at in the US, I struggle to find Crt's for less than $60 and even then, id need to drive an hour away, pay tolls etc. While $60 isnt bad, most sets ive seen need numerous repairs, making the $60 not feel worthwhile. I also spent years refurbishing Crt's, from recaps, yoke adjustments, convergence adjustments etc ive done it all. The amount of effort needed to fully restore these older TV's was becoming too much to want to deal with at a certain point. The only reason I recommend something like a Retrotink 5x pro is due to ease of access and setup. $325 is the price of your average 13 inch PVM. You dont need to do any repairs, and it's just plug and play. The next major expense is getting the best cables.
I've always knew that aging was not the only factor that took my beloved sega genesis games' magic away, even though that's a big part of why. Another pretty big reason is that no emulator or UA-cam video manages to capture the look and feel of playing them on the original hardware on a CRT TV, those had part of the magic as well.
Looking at the raw pixel art as a fine art major, you can tell the the jagged lines and colors are placed so that they can be blended to look smooth. That exactly how you shade a piece before blending. Pixel art is capable of being blended without the crt but I think the art is left jagged so the effect will be done by the tv itself, thus making up for hardware limitations :)
I’ve been dying for a video like this for a while and this was awesome!! I really like how you formatted and talked about all the smaller details and intricacies. Awesome video!!
Hey thanks man, I’m glad you enjoyed the video!
hello salty
hello salt
It really is a huge difference
Playing something like Super Nintendo or Saturn games on a CRT vs a flatscreen really feels natural. It’s a warm feeling I guess I describe it as,
Earthbound on a TV thru S video is immaculate 👌✨
sup
I think the CRT effect on old pixel art games is the reason why you hear people say "I remember it looking way better when I was younger" when they try the same game again but on modern screens or emulated.
I had my mom play the first Sonic and that was her response. She was confused as to why it looked so pixelated lol
At least people are more likely to be playing them on a 4K TV instead of a 1080P TV. Whoever decided on that resolution to become a standard should be slapped.
@@Schwarzornwhat's wrong with 1080p?
@@shadesoftime 720 and 1080 are bad cuz they aren't a multiple of 240 and 480. 240 doubles into 480 nicely, but 480 doubles into 960. If you play, say, 480 content on a 1080 display, then it'll be blurry, becuz going past 960, you've got 120 more pixels to duplicate. But that means 120 pixels get duplicated while 360 pixels don't. If you play a DVD on a computer with a 1080 display, then try comparing full-screen and a x2 mode. Most video players have that feature.
@@Schwarzornyeah we got stuck with 16:9 when 16:10 was so much better. Today we should be using 21:9 at least, but somehow we still have 16:9 and 1080p as the standard.
4k is how I assumed 1080p was going to look when I was growing up back in the day, but sadly 1080p looks bad unless it’s a small screen.
Graphics artists optimized their work for the medium they expected it to be viewed on, this doesn't mean any of them would be upset if you used a different display medium.
Composite feels more "real" and in many cases nicely blends all dithering. I don't understand all that RGB craziness and pursuit of perfection on crt.
@@kamilpotato3764
4th gen or older - Composite;
5th gen or newer - SCART or Component.
@@yottadrive For me up to ps1 and Saturn. Dreamcast, N64 and above rgb start.
@@yottadrive Nah 4th gen was RGB SCART already. Many gaming magazines in the early 90s advertised SNES RGB cables for example.
@@bubu5908
I meant the cables I'd use on each generation, not their respective eras.
Games that use pre-rendered graphics like Donkey Kong Country 2 and Killer Instinct look surreal on a CRT TV, it really gives the illusion of a game that uses 3D models, but on an emulator or on a modern TV the illusion simply breaks because you can clearly see the pixels and that everything there is just 2D sprites.
I was into 3d graphic back then, and I swear donkey Kong country 1 2 3 were indistinguishable from a Pixar movie on a Sony trinitron, it was jaw dropping. Emulating them without shaders sucks -_- Prerendered background games have the same problem (ff7 8 9, resident evil 1 2 3, and so on), lately I muself found some nice mix with the shaders found in RetroArch: scanline/dot is a must (I prefer dot for my taste), kawase-glow for the pixel bleeding effect (it works wonders by itself, although I would like to be able to tone it down a little), and some light upscale blur filtering, hqx or bzr are overkill imho, although fsr has positively impressed me, otherwise just bicub. I then found an ntsc filter still in retroarch that seem to do all of the above by itself, but it was too dark and the green seems colorless... I couldn' fix it. If anyone has its own mix please post it :)
This is just wrong lol
@@wxldfl4wer850 Explain
Nope. Nobody was convinced it was real 3d. The animations are what gave it away.
I never really got the hype behind CRTs. I could see why competitive scenes liked them, with their better input lag and such. But this video really changed my mind. I came into it expecting to watch maybe 10 minutes before I got bored, but the very detailed and well-supported way you laid out your arguments really sucked me in, and before I knew it the video was over. Thanks for this!
Hey, to be fair even us growing up in the 90s with these TVs everywhere we kind of took them for granted because most of the time the smaller TVs didn’t look that good, most of us is Kids couldn’t afford the larger or higher quality CRT’s because they weighed a ton, and cost a lot.
We were all waiting for LCDs and lighter flatscreen TVs to come out just so you didn’t have to have a 200+ pound box sitting in your house that you could barely move without 2 to 3 people.
But now that we’ve had 20 years of bad LCD TVs to deal with, and are now only getting OLED that compared to the image quality that Good CRT’s had, we’re looking back and appreciating what we did have.
If you really want the best though try to find a good Sony Trinitron or something a person is throwing away, or a good CRT monitor for Pc’s and hook up with what you can. I still miss playing older 3D pc games like Doom 3, Half life 1 and 2, Dawn of War 1, on a real CRT monitor, they weighed a lot but looked so incredibly good.
We wanted larger screens but that made the weight of CRT monitors and their size way too high, so we were stuck with tiny screens.
At least now you can get a large OLED that looks great too and does not weigh much at all.
But I still have 3 CRT’s I found in my basement, the 32 inch 160 pound Sony Trinitron is what I use to play old game systems because they look and feel so good to play on. If you have the means try to get one for free or cheap. It took me about 3 years to find what I wanted but it is nostalgic and nice to watch things on a CRT again. The image feels different because it has actual depth, it’s not just a flat panel with lights, it’s real glass with an image that comes through a screen, and it has a glow that OLED’s are now finally bringing back that gives a feeling of life LCD’s just didn’t have.
We had LCD’s back in the 90’s and early 2000’s but they sucked and were only used for tiny screens and handheld gaming devices (and they always looked worse in comparison).
@@ChristopherAndersonPirate
P'reciate the suggestions, if I decide to pick one up in the future I'll keep your advice in mind.
I grew up in the 00s, playing my PS2 mostly on a tiny ~12" screen CRT in my bedroom. Thing's long gone by now, so I have no idea what it was. I do remember, though, being somewhat disappointed at how Kingdom Hearts 2 looked on our big flatscreen when I went back to play it one day. I'd chalked it up to my rose-tinted glasses, but who knows now...
My dear, dear dude,
This was the single greatest, most comprehensive video I've ever watched on CRT TVs, retro games, and everything in between.
You somehow helped me learn something new even though I already understood the theoretical aspects of everything. Like, you actually showed how 480i works compared to 240p and why flickering exists. You covered so many things that I had never seen using actual examples. I can't imagine how many weeks it took you to make this video.
I shared this with about 15 people and I hope more people will like, comment, and subscribe your stuff. I have a retro room myself (which you can see in my latest video from a few months ago) and somehow watching your video made me even feel better about it. If you're ever in LA, reach out and lunch is on me.
Also, you have a particular tonality and enunciation in your voice that makes you come off incredibly sincere and honest. The closest other UA-camr I can compare to is The Proper People. They narrate their urban exploration videos with the same exact type of inunciation you have, which I find downright charming.
Thanks so much for producing this gem of a video and I look very much forward to more amazing content from you.
Hey thanks man, this has gotta be the single nicest comment I've read. The video took about 2 months to make btw.
@linustechtips
Hire this guy
You know... I hate most of the misinformation about CRTs on UA-cam, but you got it spot on. A lot of people even those who work and repair CRTs say that "NTSC was only 30fps" but there were other content that were in 60fps and most of it was Live content.
That is just a symptom of general misinformation about framerates, people genuinely think that 60FPS is relatively new(people were shocked to discover the GBA runs at 60, lmao), when 30 FPS was actually rarer at some point. Most old games up until the Wii primarily either used 60 or 50. N64 being an exception since despite it aiming to render 60/50, with being early 3D and having memory bandwith problem, most games couldn't run full speed due to poor optimization.
I have NEVER seen anyone say the ntsc standard was 30. We all know pal is 50hz, ntsc is 60hz.
Maybe channels that aren't tech related but it's known by almost everyone playing retro games.
@@lpfan4491the gba CAN run at 60 fps that doesn't mean games actually do that. Plenty of games are 30 or even 20. It all depends on the complexity of the frame being generated.
The screen is essentially 60hz, but games are under no obligation to run that fast. Frames are generated independently of the refresh rate of the screen.
@@lpfan4491you are absolutely incorrect about the frame rate of old games. N64 games run at 17 frames on pal, 20 frames for ntsc, with few games hitting 30 and basically only f zero x hitting 60.
Screen refresh rate is not the same as frames generated by the console.
Edit:I mean MOST n64 games run like that. As I said, frame rate is variable depending on the complexity of the frame.
Just play Mario 64. Lag everywhere. Absolutely not running at 60.
I honestly think you might be thinking about people talking about certain types of media. Not at all tvs, or the ntsc standard.
You'd be laughed out of chat if you said ntsc was 30hz.
Frames per second is related to the generation of frames from the console. The screens refresh rate is independent from the actual frames per second you get while playing a game.
random channel talking about crt for 1 hour popped on my recommendation. perfect!
the lacking detail of older technology used to force our brains to fill in, what made them look magical, immersive, personal even, because everyone could have a different perspective on a scene, and every tv had its own quirks, colors and glitches. I played metal gear solid 3 on a crt a long time ago, it's still my favorite game and super nostalgic, it just looked so real to me, realer than any graphics nowadays look
That’s definitely part of it. When I draw sometimes I like to use a blurry brush so I can play with my imagination a bit. But I also think that they knew how to take advantage of the low resolution.
lol sure bro
There's a name for that: grid effect, it is even on Wikipedia. It also masks the jaggenes of diagonal lines and text smoother, as addressed by the video, but the "mind filling the black lines" is an actual thing.
The thing about CRTs is the different kinds. Quality across the board got raised as soon as the Trinitron patents expired.
dotmasks looked kinda messy more than sony's slotmask and this is the reason. Trinitron was the defacto CRT design to rule them all and Sony owned it.
I am so glad the retro gaming community more and more are realizing the importance of CRTs
loll
@@kidrobot.Did you really "laugh out loud"? 🤔
not who you're talking to but I did, cuz I thought this was coming knowledge in the retro game community. was probably more of a guffaw than a laugh@@Hugme778
We've had a huge 34 inch CRT in our basement for nearly 22 years, still works thankfully but hasn't been plugged in for a long time, simply because CRTs aren't really "Energy Efficient". Which is why the moment you turn those suckers on, you're extracting at least 800 watts of power just to turn on the TV. Although what I do miss with modern displays compared to CRTs is the tingling feeling you place your finger on the CRTs and you can feel the statis as you glide or rub your finger side to side against the screen (felt so good back in the day).
@@SuperFlashDriver,
I don’t think it’s that much, I’ll test my KV-34XBR910…
Finally, a much-needed video that explains in depth why CRT is very relevant in retro gaming, even down to the minute details that tend to get overlooked from the bigger UA-camrs.
I'd like to point out that there's one use case worth mentioning that wasn't covered in the video where the raw pixels look trumps over any kind of CRT filter, and it's for uploading/streaming to video sharing platforms like UA-cam.
Here, all videos go through the compression algorithm to get people watching one video without having to download a hundred of GBs worth of lossless video data. This includes chroma subsampling from RGB 4:4:4 and YCbCr 4:2:2 to YUV 4:2:0 that causes some detail loss crucial to conveying convincing CRT effects.
As a workaround, you could use 4K camera to capture some gameplay footage offscreen, but that might take the gameplay focus away from the viewer's attention. I'd like to see the ability to append an uncompressed CRT filter overlay through the .png file on top of the video that has raw pixels look, or even better, one that also pull the Black Frame Insertion trick whenever 120FPS becomes available on UA-cam.
Also, the part where Minecraft is output to a CRT seems like the end result is a progressive 240p video, which certainly isn't ideal. Had the source 480p/720p/1080p signal properly processed into an interlaced 480i, I bet that the otherwise cropped-down text would become more legible.
Devs absolutely used specific pixel placements to generate effects and blending that can only be seen on on CRTs (or sometimes with a CRT filter). If we had LCDs back then the raw pixels likely would have been different. Cool stuff.
No pixelation...no screen issues...no worries about overheating and breaking easy...no believing your seeing anything the wrong way...CRTs need saving
CRT images are pixelated, their resolutions are low, but that's how old games are supposed to look. They can break easily too, they're big and heavy, so you don't want to drop one. I've went through many CRTs, and they all died except one. But as long as you're using component, s-video, or RBG cables with one (basically anything better than composite), the picture quality is great. Especially older media, they don't look right on LCD, but they look exactly like how they should on CRT with good video cables. So yes, CRTs need saving. I hope a company tries to actually manufacture new CRTs because CRTs are going to become extinct unless new CRTs are made. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when.
@@EnigmaHoodanother thing about CRTs is that good quality ones have colours better than all LCD screens, and only OLED can top that
And no lag time. Perfect for twitch games.
Retro games are not supposed to look pixelated. When you emulate them on modern TVs it shows all the blocky pixelation, but when you play them on CRTs the image is naturally smoothed out by the scanlines of the CRT
@@trinidad510 That's not true. If you play on a CRT with component cables, or s-video the picture is quite sharp. Scanlines don't smooth out anything, in fact as the video proves, most of the time, you don't see even see them, it depends on the TV and the video settings.
If you use composite cables, the image isn't "smoothed" out, it becomes degraded and blurry. This can help dithering effects achieve a partial transparency effect (in theory), but it's a crutch, and I wouldn't call it ideal since everything else is degraded.
As someone who studies film and video games, I think that your use of the term "grain" is extremely relevant, even if technically inaccurate. CRT scanlines and phosphor bleed are, in my opinion, truly comparable to film grain for movies on actual film. Something about the feel of the media is lost when either are absent where they were historically.
They add CG "grain" to a lot of modern digital movies to try and make them look better. Digital looks lifeless and too video like for me. Nothing beats actual film.
It's not complicated. It adds noise to the image, where there previously was none. You know.... Noise. That stuff that you see literally everywhere every time you look at anything in the real world.
You may have been disappointed by that first 13" CRT, but that is how most people experienced gaming back then. THAT is the true, authentic experience! People weren't gaming back then on expensive studio monitors.
wow, a lot of hateful comments. This video is phenomenal. I genuinely appreciate it. thank you!
I couldn’t agree more. Phenomenal video!
Yeah, one of the best and most thorough videos I've seen about CRTs, if you wanted to be really pedantic, there are a few minor errors here and there, but nothing too serious and would probably only distract most people from the main point if he were to pick all the nits and be precise on every minor point.
Another good thing about the interlaced video formats are, that they keep roughly the same perceived refresh rate,
while requiring half the pixel fill rate. Something old hardware was a bit more limited at.
Yep. "persistence of vision" is the phenomenon responsible for that. You brain basically blends them together.
I have waited a long time for a video like this, as more and more people are streaming or making retro games, it hurts to see games now NOT the way you did when they were out fresh. Old games don't need to look worse than they did. Thankyou sir1
I think a problem raised by this ehole retro CRT thing is with all the focus on premium sets and PVMs people are forgetting and some dont even know the truth of what its really like back in the day.
99.9% of the time, we were playing over RF, not composite. Pixels were blurred with RF noise, and scanlines went unnoticed. We were just happy to play these games on the sets we had regardless of input.
That's not to say we didn't see the finer points when we returned to our old consoles later on though. That rad 3d effect of Ghosting on early Atari 2600 games, the cool look of getting your NES hooked up to a premium Sony Trinitron or Mitsubishi specimen from the 80s only rich people would have.
Yep, screw in the RF connector, switch to channel 3, and enjoy. Oh, and turn on the VCR since you know your console was routed through the darn thing because moving your huge cabinet-size wood-paneled CRT to get to the back took too much effort most days.
I think it's interesting that even most magazines used literal 'screenshots' -- pictures of the screen -- rather than raw pixels. Even they advertised the games as you'd be expected to see them at home. That was how they were intended to be viewed.
Seeing these old games without the quirks of RF/composite is like listening to a remaster of Nirvana's "Nevermind" that polishes away all the grunge and distortion. Distortion is objectively 'degrading' the sound, but art isn't about objective perfection.
Nope. In europe we played SCART (RGB)
In the 80s sure, but by the 90s into the 00s composite became more common. Saying 99% of the time is absolutely untrue. The only time I remember using it was for our NES attached to a tiny tv, with fake wood grane pattern. Turned out it did have composite inputs so even that little tv had what we needed. By the time we got to the 32bit get RF was out.
@tubeguylee-gf1tu took it too literally, dude. Not everyone was born after 1990. Depends on the timeframe you were gaming.
Before the Playstation, composite was only on premium sets for the most part from the SNES on back and so 9/10 we were playing on an RF connection. While the NES and SNES had composite, not all parents (who did most of the connecting) even knew WHAT composite was.
The real point to my comment was to point out that not everyone's gaming childhood was on a 15k refresh capable SCART/Composite/RGB capable tv with visible scanlines. If you had that, you probably had parents that were rich or had more debt than sense. In a way, I'm trying to deflect potential gatekeeping and snobbery over video quality. I see this in some CRT groups on the internet. I say rock what you got whether it's a 25" PVM with RGB or a 13" RF only - all experiences are authentic - just depends who you talk to.
But
@neogohanamv Yep. I appreciate both modern composite and old-school RF with its character having grown up in both eras. And those big console sets were the reason even if the NES had composite...we didn't use it...either that or our parents didn't even know such "rich people tech" existed on the livingroom TV.
Fun fact, many of the pixel art in these older games were made on a CRT.. the tools they used showed the pixels up close as they drew them, while also showing the original size elsewhere on the screen.. so the art was designed with CRTs in mind.. they intentionally looked at what they were doing.
It's just a matter of the art being formed around how they would display on a CRT.
They didn't have the tech we have now days..
Also i can explain handheld games.. for one the GBA came out WAY later.. and the screens were smaller.. but again, it was the same thing for handhelds as it was CRTs, they intentionally designed the art AROUND the display the games would be viewed on.
Artists and designers also sketched out their sprites on graph paper.
There were no issues seeing per pixels on a pc's crt. But play testing your artwork to intentionally make use of blending was done by devs. Just not all dev's cared about that or gave as much thought to it.
Hey Godpuu...Great video. Thanks for all the insight it was very helpful. l just got back into retro gaming myself just last month. l already got a 27" CRT TV, and luckily still have all of my original games/consoles!! lts like being a kid all over again!! Having a blast at 48!! Gaming the past 15 years has taught me, substance, depth and charm beats shallow eye candy every time!!
congrats on getting chosen by the algorithm!
On framerates: there are people who don't just not know, but REJECT the idea that older consoles and displays could even think of doing 60fps.
I got in a facebook argument a while back with a guy who used GameBoy Advance Video cartridges as an example that "old consoles couldn't do high framerates".
I told him that the videos were heavily compressed to fit on a cartridge and that actual games ran at 60, hell the ORIGINAL Brick DMG GameBoy ran at 60fps. His response was "no it fucking doesn't 😂"
Like dude, you could just google that. takes 5 seconds.
Brick Gameboy might run at "60fps", but how well that came through on its slow as molasses LCD was a different thing. Still, as an Euro it was neat to get a CRT TV back in the early 2000s that supported "NTSC" mode, that is, 480i 60hz, and get those 10 extra frames with some games.
FYI: RGB is very common on consumer TVs in Germany. I would say in Europe, but I don't know if they are common in every country here.
RGB SCART can be found on likely over 99% of European TVs from the nineties and 2000s. SCART became mandatory on all TVs in France from 1980 (I think), and it eventually became standard to put it on all TVs in Europe. There was basically no reason to not turn on RGB functionality as it didn't really cost extra and the set wouldn't be very competitive if it couldn't offer RGB, so only some very cheap portable sets from the nineties onward in Europe didn't have RGB.
Thanks for clearing that up! I know that you can find SCART/RGB on old TVs everywhere here, but I didn't know if that was the case for every country in Europe. (although I was expecting it)
Eyup, I own few CRTs with RGB on them in Finland, including Sony Trinitrons - I can't stress enough how incredible retro games look on them.
@@KonaKonaKaabisteru RGB definitely makes a very nice difference! Would love to get my hands on a decent Trinitron someday, but I am very satisfied with my Bang & Olufsen MX4200 which I lucked into getting. It gives an incredibly sharp RGB image.
SCART has this one disadvantage over component that it cannot output 480i. It can do 240p, but it can't do 480p for some reason.
Love this video. I've been trying to explain all this to people I know and they just weren't getting it. I would just end up showing them specific examples, since that's easier to get the point across. But now there's your video that goes over all of it really well.
Excellent video! Keep it up and your channel will be a big one. I lived through all the CRT shenanigans in the 80s and 90s and your retrospective is on point on everything. Great work!
I wish there was a simple answer to what TV you should play games on... So many things to consider... Excellent video through!
I attentively watched the first half of the video waiting for you to mention the sonic waterfall and was not disappointed
I feel like the curvature of CRT screens is underrated. It can add depth to 2D games, especially with parallax scrolling.
Also anime!
One things is that emulators are still great. There are two reasons. For one you can hook up a PC or any device up to a VGA CRT and run them at 480p. That gets rid of the discrepancy of low res UI and videos and still allows you to benefit from stuff like upscaling. By running the game at a higher resolution and then downscaling it to 480p, you get cleaner edges because you are essentially Super Sampling the edges as it's a form of anti aliasing. For 6th gen games this is fantastic and it can look even better than real hardware. Some consoles could do this natively like the Xbox 360 and Sega Dreamcast as both have native VGA out. The GameCube and OG Xbox also work great on a VGA CRT as both can be converted from component to VGA and then can be displayed on them. It's so nice looking and you still get those nice scanlines on them. The only issue is that they must receive a 480p signal or higher otherwise you won't get a picture. There are relatively few VGA CRTs that accept a 15khz signal like 480i/240p.This can be mitigated either with modded software which can force 480p in all games or an external upscaler of a high quality.
The other point with emulation is that CRT shaders exist. There are some extremely high quality CRT shaders out on the market and I love to use them. They can almost become indistinguishable from a real CRT from the right distance and if you have a high enough resolution monitor. High quality CRT shaders at 1440p and higher are extremely nice and I don't play emulated games without them when they're 240p.
VGA CRT with fake scanlines @ 480p is a great option
This sounds like a lot of effort that needs to be put in to do what CRT TV's do natively. I understand that CRT TVs are difficult to find now but if you have access to one, it is definitely a much simpler option.
@@theenemy333 VGA monitors are great for dedicated emulation pc
@@mmpsp693 I'm not a big fan of VGA crts for emulation since they can't output the low res for the majority of platforms. They are stuck at a minimum of 640x480 60hz without some niche hacks that require certain video cards and software combinations.
Most retro consoles operate at 240p 15khz so everything will have to be upscaled to be displayed on a VGA CRT which at that point, why bother with a CRT if you are gonna be getting the same type of upscaling (line doubling and such) on an LCD or other digital display.
@@theenemy333 you can use fake scanlines and still get the motion clarity, no artifacts for games that use "non square" pixels, fast input and response, etc. Also, they can run at other frequencies, which are required for some arcade, old pc, and even the wonderswan color.
SCART connections were the standard in Europe. So if you live in Europe, RGB through SCART is easily accessible on most CRT TV's.
This is the best CRT video so far! Finally, I understood the meaning of progressive vs interlace signals! The slow motion guys have a great video about CRTs too, when they show line by line, how they are shown in microseconds.
Excellent!
This especially goes for DS games on DS, as well. Playing pokemon pearl feels great; the pixel art is amazing and the music playing through the speakers it was specifically designed for leaves me speechless sometimes. Gameboy too! I've emulated games for these systems and the experience is just not the same.
I'm glad the kids are starting to understand the beauty of this literal artform. One of the most impressive uses of it at 33:46 was the waterfalls in Sonic; on emulator it looks like blue lines over the background. On CRT it looks like an alpha channel over the parallax background. Amazing.
I’ve been speedrunning crt’s over the past 9 months and have gotten extremely lucky with finds and pickups and I’m done searching unless something amazing falls in my lap.
With $195 spent, here are my keepers:
Sony 34XS955 16:9 HDCRT
Trueshiba cinema series 35AFX54
Panasonic BT-H1700 PVM
I also flipped some TVs to cover money I spent, so these were basically free. I did get rid of a D-series, which maybe I should have kept, but I’m extremely happy with my collection.
Awesome video brother!
This video was perfect for me right now. Thank you!
As a kid I was enamored with the raw pixel look. I even made some cross stitchings of sprites to display in my room. Even though I played these games on CRT screens I still loved the raw pixel look and did not understand the difference at all. But recently I've been interested in the CRT image because I see the benefits of it now. So when I get a job a small CRT television will be on the long list of things I'm going to purchase, right below a new apartment that I can actually fit one in to.
Ironically, I think this is why I became fond of cross-stitch or Perler beads representing pixel art. The 'texture' you get from the medium goes a way to replicating the effects you get from a CRT. For example, the Perler bead pixel art that isn't 'flat-ironed' (so you still see the holes in the beads and gaps around them) makes the pixels rounder and looks like the 'scanlines' with the mesh from the shadow mask. It's neat!
I have done so much damn research on this type of stuff in the last four years, and I knew like 95% of everything here, but dude, you explained everything so well and so clearly and in an easy-to-follow way. Excellent job. Loved this video.
CRTs rock for visuals, even when a game wasn't designed around it. There is just something about its quirks that really looks phenomenal in-context, like the colorwarping giving depth to solid colors, the colorblending being the coolest anti aliasing ever and certain colors coming out more vibrant and saturated. Sadly, the technology is very much dying and people like me barely grew up with these displays due to their physical issues that made LCDs the new standard and it is unlikely that there will be many to be found in even 20 years, as old units can easily break.
And that is honestly why I love the current era. While we aren't quite there with getting the perfect retro gaming experience or even replicating the visuals of most CRT televisions 1:1, we are getting ever closer almost every single day and there is a little something for everyone. For example, CRT filters in emulators are intended for native res as that is what it would have looked like originally, but I really love the look of it in upscaled HD. Much sharper overall and yet still doing wonders for the parts(Like UI or some backgrounds, etc) that otherwise would look blurry or pixelated by comparison because they don't upscale. Kirby's Return to Dreamland is a magic game that always looks good regardless of what you do, but combining it with any filter and one of the three original colorspaces genuinely blew my socks off. I hope newer emulators eventually get CRT filters and color space correction for fun, I'd really like to experiment with using it on games that never natively had access to it, like 3DS games and such. If the games happen to jell well with giving them the "retro TV experience", then that may as well be a remaster of sorts.
I always feel odd because I don't have that strong CRT nostalgia a lot of people seem to. I *love* the look of raw pixels on a clear screen. Even though I did grow up using CRTs up until well after the xbox 360 launched(I remember being unable to play FF13 because I couldn't read the text on a CRT), I still prefer looking at unfiltered pixels in emulators.
A high quality connection like component/RGB hooked to a CRT will give you that “raw pixel” look. It’s not exclusive to only emulators. I believe he shows it in the video at one point. A CRT image is not a fuzzy one, it can be incredibly sharp and defined especially if you consider PVMs and BVMs which are so sharp you could poke your eye out.
It's almost 11 pm. I am 10 minutes into the video, and it already blew me away. So much information that I didn't even know of. I was always wondering why some video game VHS recordings looked smoother but people said it wasn't really 60fps. This video has so much information that made it easy for me to understand. Its so in-depth
I do wish i could have a crt, they are just super cool to me! And the technology is super interesting!
Go for walks around your neighborhood if you have large trash pickup I’ve went through 3 this way
@@bennoismsnot these days lol . I see them alot at thrift stores
check surplus sites near you, medical company bankruptcy auctions/liquidations, trash sites of an obscure place lol, calling into areas that have outdated equipment but can’t throw away (local radio/news stations, school IT departments, churches too lol)
There’s def a ton of possible methods. Just requires a fair share of effort put into it.
I got mine for legit $5 dollars on a medical surplus auction site near me.
OEV-203 (reskinned PVM-20M2MDU), and it’s damn good. Only luck of the draw for these sorts of places if it works or rather works well. Be sure to test it with something before the purchase if possible.
check marketplace! i found my sony trinitron kv model year 1990 for 30 bucks and it was recently repaired so shes got some years left
i subscribed as soon as you named the models numbers. it bothers me a lot when people don't do it. THANK YOU.
I really loved this video. I appreciate that you gave composite video its fair due. Ultimately it's a limited and flawed format but many game developers worked around or even exploited the limitations, and you highlighted that very well. On online forums I often see newcomers to CRTs get almost coerced into thinking that their composite-only CRT isn't good enough because of how much hype there is around RGB... No question, RGB or Component on a CRT can look amazing for some games. But for all the reasons you talk about in this video, composite is fine and people should enjoy their TVs. Great work!
it really is true guys
the games DID look better when we were kids
the truth is ya need a good CRT
not if you had a shitty TV to play on with only RF connection. Playing n64 through a RF adapter made things look pretty bad. Seeing a large TV that finally had at least composite was insanely good by comparison.
@@scikoolaid my TV had composite/av as well as RF
my TV was a 1981 Pioneer front projection 60" TV which had 3 RF inputs, 4 composite inputs, composite audio input and output and 2 power plugs for your VCR or whatever built into the unit.
It was the best TV I ever had IMO.
I was a very late adopter of modern TVs, I kept our family CRT alive for as long as I could afford it, got it repaired when it really shouldn’t have been worth the effort, because I just hated modern TVs and how games looked on them, it felt uncanny.
I really love the way these games look on the old tvs
I also have to throw this extra comment, if you want to make a video about the state of PCSX2, please make sure to grab the latest version (2.1), as what you used in this video seems to still be the ANCIENT 1.6... PCSX2 has radically changed both visually and performance wise, by adopting the Duckstation Interface ( thanks Stenzek ), and by making is so convenient to have per-game profiles for nearly everything.
I'm an old man who's first console was the SNES. Back in the day we'd usualy just use composit, because that's the cables that the consoles came with. Firstly, as kids we didn't really know any better and secondly, even if we knew, the better cables were another expense, money a kid doesn't have, especially RGB or component cables, thirdly, neither were they readily available because they were often produced in small numbers (original Gamecube component cables cost crazy money). But I'd definitely recommend using S-Video for SNES and N64, new cables are being produced and available. For PS1 and 2 there's great RGB cables. It ,of course, always depends on how much you can or are willing to spend.
On PS1 they'd use the trick to switch from 240p to 480i in menus to make small text and items more legible, for example in the Resident Evil games or Squaresoft RPGs. On a CRT you wouldn't notice since it's an analogue signal and the switch is instant. A low to midrange upscaler (RetroTink 2X/5X) will then drop the signal and you'll get a blank screen for a couple seconds every time, the RetroTink4K won't. If you've got the money to spend the RetroTink4K is also great for upscaling 720p or 1080p content.
Luckily I kept all my old stuff and expanded my collection with all the mainstream stuff I didn't have back in the day, such as the PS1.
Thank you for the great video.
Great take on the benefits of CRTs, learned a lot from this!
As someone who's old enough to have experienced CRTs back when they were not just dominant but pretty much the only popular tech for TVs let me tell you that the average TV was kinda crap when it comes to image quality, a good chunk of your opinions seem to be colored by experiencing mostly nice TVs but back in the day you'd have been stuck with something similar to that first mediocre CRT TV you picked up, at least most of the time.
From what I remember the nicest experiences I had with CRTs were PC monitors rather than TVs since those tended to have higher (sometimes significantly higher) resolutions and much better picture quality, when I emulated SNES games on a PC in the early 2000's I was genuinely taken aback by just how good they could look after messing with the emulator settings for a while. And let's just say that emulating Neo Geo games on a CRT monitor is something I actually miss.
That said I moved away from CRTs as soon as the chance presented itself and never looked back, for all the nice features they had they gave me horrible headaches after using them for a few hours that simply don't happen with modern displays even if I sit in front of a screen for hours on end. But that might have to do with my specific type of astigmatism.
I have a Samsung Syncmaster 955DF, it's a real 4:3 1440p (1392p) CRT monitor.
Motion clarity on current displays is garbage, and colors are way off on LCDs and any OLED that isn't QD-OLED or AMOLED.
I dislike CRT TVs. 480i is worse clarity than 480p, there is color convergance and geometry issues. My 32 inch Sony Trinitron KV TV from 2002 looks
like crap vs my Syncmaster monitor.
My Syncmaster is so sharp that text looks way, WAY better than a 1080p LCD i have.
I played most of my games especially my PS2 and PS1 on my new Sony 4K TV along with an HDMI upscaler for them. Strangely enough, when i fixed up my old room. My dad wanted me to make use of the excess of FD Trinitrons I kept using as a kid, so I put one them in my room again and man. PS1 and PS2 games just look so much better in a CRT.
I thought that they'll look so much better in a plasma or a led screen but I was wrong, the colors pop, the picture looks better and some Sony speakers which were packed in Trinitrons back then just blast your music.
Makes me glad that I decided to clean my old TV up again. It adds a retro aesthetic to my room so if ever you have a good CRT in your house along with your old games. You should give it a 2nd chance.
There's just such a warmth, a vibrancy of colour and visual charm that is like a chef's masterpiece when playing somethinh like Super Mario World 2 on a CRT. Turn off the lights and it's just wonderful watching the shining crydtals in the caves, the beams of light peaking through...perfection.
I love when people talk about CRT's. There's something about them that is charming, and old technology in general. I get tv's now being flat and better image, but nothing replaces the feeling of gaming with a crt
Middle of the night.
Dark rooom.
Mountain Dew and Doritos.
Magical
it's just nostalgia bro
@@kidrobot. Wrong again, bud.
@@IntegerOfDoom wrong
I will put out there really fast....
4:3 HD CRT sets are actually really great for viewing broadcast anime or just shown in general off of an HD source such as blu ray.
Super interesting video! You explained everything about CRT vs modern, pros and cons per console, cables etc so clearly, first time I've watched a video like this and really felt like I could understand and follow along. Thanks!
I always like the "unorthodox", so I'd love to see how black & white CRTs play with these games, or how GB and GBA games work on a CRT, or how high definition games play on lower res displays.
I played Pokémon on my diamond which is a Samsung Syncmaster 955DF PC CRT monitor at 480p, (i can do 480i but i would need a shader for interlacing, as for 240p i would skip lines).
The coolest thing is the fact that my gem of a monitor can do real 4:3 1440p, it's also a dot mask.
At 480p the pokemon sprites look painterly, with the GTU component shader from Reshade it's basically the OG artwork.
Still midway through the video, but here are my two cents:
Most crt sets are fine
Composite on a crt is good enough for the majority of consoles
Motion clarity is the reason to get a crt
CRT are almost required for games with non 4:3 "pixel aspect ratio", such as nes, Snes.
Wii are awesome on a crt because it can emulate tons of consoles
Play however you want to, just enjoy
In the UK and I would assume other Pal regions "RGB" or as we called it scart, Was pretty much the standard from the mid 80's. When I originally got a PS3 we hooked it up via scart on our old sony 1080i plasma TV. That TV played excellently with legacy devices as well so for me at least the transition was (expensive but) relatively painless. I just laugh looking back at how we worried it might fall over, being "so thin and light". Thing was a monster. Also apologies I don't recall the model number, I will have a look and may edit it in if found.
Sony KDE-P37XS1. I think not 100%. Had 3 scart no hdmi and is chonky so close enough.
This was a fantastically well-made video I'm not even sure where to begin with the amount of Praise that you deserve❤😊
25:22 it’s worth mentioning that there are a few old consoles known for having rather “clean” composite output as well, and this can often sidestep issues if your TV otherwise doesn’t handle composite so well. For those of us weirdos who actually *prefer* the soft look of composite, when it’s filtered right, consoles like the PS2 and the Wii are a godsend in this department, at least at 240p. 480i can still come out a little messy. It’s also worth mentioning that the Wii can emulate most older generations and output them at 240p via virtual console and RetroArch… which can give you a cleaner composite output from the Wii while playing these games than many of the consoles they came from 🙃)
I use my PS3 on composite. It is one of the HD ones but a pro of that is that the composite cable recieves a clean image that displays in borderline component like quality if good composite cables are used.
As a huge fan of the soft look of composite, it's the cleanliness of 480p AND softness of composite.
And this is how I was converted into using my PS3 in SD 😂
I never even thought of this before! Super fun video! Now I have to get a CRT for some of my older consoles!
13:26 for anyone new to this topic, Gen 6 consoles are all capable of outputting 480p. The Xbox can output 720p on some games, and a very limited number of Xbox and PS2 games can even output 1080i.
None of these can be displayed on a consumer grade CRT, however. The Dreamcast could play most of its games in 480p over a VGA connected to a CRT computer monitor.
A few older consoles could output 480i as well. The N64's "hi-rez" is 480i. The Sega Genesis could do it. The Sonic 2 split screen multiplayer is 480i. The Sega Saturn had a bunch of 480i games.
Early PS3 models and I think all Xboxes 360 support analogue out and will play on a CRT in 480i since HDTVs were still not the norm when the 7th gen dropped.
All PS3 models support analog. I use my superslim in composite. It is great to play PS1 games in actual 240p not get disgustingly stretched to fit even 720p.
@@rac1equalsbestgame853 good to know. I have a 2nd generation fat PS3, the one that doesn't have 4 USB ports on the front. It has analogue out.
@@mscottjohnson3424 Same goes for all 360's.
Also the PS3 outputs analog even through HDMI. If you have a pre HDMI 2.0 cable the TV will have analog artifacts, just less obnoxious because it's HD.
My old af hdmi cable had the same analog artifacting as my PS2 does with the PS3 but not the PS4. And also looked worse on the 4k than the not even full 1080p oldie I main as expected from an analog situation.
@@rac1equalsbestgame853 if I remember correctly, the earliest Core models of the 360 didn't have an HDMI out at all, but I could be misremembering.
@@mscottjohnson3424 Yep. Launch 360's did not have HDMI. And the PS3 was sold with composite cables even later in it's life. The HDMI cable was whatever that rando laying around is.
Ive always thought about this in the same way i think about how to view paintings. If you get too close or are seeing a painting through very hd pictures, sure, you'll really start seeing the very fine details, but you'll begin to miss the whole and focus on the individual strokes or lines. But many paintings are meant to be viewed in person, from a distance. Thats when you can truly See them, as they were intended. Retro games on their specific hardware (or emulated as close as you can get) are designed to look a certain way FOR that hardware. To judge them otherwise is deeply unfair.
A wonderful and very helpful video, and i learned a lot! Thank you so much. I will say in the future, even just some quiet background music will go a long way to keep things flowing better, so i hopw you'll consider itnin the future!
I really appreciate this video because you showed the way CRTs look compared to raw pixels without necessarily declaring the effect to be "intended" or "better" even going so far as to show how that CRT pixel bending looks on Composite vs S-video vs Component. I honestly think it comes down to preference in most cases. But we also can't deny that some of those profile icons looks so much "cleaner" in composite.
As a Swede.. I am happy to use RF for my Nes, because I think it looks nice and "soft". And for my Snes.. A Original Snes RGB Scart.. It is so sharp that my eyes pops out. Haha. Glad that you have found your way in to crt gaming..
Good video man, didnt watch everything since i need to go to bed. But for the length that i saw it was a very well done and informative video.
Man this was a fkn deep dive!
I wasn't expecting it but had to watch ALL of it cause it was non stop good info 👌🏼 well written and presented 👹❤️
I grew up with CRTs and still own nine of my own, ultra neutrons. Although the soft picture of a CRT looks great, I still like to play with Pixel perfect visuals a lot of times. Now that I'm thinking about it, it probably comes from our association of Sprite based games with the Game boy color in The Game boy series of consoles. Certainly, the original Game boy had a lot of smearing when displaying movement but even all those years ago, It was using a digital screen instead of cathode ray tube. I have a great appreciation for both and the only way I won't play them is on my 80-in 4K. Great video.
Edit: literally 10 seconds after I wrote this comment, you brought up the handhelds. I should have figured you'd get there, I really appreciate this video.
Edit Again: since you brought it up several times, it might be fun for all of us to know that the original Xbox was capable about putting 1080i.
This was a pretty awesome video dude!
CRT appreciation has been slowly creeping up in the past few years. Glad for you to be a newcomer!
One thing you didn't mention is higher resolution content on high res CRTs. I know that your main focus was higher res on consumer CRTs. But Digital Foundry has shown that even high res CRTs like HDCRTs and VGA PC monitors can make modern games look absolutely stunning.
My new craze atm is using the RetroTink4K CRT filters on modern games up to 1080p. The CRT filters already make modern emulators more appealing, but even slapping a CRT filter on a 1080p game can make it look stunning on a 4K TV. Frankly a lot better looking than any upscaling technique i've scene.
The magic of a CRT is all about "perceptive" quality. Where the mind fills in lost detail so any game no matter the resolution can look amazing on a CRT display.
Loved this! As a TV history and video game lover, this vudeo is a gem. Thanks so much!
Great break down of the different qual;ity you can get out of CRTs! I have a decent CRT that I use for my retro gaming, its probably not the best set up but when it comes down to it I think the biggest factor is really gonna be personal preference. As far as emulation on modern displays go, its really nice having all the filters to help recreate that old CRT feel.
The CRT TVs scan line display would essentially blend the pixel art making it look more balanced. Us kids of the day didn’t think much of it at the time as that’s all there was. I remember being a bit disappointed giving Final Fantasy VI on an LED screen, the scan lines of the analogue tv profoundly brought it to life.
Very insightful video. Thanks for all the info. It's unfortunate that the younger generation believe that 80s media looked like pixel art or low-res, and not having many CRTs around, most of them will never experience how beautiful it looks. I have three CRT TVs by the way.
The CRT thing is honestly why a lot of modern pixel games can look amazing, I think; a lot of really detailed, well done *modern* sprite-driven games create art that gives you a similar feel to the rich smoothness that CRT had visually, if not in the raw pixels. So they end up looking "better" when compared to older games - unless you display the original games on their intended screens.
Love your video! Thanks a lot for that :)
I am in the CRT and Monitor game since 4 years now, and I am in love. Old tech in general just is amazing, been doing analog photography and scanning for long time now as well :‘D
Thanks for sharing your appreciation and joy :‘) take care 🐈
This is why I put like 50 different filters on at once in duckstation just so I can replicate the crt style, looks good man
Interlacing was actually invented to reduce flickering as well as saving bandwidth. You would get more flickering without it actually.
Awesome video man! I grew up with wonderful memories of CRTs and their myriad of unique phenomena like the fuzzy channel, and the weird static glow of being close to it but I never knew the precise science behind how the images were being created.
Since I never owned a console in my life, and my dad was a programmer, my own "retro" gaming is the 1988-1998 era of PC games though, and things there are completely different. You definitely had 480p CRTs as PC monitors, and PCs had graphics card related oddities like standard VGA 256 colour mode being 320x200 stretched to 4:3, rather than actual 240p.
As you can imagine (and somewhat mentioned at 43:44), there's a completely different set of challenges involved in making those look right on modern monitors.
Yeah I collect vintage PCs as well.
The best modern monitor I have to display 200p is a dell with 1920x1200 resolution. With it, I can display a 4:3 image (which would be 1600x1200) which is an integer multiplication of 320x200 *and* is also an integer multiplication of 320x240 !
However I wish there was a 4k version of this resolution (3840x2400) as this would allow me to display 640x400 and 640x480 with an integer scaling too ...
I really enjoyed this video and just want to add one thing. The Dreamcast could output VGA video, so 480p to a CRT computer monitor. It's fantastic.
Excellent video. I'm 44 years old and I still play my Super Nintendo and GameCube . I absolutely love the way my games look on these new modern televisions with the smooth movement or natural movement Clarity on. I'm so used to looking at blurry fuzzy VHS and games on CRT TVs that these modern upgrades make it feel like I have all new video games. I even like using that smooth movement feature on heavily CGI implemented movies it just makes it look so surreal that it Blends the real life characters in with the CGI
this is a great place for this. Ninja: Shadow of Darkness on Ps1 was designed for CRT. the wiretraps on chests seemed almost invisible but on emulation are super obvious. After the first checkpoint it had this river sequence, everyone I ever watched play this on CRT avoided the water, eventually realized you could walk into the water then die to a pit INSIDE the water. it forced you to basically "minecraft crouch walk" this invisible river path and they have the AUDACITY to add a CRAB JUMPSCARE and MOVING PLATFORMS YOU CANT EVEN SEE
amazing how half of the BS traps are lost when being emulated.
Really solid video that covers just about every topic possible
This video is probably the most nuanced take on CRT TVs I've seen.
I'm sure every developer had a different opinion but I know for a fact Square Soft (Square-Enix) definitely had CRT blur in mind because not only everything they made from Mario RPG to Vagrant Story look better but also the PC/Mobile ports of Chrono Trigger before the patches and classic Final Fantasy before the Pixel Remasters, they tried to upscale the art (I'll be it poorly) and didn't have options to change to sharp raw pixels at the time. I believe there's interviews of devs being surprised by people's preference for sharp pixels but I can't seem to find these anymore.
I'd also like to give my take and a bit of context on the Super Mario 1 & 3 box art, the Japanese box art for Mario 1 is closer in style what we got with Mario 3 here in the west, the reason early NES box art was in the raw pixel style was a marketing strategy to show "What you see on the cover is what you get in game, we're not like Atari where you get an amazingly detailed sci-fi illustration on the box only to realize you play a literal dot, a stick figure or... what ever E.T. was supposed to be" I think once Nintendo became a household name and people knew what NES graphics looked like this was less an issue and we got stylized covers again.
I have no idea why I watched this whole video even though I'm already heavily invested in this and know the outcome 😂
Great video though, it is very informative. Kudos
👏
Really cozy and informative video, also appreciate your love for 8-16 bit graphics, my childhood.
This might be the most comprehensive video about CRT TVs in the entire universe
Same with handhelds. Emulated 3DS and PSP for example have ugly blocky pixels on the edges of everything at original resolutions. On their original displays they look so much better. Though I noticed a CRT shader also gets rid of the weird looking blocky pixels on emulated PSP, which is interesting as these games weren't intended for CRTs in the first place.
The original artists worked with those original pixels, in conjunction with the dithering effect , to create shading, more colors, transparency, and rounding. At the time no, raw pixels were not meant to be viewed.
I'd love to see major companies start to manufacture CRT style TVs again just for the retro game market. A guy can dream I guess.
I only use RF for my old consoles. Though, I have every single type of connection including RGB. For myself personally, I certainly prefer the RF look over all others. I even run my RF through my VCR's just to get that extra blur and dirty look. I love it man. Viewing gaming through any CRT, HDTV, or even emulation is what is cool about retro gaming in general I think. We have so many choices and certainly are living through a golden age of gaming. Play it loud, play how you want, and enjoy yourself with how you want to play these old treasures. It's the only life you have, so make it a good one.
No space for a CRT currently, so just opted for the RT4K. *Really happy with my purchase so far...* Procrastinated about buying one for so long, when the 4K with it's vast features, I finally realized I had to do it.
I can get the exact same effect playing retro games without my glasses on.
😂😂😂 me too
This is a fantastic and comprehensive video! I emulate, using default retroarch crt shaders - it gets me most of the way there.
That's why I have spent extra effort reproducing to insane accuracy a digital image of the Sony Trinitron KVM1620B, that we've owned since 1991, but got stuck in a boot loop recently and needs repairs ontop of a faulty color mode in composite input...
That CRT supported PAL, Sécam and RGB up to 60Hz, but not NTSC ( needs parts soldered ), and the phosphor coating contains 443 continuous RGB triads vertically, and a screen aspect ratio of 1.3645:1 ( 300x220mm ).
To replicate it natively on a 1920x1080p monitor, all I have to do is ensure that the drawn space is upscaled by 3 exactly to make each pixel column deal with 1/3rd of a triad.
Results a resolution of 1329x972. Then I can draw the CRT around that screen size and crop to 1080p at the end ( in a 4K monitor, the whole CRT becomes visible )
Sure, the relatively small size and triad count means this CRT will usually downsample the horizontal resolution of a lot of games, in 5th and 6th gen ( specifically those 512x256 PS1 games! ), but that's exactly how i remember my games and VHS looking in my childhood.
In practicality, I use Reshade with my crt overlay as a png on top, then i use various shaders to resize the contents to match available screenspace, compress the sides to give a cylindrical distortion that matches the CRT shape even more and finally CRTRoyale itself to create the triads ( and thanks to the png exacly 443 will be visible, regardless of overscan )
If i'm also playing a low res game in the 216-288p range, i'll add a little scanline shader to show those seams. in higher res, the lines are so densely packed you don't see them.
Still, it's important to note that being from 1991, that CRT was powerful enough to display 480p60 signals, unlike standart definition CRTs from before. This was mostly observed during the last decade of CRTs.
Extra for 21:00 -> Yes, for the USA, RGB is rare, but is extremely common in Europe! The plug itself is called "Scart" or "Péritel" and doesn't necessarily mean RGB ( you can send a composite signal through a scart input on a CRT with an adapter if you want, and ths signal will not be RGB ). This also means that european releases of consoles like the SNES and Gamecube ( see 49:00 ) also support RGB and 480p ( more like 528p for the GC itself ) without having to use the Digital Out, you can just opt for Scart RGB. Same for the PS2!
All in all, it's a very well detailed video, at least when it comes to the NTSC side of the world. Some comparisons with PAL or at least mentions of differences would be helpful too!
When I discovered how s-video looked in the early 90s, I could never go back to composite video because of the clarity it provided. I believe it was the SNES that had it and then again with the Sega Saturn. Everyone says component is superior to s-video and it may be true but my TVs only had s-video, so the better color separation of component wasn't even available to me. In fact, I had never even seen component inputs on a TV until HDMI had already become the next thing for HD TV output in the mid-to late 2000s. I think a lot of us missed the component boat at the time because nothing we had even came with component cables except for maybe a cable TV box that my dad had and that was the only one I ever saw.
As you said, the artists did work with the individual pixels.
But also as you alluded to much earlier, since the most common displays were CRTs that also meant the monitors they used to *make* the pixel art were still CRTs. So effectively what they were seeing at creation time is closer to what people were seeing playing it at the time than they are to people making pixel art now. Barring the artists making their pixel art on a CRT as well.
Hi, this is a very informative video, and I really enjoyed watching it! My take on the subject is that Crt's would be the definitive way to experience these older games if they weren't so difficult to get.
This is heavily dependent on location but where im at in the US, I struggle to find Crt's for less than $60 and even then, id need to drive an hour away, pay tolls etc. While $60 isnt bad, most sets ive seen need numerous repairs, making the $60 not feel worthwhile.
I also spent years refurbishing Crt's, from recaps, yoke adjustments, convergence adjustments etc ive done it all. The amount of effort needed to fully restore these older TV's was becoming too much to want to deal with at a certain point.
The only reason I recommend something like a Retrotink 5x pro is due to ease of access and setup. $325 is the price of your average 13 inch PVM. You dont need to do any repairs, and it's just plug and play. The next major expense is getting the best cables.
I've always knew that aging was not the only factor that took my beloved sega genesis games' magic away, even though that's a big part of why. Another pretty big reason is that no emulator or UA-cam video manages to capture the look and feel of playing them on the original hardware on a CRT TV, those had part of the magic as well.
Looking at the raw pixel art as a fine art major, you can tell the the jagged lines and colors are placed so that they can be blended to look smooth. That exactly how you shade a piece before blending. Pixel art is capable of being blended without the crt but I think the art is left jagged so the effect will be done by the tv itself, thus making up for hardware limitations :)