Antialiasing and dedithering effects of CRT shaders are doing a great job on 480p and 600p content. You guys should try it someday. Definately helps also to aesthetically blend 2D and 3D with a common grain.
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I suppose that’s the flip side. At a full 10" bigger than the FW900, it makes sense that scanlines would have been much more visible at 720p. I’ve experimented a little with Megatron at 4K for 720p games (i remember taking a look at Braid in particular), and the result is definitely compelling, tho i don’t think we have the resolution to really make it shine at 4K. It would probably take 16K to make it work as well as 240p does on 4K displays, and the way the world is going, i’m doubting 16K will ever be affordable, even if it does end up existing.
Oh, i certainly wouldn’t recommend going that route at this point, i was just specifying what i personally use. (Also, getting an FW900 when it was cheap and using it for 15 years was something a money saver on the whole compared to getting LCDs in that span, which offset the cost a bit xD)
At this point, there are a number of more affordable OLED monitors that have become available in the last few years that i would far sooner recommend over using a 48" TV as a desktop monitor (unless that is what you are into.)
@Obsolete absolutely! And even higher resolutions too. I just told Azurfel, I run Xenia and RPSC3 with a shader and I absolutely love that 720p crt look. Those games appear tragically flat and soft without it.
So if you want to get really into the weeds (or the aperture grille, or something) what started this whole line of thought for me was my beloved 19" Gateway VX900 from 1998. It still runs like a champ and I still use it for older PC games. But it occurred to me that that monitor won’t last forever, so I wanted to figure out how to best capture that high-end VGA CRT monitor experience for whenever it finally bites the dust (hopefully still many years in the future).
And then I thought, well not many people will know that particular monitor, but the GDM is pretty well known in CRT circles, so I’ll use that as a stand-in for “awesome high-end late VGA Trinitron suitable for Windows 98/XP gaming”. So that is my rationale, not an attempt to perfectly emulate an actual GDM so that I can avoid paying for it or whatever (heck, I still hope to find one of those one day).
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Monitors had a ‘design resolution’ where the beam was sized so you wouldn’t see any scanlines. The last CRT I had, a Dell monitor, only started to show scanlines once you got down to 640x480. Way cheaper than an FW900 but you see the same thing: clean transparent image from 800x600 up.
I agree past 480p, CRT effects aren’t really necessary. Scanlines still look good on 480p. 1080i is kind of the oddball though. It might look better with one of the interlacing shaders (haven’t tried it; I like how 480i looks with them), but there weren’t many 1080i games anyway IIRC.
There were hardly any CRT TVs that could do 720p (I’ve heard of exactly one). Monitors could them though. 720p TVs were mostly flat panels.
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They were, they were. And man that TV looked so much better than any LCD from the time (mid 2000s). When I first slapped the shader over Xenia, it almost brought a tear to my eye. In fact, 720p for me is still a “TV” resolution, and 1440p the first actual pixel count that looked really great on flat screens, with 1080 landing somewhere between the two. Obviously, very few CRT TVs could do 720 or 1080, and the ones that did were rare, expensive, heavy and prone to failure.
If you want to emulate something that was transparent, then you dont need shaders at all I guess. 480p games didnt look good on high-end SVGA screens IMO, it was already too crisp, with dithering too apparent.
I remember a time when the fog of war in Warcraft 2 was properly blended and transparent, aesthetically pleasing. Something they now have to redo in the remasters.
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There were a few. I had the Samsung 32" and boy did the xbox360 like it. Was just talking about that, I run xenia and rpcs3 with a crt shader for that look and it works very well, both on the 27" monitor and the 65" oled. So well in fact that I can’t play those 720p games without it.
Now imagine this
https://crtdatabase.com/crts/sony/sony-bvm-d32e1wu
Based on my experience with HD-CRT-TV simulations, I’m pretty confident that you are going to be able to make a preset that will look a bit different than the crt, but in many ways better, and will leave you more than satisfied.
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add also that brightness of crt vgas was way too tiresome for the eyes. Majority of users had monitor filters
CRT-Guest-Advanced-hd preset was the base, IIRC. Key parameters being intres = 1.5 to avoid moiré at 1080p, hiscan = 1 and shadowmask = 4.
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Oh i’m using this preset already so i’ll tinker with it a bit thanks
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