It is. And it’s a shame it’s so hard to go and set those emulators up to display the graphics how they were actually displayed. Both PSX/N64 emulation defaults to smoothing out all the dithering and little quirks of the OG graphics.
Which, yes that at least makes them look like we remember them. And makes them look nicer for the new generations coming in to experience them. But also it’s not honest. I feel. ;p
Frankly, that’s it. I had lots of in-person gaming-related interactions with younger folks and they almost always have an initial shock with retrogaming, even if they’re genuinely interested. The general style, looks, progression, mechanics, difficulty and feeling of those games are already different enough for youngsters, and if you also throw in a vastly unique display simulation to them it will certainly be a “double shock”.
With that in mind, I can’t really blame emudevs for trying to “smooth out” first impressions, at the expense of the (fewer) old-enough players. Personally, as long as both options are readily available, I don’t mind. Still, it would be nice to have some kind of encouragement for the new players to try out a more classic look, even if just as a curiosity.
Elegantly written. Respect.
At the beginning of modern emulation, like 20, 25 or more years ago, those remembering pete’s plugins, ePSXe, 2xSaI, HQnX etc. would say enhancement were the way to go. The main difference regarding actual state is that all was displayed on crt tube monitors and the user could viably choose from a set from availible (fullscreen) resolutions. Totally different experience. How it happened, i like FF7 Cloud’s hair a bit more defined now, please take no offence. 
No yeah of course not! ^^ I myself enjoyed some Ocarina Master Quest at 1280x960 on those monitors.
A huge upgrade over actual N64 hardware. I think people go through emulation phases. I had my naked pixels phase with Genecyst and Nesticle back in the day.
New Release Version (2025-09-14-r1):
Notable changes:
Download link:
https://mega.nz/file/x85zDZ6R#fEq4VBlQWHgcTM6NyfwHGlCGWoCcgejIkEWoIpXiyDM
cool! thanks for “Speedup with increased internal Resolution options” do I need to set it to 4 if I scale to 4x in the core?
is “mixed phase” alternative to “Auto”? what’s the difference between the two? What is better for general purpose use?
The more the faster. You can also do without, it’s purely optional. Bigger resolutions can handle more of it without quality loss though.
Mixed phase will not be triggered by “Auto” mode, this is only for 2-phase or 3-phase. Mode 4 has been around for a long time now, with pretty much neutral chroma handling. Mode 5 has full 3-phase chromatic effects. Mixed phase modes 4 and 5 can blend dithering, where pure 3-phase cannot, so you can use them with 3-phase games to blend dithering or with some cores like for Amiga, Saturn, PCE…
I did a test and seems work so good! thanks! I will use it in my preset in the next update
I was using a good Scart cable with my PSX/PS2. The emulators should smooth out all the dithering, I don’t know about you but I was not seeing any dithering when I was playing, nor “staircase” edges and pixels wobbling like crazy. It’s not that they were not there, it’s just that viewing them via a CRT that was also way smaller that today’s TVs made them imperceptible. Unless you are using a good CRT shader, displaying games enchanced/upscaled is actually closer to the original experience. There are also many details in 3d models that are not visible at native res on PSX.
That being said, I cannot stand the fonts when games are being upscaled which is why I want a good CRT emulation, plus there are some effects (e.g. bloom) that without a CRT are being lost in 2D elements, especially notable in 3D games with pre-rendered backgrounds.
@guest.r is it possible to have a mask option that automatically chooses the “best” (an appropriate one) mask implementation based on screen resolution?
SCART is basically exclusive to Europe, so it’s unlikely that artists working on games in Japan or America intended for them to be displayed this way. The low res textures and dithering definitely benefit from composite video- the fog in Silent Hill is a famous example. The quality of the composite video can be adjusted in shaders. You can actually completely disable the “pixel wobbling” if desired. To each their own of course, but IMO composite video is even more essential for 5th generation consoles than some older consoles like SNES and NES (which rarely made use of dithering).
PSX emulators are actually not that difficult to configure for an authentic look- N64 is more of a headache.
I also don’t like what upscalers do to fonts and small details. You’re absolutely right that CRT shaders at native res are the way to go. These games were intended to be seen and played on CRTs.
I totally agree with this too. Like CRT shaders make me enjoy using the original dithering stuff now. For instance, in this video the CRT shader hides the gray pixels in Diddy Kong’s sprite, it makes all the pre-rendered sprites look like legit 3D models in motion…things feel so much more like I remember them back when they came out.
It’s a viable request, indeed. OTOH diving into masks is very worthwile and “rewarding” for crt-guest-advanced and other crt shaders with appropriate mask options, like crt-geom-deluxe, newer crt-hyllian, royale, especially megatron etc. A good argument for manual tweaking is, that the users display resolution is more or less fixed for a longer period of time. But this doesn’t mean i’m discarding the idea, just that it isn’t trivial and a good ammount of consideration would be needed, since it’s a major change.
NTSC shaders have a nice option called “NTSC Resolution Scaling”. Should be 0.5 for 2x, 0.33 for 3x, 0.25 for 4x and 0.20 for 5x internal resolution. Or a notch less and downsampling + filtering options tweaked. I must admit i didn’t play “hide and seek” with dithering situations on some systems, but someone might explore this aspect too, i guess it could just work, especially with scanline mode.
When I’m done with my next work project, I’m going to finish up my presets I’ve been working on the last year and release them.
Technically I think they’re ready for an initial release, but I want to do one set with Color Grading so I expect that will take a couple weeks when I eventually get back to it.
I completely agree. This is already handled by the community shader preset pack scene, where less inclined or less technical users can use these for easy mode, while more serious users may not mind having the control offered by delving deeper into mastering the CRT shaders themselves.
I’m so much into trying to master CRT-Guest-Advanced-NTSC and trying to get the most out of it that I’m still using version crt-guest-advanced-2024-10-27-release1!
New Release Version (2025-09-15-r1):
Notable changes:
Download link:
https://mega.nz/file/o0RQ3QZT#CHVw86oT6TfWyWMasSdmWUv0dm9p2xHKKFVtKJ2R_1s
You can get a pretty good S-video approximation if you set resolution scaling to around 1.20 or so, just enough to break the dithering in Sonic, along with maybe some adaptive sharpness.
Interestingly, I just checked the fog in Silent Hill, and it’s still blended- I think it may have been designed so that it would blend even over a slightly lossy signal. So maybe S-video is fine for PSX/N64, now I want to revise my earlier statement… I still maintain that RGB is too sharp for these systems, though.
btw, isnt S-video luma = Component luma? so the difference between the two should be in chroma scale in shader
dont know how RGB different from Component in sharping but I think all analog connections even the late VGA has some form of lossy signal
I think there’s a little more to it in the shader; dithering is still blended even if you raise/lower chroma scale all the way
EDIT: ChatGPT gave me this. Does this mean resolution scaling up to 1.33 is “accurate” for S-video? (330 vs 440 lines)
dont know if this bug happen in the last update but seems with d3d12 and CRT-Guest-Advanced-NTSC the output will be dark! but CRT-Guest-Advanced one work fine!