Updates on what Iâve been working on
I want a shader that can mimic the functionality of Multi-Scan CRTs. Itâs a myth that CRTs have no native resolution or can handle any display mode thrown at them, otherwise we would have never needed circuitry to handle NTSC signals on PAL televisions! While CRTs are a lot more flexible than LCDs in how they present a signal, they are in many ways a lot less flexibile and scaleable than LCDs because they usually only operate on a fixed horizontal frequency. For decades that was about 15 kHz, but that started to change in the 16-bit computing era.
One of the pioneers for faster scanning displays was Atari, who used âmedium resâ monitors in some of their games. The idea behind medium res is simple, take the resolution of a PAL monitor and combine it with the refresh rate of an NTSC monitor. Voila, you have a monitor that can display more lines without the flicker.
If you see a computer system or arcade game that runs at around 384 lines, you know itâs a medium res game. Mac 68ks and the IBM EGA monitor used these resolutions.
Multitasking started to become more important in the mid-80s. 240 and 384 line displays were adequate for single-task workflows, but felt cramped in multi-tasking environments. The easiest way to experience this is to emulate something like a Mac SE/30 and exploring the file system with Finder. Your screen will fill up with windows very quickly. 480 line displays were sorely needed. The Japanese had already solved this problem with 480i modes (because their language requires more pixel-space to render clearly), but this was improved upon by doubling the 15 kHz scan rate to 31 kHz, and thus 480p monitors came about.
But what if we want to display a 15 kHz signal on a 31 kHz monitor? Now the issue of being able to drive multiple signal types with a CRT really needed to be solved. It couldnât simply be ignored because we needed backwards compatibility with old software designed for ~240 line environment. Video cards also supported more colors on the lower resolutions, which were critical for games. The Japanese (again) had already solved this problem. When a 31 kHz monitor encounters a 15 kHz signal, it doubles the lines and displays the signal with the vertical resolution essentially upscaled as NN. But these monitors were quite expensive. IBM came up with the solution of doing the line-doubling with the video card, so any 31 kHz monitor can be used with the â15 kHzâ signals.
Finally it was in the 90s where Multi-Scan capable monitors started to become more common. A CRT monitor would be advertised as supporting a maximum resolution, and the CRT would have built-in circuitry to handle most of the common modes. The CRT could theoretically handle a much larger variety of modes as long as it fell within the configurable horizontal frequency range. Over time, the minimum frequency increased until it capped to 31 kHz, VGA frequency, because VGA compatibility was so critical.
Why does any of this matter for shaders? It doesnât matter at all for consoles (at least not until we get into HD consoles, at which point CRTs were so rare itâs perhaps not meaningful to have CRT shaders for them). It only matters for computer emulation, and only if we care about the artifacts of a multi-scan monitor. There are three primary complications that multi-scanning has: 1. Scanlines become more visible as lower resolutions are used; 2. the overall brightness of the screen diminishes at lower resolutions (because of 1); and 3. the geometry and positioning of the screen changes depending on the resolution chosen.
1 and 2 are easy enough to implement. We just have to decide on what the ideal resolution of our simulated monitor is. That resolution would not have visible scanlines. When the emulator switches to a mode with a smaller resolution, we would add scanlines. Adding the scanlines would automatically cover 2. 3 is complicated, and every monitor would handle these differently. Actually, it goes back to number 1, because they wouldnât necessarily cover the same picture area with a lower resolution, and so scanlines might not scale linearly in that respect. Another complication is aspect ratio. Most monitors would just spit everything out in whatever aspect ratio they were designed for, so a 4:3 monitor would distort a 5:4 resolution and vice versa. Late professional monitors (very expensive) could actually handle different aspect ratios and display them correctly.
But 3 is really a non-issue when you consider that by the time Multi-Scan monitors were common, geometry controls on monitors were also common, and usually the user would adjust the picture to fill out the screen to a comfortable (usually we would leave a bit of space to avoid too much curvature). So really it is just 1 that Iâm going to focus on.
