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Retro games really did look better on a CRT
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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More about size. We play shit on screens WAY bigger than we used to back then. That image is just an icon. not meant to be that large or on a computer monitor that close to your face. CRT can help it look less bad when that big and that close, but can also remove detail when small and far.
I have a MiSTer and was telling my friend about it. We started playing SNES games on my 65" OLED TV and he was like "this looks like shit and it cost you about $500?! The Raspberry Pi looks way better than this!" and then I told him it's because the MiSTer is an accurate recreation of what the actual console was like and the Pi attempts to make everything look good on modern hardware. If you could connect a NES up to a 65" flatscreen it would look the same way as the MiSTer since the NES was meant to be played on a 15-25" CRT screen not a 65" inch OLED screen. It's no different than trying to watch a show or movie from the 80s or 90s where it's 480p on a 4K TV, you're stretching the picture out to like 8x larger than it's supposed to be.
A Raspberry Pi software emulator usually outputa the same picture as a Mister FPGA core. The only difference is the post-processing filters available for each. Mister has a lot of really good CRT filters available too that you can load per core.
Yeah, my point was the Pi usually has all that stuff pre-loaded whereas the MiSTer is for the hardcore people that want the original experience. Every time I load up a core for the MiSTer I have to set the filters and upscaling.
Also, the games were designed to run on that display hardware. They exploited the limitations and artifacts to get a better over all image. When you play on something without those artifacts, those tricks don't work. Hell, you can't even play some games like Duck Hunt on modern hardware without significant modifications.
And we definitely played that close to our faces sometimes because not everyone had a big TV and no one had wireless controllers so you'd be sitting on the floor between the TV and the coffee table, which was in front of the couch. If you were lucky, you had the game system and an old hand-me-down TV in your bedroom so the TV was likely as close as your toes, or closer.