I played SNES and PS1 games on a CRT. I played them on LCD and OLED TVs. I can’t tell the difference.
I mean I can tell that hdmi cables never introduce chromatic abberation something which was quite common on these old TVs when the SCART cables I used to use got old and I never had a LCD screen catch fire something which happened to me twice with aging CRT screens.
I really don’t get the nostalgia or whatever it is called when some of the people who think it was better then weren’t born at the time.
There are some effects that notoriously work only on rather specific combinations of screens AND cables. Those look horrible on emulators.
Usually it is effects involving transparency, some games for example literally rendered some things only on some frames and not the others, to achieve 50% transparency, others tried alternating scanlines, or the most crazy one: Sonic that made a transparent waterfall by relying on the fact that cables common at that time blurred pixels horizontally, thus it renders one column that is water and one column that is not, and hope they will be blurred into one single column that is 50% transparent water on top of the background.
Can't be shown with a screenshot: Axelay. I never seen that game running on a real CRT to compare, but on emulators that game look horrible, with distortions and flickering things everywhere, I was told this was not the intention at all, instead they relied heavily on CRT hardware to create pseudo-3D and transparency.
I think if you're looking from a normal couch to TV distance, you probably can't tell the difference.
If you're sitting computer desk to monitor distance (close enough to read text), you probably can tell a difference. From there, I think there is some false nostalgia at worst or subjectivity at best. Did computer monitors even have (noticeable) scanlines? I don't remember them while playing Wolfenstein or playing around in MS paint on windows 3.1... Maybe playing gorillas in DOS, but I can't remember...
If you're emulating snes on a modern PC, people like to say "games were developed with scanlines in mind", but they were also developed assuming you'd have a small TV and would be sitting ~8ft away from it!
With 25% scanlines on PC CRT's they looked pretty close to TV's. On LCD's, forget it. Not even close, even with CRT filters.
I played SNES and PS1 games on a CRT. I played them on LCD and OLED TVs. I can’t tell the difference.
I mean I can tell that hdmi cables never introduce chromatic abberation something which was quite common on these old TVs when the SCART cables I used to use got old and I never had a LCD screen catch fire something which happened to me twice with aging CRT screens.
I really don’t get the nostalgia or whatever it is called when some of the people who think it was better then weren’t born at the time.
There are some effects that notoriously work only on rather specific combinations of screens AND cables. Those look horrible on emulators.
Usually it is effects involving transparency, some games for example literally rendered some things only on some frames and not the others, to achieve 50% transparency, others tried alternating scanlines, or the most crazy one: Sonic that made a transparent waterfall by relying on the fact that cables common at that time blurred pixels horizontally, thus it renders one column that is water and one column that is not, and hope they will be blurred into one single column that is 50% transparent water on top of the background.
Screenshot of the waterfall effect: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1cGAP1i_4xQ/maxresdefault.jpg
Can't be shown with a screenshot: Axelay. I never seen that game running on a real CRT to compare, but on emulators that game look horrible, with distortions and flickering things everywhere, I was told this was not the intention at all, instead they relied heavily on CRT hardware to create pseudo-3D and transparency.
I think if you're looking from a normal couch to TV distance, you probably can't tell the difference.
If you're sitting computer desk to monitor distance (close enough to read text), you probably can tell a difference. From there, I think there is some false nostalgia at worst or subjectivity at best. Did computer monitors even have (noticeable) scanlines? I don't remember them while playing Wolfenstein or playing around in MS paint on windows 3.1... Maybe playing gorillas in DOS, but I can't remember...
If you're emulating snes on a modern PC, people like to say "games were developed with scanlines in mind", but they were also developed assuming you'd have a small TV and would be sitting ~8ft away from it!