I’ve heard quite a few times that old games were made for CRT TVs, and that they look a lot better on them because of the effect. But, in the few re-releases of old games I’ve seen, the CRT filters included are simply disregarded as “bad”. With CRTs becoming more and more rare, is it really so hard, or even impossible, to recreate something faithful?
In: Technology
A number of reasons. You need a really high resolution to convincingly reproduce analog images in general but even beyond that, the contrast ratios of CRTs even in raster mode are not possible on most displays. They can’t make their whites as bright or, especially, their blacks as black and when you’re attempting to recreate 240p (a hack resolution to begin with) the intensity of difference between drawn lines and black scanlines creates intentional shading effects that happen as much inside your eye / in your brain as on the actual screen. If you’ve ever had your eyeballs seared by a vector CRT like in a Tempest or Asteroids you know that even plasma screens and OLEDs simply can’t replicate that. Furthermore some retro games used hacks of the NTSC palette to create colors onscreen that the hardware wasn’t capable of actually making and that’s an entirely other unique visual effect that is difficult if not impossible to accurately recreate on other displays.
CRTs have low input lag and high brightness and intense colors. They also had a lot of quirks that were exploited by art design of the time, like the images being fuzzy and interlaced, to create gradients and colors by mixing images.
They have very low resolution, poor energy efficacy and very high weight compared to a LCD, plasma or LED display.
Mostly it’s a matter of clever programmers designing the art and game to take every advantage of CRT technology available at the time. Large parts of this can be emulated, but it’s often hacky and hard to get consistent results.
Sure, it would be possible to make something more faithful, but it would be very expensive. When a 4K display can be $200, there really isn’t a demand for a $2000 high brightness beam penetration color display. You could come quite close with a high brightness projector in a cabinet, maybe a $500 gadget, but you’re going to have to make your own lenses because the factory lens is for an outdoor video wall and it won’t focus down on the cabinet screen.
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