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.
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