Hey Holla Forums, let's talk classic systems, RGB and CRT displays. You don't know what you had until it's gone...

CRTs look pretty, but it's not worth using a screen that burns away your retina because it flashes light faster than your eye can adapt.

interesting, but I do not think this is as bad a problem as you describe.

Reminder that LCDs are superior because they actually display per pixel graphics as encoded in the game data, all crts do is end up with a blurry mess. Not to mention their sound output is abysmal, they get 240 lossy bitrate at best

While LCD's have caught up in time in some aspects, classic games are reliant on much of the technology in how CRTs provide output. There is always the classic waterfall test, which LCDs always fail. Not to mention you can't play light gun games, you will always have input lag, and some times pixel perfect output leaves junk data on the edges of the screen for many games.

Wouldn't input lag be a result of a bad controller? What?

it's inherent in LCD displays. They do a lot to minimize it, but they can't eliminate it.

It should be called output lag then because it's a visual output device. It's never been an issue so I have no idea what you're even talking about

The problem is that developers compensated for how CRTs displayed images and even used it to their advantage to create effects such as transparency. There are filters that can replicate this, but it doesn't work quite as well.

You are just unaware of it, then. It's called input lag because it shows your inputs out of sync with when you pressed them. You can look up your monitors response time, and even do tests yourself, it's interesting to see how different game pads, keyboards, mice, etc. have different input times. You can also use these tests to determine your own rate of human error.

That's called a fucking reaction time. It can't change the game state. All your input is processed by game and then sent to the screen

Uh, no. You should try the tests before you continue to talk out of your ass.

gdapt, mdapt and cbod all work decently user.

Okay so you're just a retarded hipster then. We're done here. Thread hidden.

>This meme still isn't dead

They play fine, and well enough for the convenience. Hell, some run better, due to rom hacks that fix bugs and errors the dev teams didn't have time for (such as the lvl 99 bug in Phantasy Star IV) - not to mention re-translations of games which originally had their localizations ruined. Or which had never been localized at all.

I'll trade a minor loss in function, for the convenience of having every single NES/SNES/SMS/Gen/SegaCD/32x/GG/GB/GBC/GBA/TG16/Lynx/NGPC/PSX/and a good selection of LucasArts & Sierra adventure games simultaneously installed and available at a moment's notice my PlayStation Portable.

The chassis is shattered on top and has sharp plastic everywhere, so I currently have a blanket on top because cats love CRTs. My cat already jumped on top of it and is now asleep.

I don't want to use it until that's safe, because I know my cat will go to sleep on it when it's warm. The only problem is I don't really know what to do about it.

How big is the hole in the top?

Why. Fucking hell, Rayman Origins is the perfect ULMB game but is locked fps. And since it's on uplay with a bunch of anti-debugger stuff, no one's willing to hack it like dork souls to uncap it.

put the thing in a shelf so that the top slat is too close for the cat to fit in. Failing that, put one of those coffee tables on top of the TV? Shit I dunno,

Pretty big, but I also have most of the plastic that broke off (it was all together). I did some reading about repairing plastic, and there was some glue lying around that works. So, now it slowly gets repaired. Pics show where the broken plastic would fit.
It might work.

If you can make it work, great for you. For me, a decent flat CRT with S-Video hits the sweet spot between "looks good enough" and "too expensive / too much hassle".

Scanlines have always looked terrible and will always look terrible.

you don't even know what a scanline is

Oh, come on.

Scanlines look like garbage

you don't know what a scan line is

Folks don't understand that while a CRT refreshes faster, both types of monitors are still beyond the limit of human detection (~20ms). So, people that say they can see a difference are full of shit. The closest report I saw was that people who can 'discern 60FPS' actually only need 45ish-FPS, which approximately matches with human, 20ms optical response (50 frames in 1000ms).

This thread is just fucked. Too many idiots who have no experience like to butt in and give opinions on shit they don't know about. You'll never get a good discussion on this board with faggots like this running around.

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Advantages of emulation:

Fucking PVM fags. Those pics are absolute horse shit disinformation.

That would be an easy fix with just any old super glue tbh fampai.

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So when do you think this meme and the "no half press" will die ?

The original hardware meme will never die, people invested too much and are so attached to their physical collections they'll sooner retreat into denial than admit there are any benefits to emulation.

All LCDs have at least 1 frame of lag between when you make an input and when you see the effect on the screen. Most have significantly more than 1 frame (16.67ms at 60fps).

You don't notice because modern games have been designed "slower" to account for this. Timing windows are larger. The total system is slower so games are designed at a slower pace with more forgiveness in player reaction times to compensate.

Basically, everything post-CRT is easy-mode.

CRT's aren't magic, they can't instantly display an input in zero time. Nothing can do that. Physics and causality won't let it happen.

Even though it's impossible, let's assume just for the sake of this example, that a console can instantly have a new frame ready to display after the exact moment you press a button.

If a CRT is refreshing at 60Hz, it re draws the image every 16.67 ms.
You press a button.
The console has a new frame ready.
The CRT can't magically display the new frame as soon as it's ready, it has to wait until the next refresh.
This means that depending on when in the current frame you pressed a button, there can be anywhere from 0 to16.67 ms until your action can be displayed when the new frame is drawn.
Assuming your inputs are randomly distributed, the average latency will be 8.3 ms.

Until we can break the light speed barrier, the lowest average latency any display can have from a manual human input will be, on average, half its frame time.

Modern gaming LCDs have an input latency of 9-10 ms, so between 1/8th and 1/16th of a frame behind CRTs.

Oh, and just to put 1-2 ms into perspective, blinking takes about 350 ms, and the absolute lower limit of measured human reaction time is about 100 ms.

CRTs are quantum monitors which are capable of displaying an image before it's even rendered.

I kek'd

pfft

I've got 2 PVMs, & a BVM-D24E1WU I purchase off someone who saved it from an editing warehouse that was going to be demolished. Production code says it's 227/1000 produced by sony. I would be there's no more than 500 that still exist, & maybe 300 of those are in working condition.

Any specific questions? (monitor pictured in the video I linked)

is that the 720p-1080i BVM? I was eyeballing a 14" BVM, at best used for PS2 time crisis games. Any issues with component cables? Got anyphotos of Saturn running on the TV?

One & the same.

I've got my PS2 hooked up to it through RGB at the moment. I almost want to say the scanlines are TOO thick for 240p games. ALMOST that is. I've only had it for a month & I'm not quite use to it yet.

I tried hooking my PC up to it today with my extron & couldn't get the colors to calibrate correctly. My graphics card doesn't support 15khz either so it's pretty much just for my consoles.

The one time I tried my PS3 on it in 720p though it looked fantastic. Definitely not for everyone though.

very interesting. Where did you get your set from? Also, have you tried original Xbox games? Something like the warriors or THPS4 which naturally outputs at 720p.

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While I own a saturn & xbox, & haven't tested either with it. I tested PS3 at 720p with Street Fighter 4, and also a bluray with it at 1080i. Both looked pretty damn good. Should probably try Soul calibur 2 on xbox at 720p one of these days. Too busy playing breath of Fire 3 instead!

But that's wrong. CRTs are interlaced, not progressive scanned like LCDs. That means that a new frame is being drawn interlaced with the old frame

To answer your question. I contacted someone on eBay & struck a deal. You're probably better off with a 600-800 line PVM instead though. (my BVM is 1000 lines for comparison's sake) The price of the BVM-D24E1WU has really gone through the roof this last year.

Any PVM or BVM that's at least 14 inches should be fine. My first RGB monitor was 23 inches & I wouldn't go larger than that. They're basically giant lightbulbs, so when they tried to make them larger they often ran into geometry issues at the factories they made them at.

Bigger than 23 & a circle is less likely to be a perfect circle. It could drive you nuts trying to calibrate something that big.

My BVM-D24E1WU does 480p &720p, though it was right on the edge of the HD era, so it's probably the only CRT that does that.

There's a part inside a CRT called a proton gun. You know protons right? They're light particles, & that proton gun shoots light at the screen nearly instantly. We're talking nano seconds here, not milliseconds.

There's no image processing being done at all on a Cathode ray tube. Red green & blue are sent directly to the screen & that's it.

A millisecond is 1/1000th of a second, and a nanosecond is 1/1 billionth of a second. You're splitting hairs if you want to go that route.

Typo; meant Photon, not Proton. I've got ghostbusters on my mind.

For that matter it's actually the Electron gun that shoots the photons, not a photon gun.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_gun

fair enough. Have you got any photos? Hours of usage? Have you used lower end P/BVM's like the 14" I'm interested in? How's the internal sound?

there's a few CRT's floating around that do 720p and even 1080i. When I lived at home my mom had like a 260lb 40" Sony WEGA that did 1080i. Good picture but god fucking damn I'd never wanna carry that thing around ever again. I think it was Sony's last proper CRT, even had HDMI in.

this is part of why I would mention there's always milliseconds of lag on LCDs, but 0MS of lag on a CRT. Because the picture output isn't counted in milliseconds. You start getting problems when you bump into EDTV branded CRTs, they use digital boards combined with the photon gun to produce the image, which when you take an analog source, pass it through anything digital, you're only gonna be wasting time reprocessing that image.

I really don't give a shit because I'm not autistic.

Here's my SNES running Umihara Kawase through RGB. It's the same model as the one in that video I posted.

65,000? The tube was replaced somewhere at 30,000. Sony was always upselling people on tube replacements, so even though it should have run fine for 100,000 hours, they were always replaced at 10,000 - 30,000 so sony could make extra money.

The only thing you're going to notice on a tube with a ton of hours is the flyback noise. The older the tube, the more flyback noise. BVMs have a service menu you can use to look up hours. I don't think any PVMs do though.

I have a 13 or 14 inch PVM in my room right now from 1994. If it weren't on top of a bookshelf I would flip it around to get a model number for you.

Right, so let me just make this clear. PVMs generally have ONE mono speaker built in. These CRTs were used for the medical industry to do things like endoscopy, so they were there literally just to make beeping noises.

What you need to do to actually get sound would be to get a stereo extension cable & plug your audio into an amp, & then from the amp you would have two separate speakers.

It's kinda nice for NES games since they never had stereo sound to begin with, but aside from that, get yourself some dedicated speakers & an amp to pull audio from your console cables.

great choice of game. I'll check my BVM once I get it for any humming noise, but I honestly may just use a pair of headphones much of the time.

Oh, and how does dithering look? I find a great test to be silent hill or metal gear solid's opening stage. Heavy dithering there.

Same as it does on any system. Vertical lines that would have been blended together if you used composite.

If you have access to a SNES or sega genesis flash cartridge, or a hacked wii or something, there's a great tool, you can use called the 240p test suite that has a dithering test you can run.

Dithering is generally something that's nice when you use composite, but you don't miss it at all once you realize how sharp everything else is as a trade-off.

fair point. I'll have to see for myself, I've noticed some points where composite seems like a decent tradeoff for heavily dithered games. I'm very excited to get my hands and get RGB out on my Saturn on a good set. Play some Cotton 2 and Cotton Boomerang and Panzer Dragoon on it then.

You own a copy of Cotton 2? I'm kinda jealous. It's very expensive right now.

Why does "retro gaming" involve tuning things way beyond the levels that kids experienced during that era? No one had a professionally calibrated Trinitron.

Is it so hard to believe that people would want to calibrate their CRTs once & then never fuck with that again once they have their colors & geometry the way they like it?

People do the same thing for LCDs these days, it's just much quicker with modern displays.

own a copy, yeah, but it's not an official one! Saturn is too expensive to buy each game for, so I got into back up loading as soon as I learned about PseudoSaturn and began exploring the system. It's why I've asked so many questions about it.

Good news for you then. You've seen this video right? Someone finally cracked the Saturn, so we should have a hard drive loader soon.

But when aiming for accuracy, accuracy is not what defined that era. So they're less accurately reproducing the retro experience, in a way. A CRT randomizer tool would help them bring their salvaged high-end Trinitrons closer to what games really looked like back then.

yes, the video actually came out the week I ordered my Saturn. I avoided the price bump that announcement caused by like two days.

Retro game developers often used PVMs & BVMs to develop their titles. Who's to say how they expected their games to look. There's nothing wrong with using composite video if that's what you prefer (hell, sunsoft's nes games look best with composite video), but what do you have against making sure your black levels & contrast are correct?

I did. :^)

Huh. Well, lucky for me I own too. In a perfect world this announcement would drop the prices of physical titles, but that's not how it works.

not gonna happen, sadly. Although getting into Cotton has given me a tremendous interest in shmups. Also, my boss at my day job (I work at a retro game store) had come across this laminated ad for the Turbo Duo game, so he got it for me as a gift. Kinda wanna collect some of the Cotton merch, if I can.

I've always wanted to own the Teacup.

the playstation fantastic night dreams with the tea cup is on sale for $262 on ebay. Seems like the best deal you're gonna get on it. One of these days I will put some cash down for this stuff.

Panorama Cotton is technically impressive for a Genesis/MD game but the framerate is too low for the game to be really enjoyable.

ehhhhhhhhhh?

it wasn't that bad in my experience.

actually seeing this available at this price is remarkably tempting.
ebay.com/itm/COTTON-ORIGINAL-Teacup-Import-Japan-Very-good-used-/152178994399
She's just so cute. Cotton is daughterfu material, and I only hope little witch girl user experienced her before he passed.

Even with reduced slowdowns Thunder Force IV and M.U.S.H.A. are still better

you may be right, but Cotton is cuter. Sometimes I'm happy to compromise between some game play and cuteness. It's entertainment on another level. Although Cotton 2's grab mechanic is fucking amazing and was so brilliant it sold me on the entire genre being something worth experiencing at large.

What is the best Cotton game and what is the best way to emulate it?

For example: For the Arcade and Saturn ones, which platform will give the most accurate emulation?

Hipsters.txt

neither from what I've seen. same board, both games have elements that pop in and out sporadically.

You can be autistic about it all you want, filters are in no way an acceptable substitute for a real CRT.

Wouldn't expect anything less from the company that brought you Johnny Turbo and his gay roommate, Tony.

Not the first user, but in my case, I can barely tolerate working with them 'cause the high pitched noise drives me up the fucking wall.

Hopefully that'll stop being a problem in 20 years or so.

emulating CRT displays has come a long way actually

A CRT actually has an electron gun.

Still requires a decent GFX card and a 4k+ monitor unless you're very easily satisfied or like the Trinitron "thick black lines" look.

Yeah sure, but it's only going to get better as technology progresses and I'm just happy that there is people working on that.

I love the way a pixelated low res old school game looks on a CRT display. I'm glad that this look will be preserved beyond the age of actual CRTs.

Any word on when an OLED TV that isn't laggy to the point of uselessness might come out? Or, better yet, an actual gayman OLED monitor with FreeSync/G-Sync that runs at a bazillion FPS native thanks to its sub-millisecond ignition/decay times.

Scanlines are shit and the last thing you want with a CRT. I don't know about the hipsters, but I want a CRT for every other possible reason.

Except you NEED scanlines for images to be drawn correctly on old games.

Like what? Scanlines and the bigger pixels are quite easily emulated by a filter on top of the image, you'd then need another quick filter to reproduce the slight brightness flickering created by the interlacing and you're done.

Except scanlines on am emulator are drawn on top of the image. The way it works on a CRT is every other line is skipped & the scanlines are actually blank space where no image exists that go between every line.

If you add scanlines through an emulators you're just making the image darker. The XRGB mini is the only thing I've seen handle that well.

Not until they fix imageburn issues but truly most beautiful image known to man.

CRT-royale supposedly handles that correctly with the right configuration.

Except like every computer monitor ever.

IIRC that's caused by a coil that gets loose from age or damage. You can find one that doesn't have the whine.

Maybe when we can emulate the XBox.

At that point there's literally no functional difference. Then, if you want to harness the power of your PC, you can take that emulator and force a higher internal resolution and other hacks to make your own "HD rerelease", or overclock the emulated CPU to eliminate slowdowns and other performance issues. Ironically, emulators usually do a better job than official "HD" editions.

Eh, you're probably right. Hell, I've seen a CRT with HDMI inputs, so I was wrong even going by my own memory.