I finally understand why images from my childhood don't evoke the same feelings on the mounds of emulators I have tried. Thank you.. I believe I should track down actual hardware

I love all the examples you use with dithering specifically. Crazy how pixel art games can go from looking like crap with sharp pictures, to having so much depth and texture when CRT masks are used.

Great video. A little tag indicating if it's RGB, S-Video or Composite would be helpful.

Nonthing compares to the cozyness of a small glowing CRT with your favorite console, a blanket with your favorite food and a rainy day outside.

A potentially cool idea for a video would be to play modern indie games with pixel art graphics on a CRT TV/monitor to see how modern pixel art would look on it. Games like Sonic Mania, Shovel Knight, Owlboy, Hyper Light Drifter, Celeste ect come to mind.

Much like when comics were printed with halftone color, the artists made their choices with those limitations in mind.

If someone wants to replicate the crt style on an emulator and doesn't have a crt monitor or something, an easy way is enabling scanlines, but adding the bilinear filter (only scanlines with sharp pixels makes the image just look bad and darker) even tho, some emulators like k fuson or retroarch have filters that can emulate the CRT blending 99% perfect, however in retroarch is a bit tricky finding the right filter

This really emphasizes how much thought and care goes into pixel art. All the shapes and textures they imply really came to life on the CRT. The aesthetic just has such a video game feel to it that's beautiful in its own way. It's hard to capture the same feeling with CRT filters alone.

bro, seeing the CRT images hit me with such a huge way of nostalgia and feels. i have to figure this out or just get a CRT monitor lol.

Thanks for sharing this. Far too many retro gaming creators just show us the raw pixels without applying any sort of filtering (and many of them seem to think this looks better? smh). To me that's such an eye-sore an not how these graphics were meant to be seen!

This is an excellent showcase of the difference between raw sprites and properly filtered sprites. I use reshade to apply crt filters on all my old games. Through emulation front ends like retroarch to steam re releases, proper crt filters are an absolute must for older pixel based games. I have been explaining this fact for years, and have met much opposition, for some reason...

Love it love it One thing you didn't show off is text. Soul Calibur 2 (mine's on PS2 through s-video) is a game with lots of small text in the mission descriptions. I've found that the same shadow mask that you use in the video is really good at cleaning up text and making it super clear.

You've used some fantastic examples there. Composite/scanlines/crt filters are absolutely transformative. I'm going to "downgrade" to composite with my Retrotink 5X and have a play around with it. Great vid.

Great comparison! The filters looks amazing

10/10 video, I've only seen these examples on image forums; it's great that they're available for the masses now.

Looking so much better with scanlines. We are missing out a lot in the LED era

You make me relive my childhood with these. Thanks!

Amazing video! What settings are you using on the RetroTINK? Somehow, the CRT filters don't look this good on my end.

Great video, i love comparisons like these

Thank you so much for this video. I never thought the diffference was so enormous. You helped my understanding of 2D graphics massively.

WOW 😯 Amazing job with this video!

Please, let me go back and live it all again! So many wonderful memories in here. I miss when games looked like this!

the sega megadrive takes advantages with composite cables adding the ilusion of more color on screen

One of the best videos I've seen on the channel. Your content is getting better every day more and more! (Very well chosen music too ;))

I find that activating the scanline effect in MAME and playing around with the different effects that it offers (through HLSL) really helps make games look a lot better even if not as good as original hardware it still gets really close. Thanks for this video 😊

All these old games were designed ON crt screens, so all of the color and contrast decisions made in the illustration are suited gor the display. But when in the sharp pixel-perfect format, the coloring and contrast gets all messed up. Also the 'softening' effect comes from how CRTs don't use pixels, instead using a dense rgb color mask system, as well as the horizontal blurring from the electron gun's movement.

Very nostalgic and instructive video. I had not seen many of these games in this form since I was a child. The games straight up did not look that bad back then, it's not just a nostalgia effect. Modern high-res pixel art (which is still beautiful in its own right) kinds of muddles the sleight of hand that they were doing back then.

Excellent video, until a few years ago I started to learn about the old tube TVs and how pixel art games should really look like, and although as a kid I played retro console games, I did it through emulators on a CRT monitor, with a clean image not much different from an LED or LCD monitor. Now that I know how it works, I use quality shaders to imitate those old TVs in retroarch, achieving correct results. Even understanding that tastes are tastes, I can't understand how there are still people who say that those retro games look good in raw image, with clean pixels that sometimes don't form anything recognizable or pleasant to see.

I use scan lines with my Retrotink 5x and it's amazing. The only thing I don't use is the wobble pixel mode like you have, that simulates cheap CRTs. It messes with my eyes a bit lol.

Incredible! How did you capture these? Or are these post-processed filters?

Good idea for a video. As a guy in my 40s I had to watch until the end to see what games you chose.

I used to have it so good playing these games on a crt tv as a kid. I have been playing them on modern tvs now and it just isn't the same.

@Wobbling Pixels: Great video as always. I’m wondering if you have a Mister FPGA and if so. Do you have good settings for that to get this kind of look out of it?

Thank you so much for all the work you have put in. I have been looking for a solution that could potentially let me retire my CRT's forever. And your work with all the CRT/LCD filters looks like it just might be the answer! I don't enjoy the pixel perfect stuff because it to me it destroys the artists intent. There is a lot of color and detail blending you miss out on when not on a CRT. But I've never scene something replicate that really well digitally until your work. You sir are a Hero to the retro game preservation world.

Stunning! I know that the game I am working onf for Amiga computers looks significantly better on CRT. The CRT effect superbly illustrated here. I would love to see some Bitmap Brothers stuff in here too though ;)

Beautiful pixels buchered by recent hardware. Thanks man, very cool video !

This is exactly why I thought I was imagining things when I remember games looking better back then than on emulators. It's because our modern monitors are different from old CRT TVs.

1:02 Earthworm Jim art is mindblowing with the CRT filter applied.

2:48, i don't believe, really! The eyes of the lady are squared, and on CRT looks like a good painting!

This is why old console pixel art looks totally different from our modern pixel art, but old handheld art looks more in line with today.

This is wonderful you do kind of forget how these games looked and how sometimes lower clarity created better images.

Some of these animated computer graphics conjured up the spookiness of early animations from the 1920's and 30's.

i like the little specks of color it puts around stuff

Awesome video , did you achieve the CRT look on the retrotink 5x? If so which filter 😁

I've been using a shader set called "Guest CRT" and it's made 4th and 5th gen games look amazing

Note that in real crt TV, you dont see those black lines unless you're looking an inch from the screen, which you should never do.

Guys if you want best imitation of old CRT in modern retro games or emulated or ported games, use reshade and exactly GTUv50 + EasymodeCRT combo of shaders, GTU gives almost perfect blur and composite color bleed and easymodeCRT gives good enough aperture grid imitation that combined together looks close enough to real old CRT (you can also add motion blur and chromatic Abberation for better effect), But before doing it make sure to find out real internal pixel resolution of game to set up shaders correctly. Best way to find out is to make screenshots and measure size of on screen pixels in actual pixels and divide it. For example you play in 4k and your in game pixels on screenshots is 8x8 pixels, this means you have to 3840/8 and 2160/8 and you will get internal resolution 480x270 (that actually pixel resolution if most recent TMNT Shredders revenge) if game is 4:3 better play it in original resolution or you will have hard time setting proper float resolution of heights that compensates 4x3 to 16:9 resolution changes and adds black bars to count.

Do you think horizontal scaling is important to make crt masks like 'consumer 1' etc taking full effect?

amazing! but now can't unsee all the intended and missing effects and my brain always trys to image this with crt artefacts or dare I say intended effect. please include a short crt-filter comparison in all your clips from now on!!! thank you XD XD XD

3:51 CRT added teeth^^

CRTs did wonders for 90's games, that's for sure, but I definitely don't miss the eye fatigue that they caused me. I've actually started to appreciate visible dithering as an artistic choice.

NOTE: These are Retrotink5x PRO CRT masks/filters NOT Retroarch shaders! The video is a best of from second twitter account twitter.com/5Xpixels plus new examples. Less infomercial but entertaining video. Enjoy, relax and let me know which one is your favorite😎In case you would like to have a basic explanation about the benefits of CRT TVs/CRT filters with low resolution games : kzfaq.info/get/bejne/Z8l3dLNizsWYqIU.html

Now THAT...is eye opening. Wow.

This is why pixelart with dither has been so powerful in the past 😮

3:51 happier on the crt filter 🙂😃 👌

My CRT is a low grade consumer one so I get the vertical jailbars but man its still waaaay better than an emulator.

Great, need full setting about scanlines for sega gen, ps1. Like for this great job

This is astonishing.

YEAHHHHH I KNEW THEY WERE LOOKING SO GORGEOUS

The CRT monitor is akin to lacquer when finishing a car's spray job.

I loved this video. Could you do a part 2 with more games?

I still have a CRT at home, I recently learn you can play wii u game with the composite cable from a wii, I want to test that out with some virtual console game or maybe shovel knight

I like this simulation (filter) because it gives a pretty good approximation to how old games are supposed to look like, and also give people a proper introduction to the difference in display technology. There's some caveats, however. As someone who exclusively hooks my old consoles to my high-range consumer-level CRT (because professional-grade monitors like the PVM give you an image quality no one in the consumer space would have ever even witnessed), there's multiple things you just can't do with a filter, and some things filters just get really wrong. One of those is the scanline effect actually not being really noticeable on real hardware, unless your console or device is outputting 240p, because that way the same lines are getting redrawn top to bottom, leaving the intermediate lines dark, although they still experience color bleed (due to the way the electron beam emits light), which fills up the blanks. Again, it's not really noticeable unless you basically stand 1 inch away from the screen, and this seems to be what people who program these filters do, which seems weird to me because you're not supposed to play your videogames at a very close distance. The other thing is the vibration in the image is something filters get all wrong and/or mixed up constantly. Interlaced and progressive video modes can be told apart from each other exactly due to this. Some consoles output progressive scan (such as the SNES), some do interlaced scan (example, PS1 and 2), and some can do both depending on game or cables you're using (such as the Gamecube). Interlaced scan tends to flicker and "ride up", as it were. You can easily notice this on real hardware, if you plug your PS1 to a real CRT and turn it on, the PlayStation logo seems to waver up if you look at its edges. That's the interlaced scan in action, with the TV "knitting" frames together quickly one after the other. You'll never see this "vibration" on consoles like the SNES, because of their progressive scan output. Overall, I think it's pretty cool to have technology that can approximate what real hardware shows you, but in the end, I don't think it'll ever be possible to accurately represent what you can experience on the actual hardware itself.

I've never had those hideous visible scanlines on my CRT, even never seen them at other people's houses when gaming there.

How do you emulate the crt look and the technical errors?

what tools/software did u use to change the normal picture to CRT scanlines ?

it is not only the pixel art...is the crt monitors! and the scanlines of the retro feeling!

So it wasn’t just me. I though these games looked better when I was at an arcade vs emulating it at home. Excellent video!

I wish there was a good universal CRT filter for all the classic games. CRT filters can be quite fascinating, especially at 4K.

The waterfall in sonic 2 looks more transparent and all games have better blending of colours on the CRT. I guess this was the intended look

This video really highlights how CRT TVs made the low resolution graphics look great. With that being said I like how Dreamcast looks over VGA on an 4K OLED TV. Tried both but it looks so much better on the HDTV.

Definitely is a different experience originally when we didn't actually look at pixels directly since the CRT offered a form of free antialiasing. Emulation kind of created this conflict where to this day people argue about aspect ratio even though 99.9% of the screens were 4:3 lol. I'm just glad filters came about to bridge the two worlds together and provide something approximate to the old video conditions. :) Composite alone really does a lot for the Sega Genesis and Saturn, many examples where they took full advantage how that can blend adjacent pixel colors together and create new colors and transparency effects.

With the newest firmware on rt5x, the hdr10 option increasing brightness and increases the gamma setting's range. This makes the CRT scanlines and grill/mask filters darken the image less. Combined with a new OLED TV with BFI, you get the best CRT emulation we've ever had. What scanline and CRT mask/grill settings qqare you using now? It's insane that so many features have been added...

What capture card do you use and/or recommend?

Best advertisement for CRT televisions I've ever seen.

2:33 that's actually insane how more realistic the picture looks

OMG I just KNEW Yoshi Story did look better when I was a child!

Ah yes, the invisible grid that makes the magic happens... LCD and OLED is nice and all, but CRT is just something else, also the response time... *chef kiss*

I feel that CRT shaders expecially from those working on Retroarch are getting there, dont know if they will ever come close to the real deal, but at least in its current state are way better than having none

What is the closest CRT filter to match the one in this video? Specifically SOTN?

In GBS (8200) Control this is also possible. With the advantage that by having a VGA output, we can use a CRT monitor. It looks beautiful.

I also have some videos posted on my channel relating to this, but it's mostly tricks and such I did on an ossc.

Scanline is amazing

Which Retroarch filter can I use to get visuals from this CRT?

Not a huge fan of scan lines on 3D games, but my god those 16-bit games look amazing.

there are some common misconceptions though about games of the past: 1) not only we were playing on CRTs back then but also using RCA composite or even RF signal. This had a huge impact on how games looked and felt. 8-32bit games with RGB on CRT looks nothing like RCA on CRT and RGB does not always means better. It is blurrier especially on text but it is almost always the intended look 2) this should be obvious by now, but games of the past were never pixelated (aside from pc games). The first time I ever seen pixelated games was when I played genesis games on an emulator. Even more shocking to me was when I played God of War on an emulator and could not believe how bad it looked at native resolution. No genesis, ps1 or ps2 game was ever looking that bad as it is seen now. Even CRT filters can't really replicate the look of a glowing screen and that smooth picture 3) 480i is not a low resolution. It may be laughable now with todays 4k and 8k displays but it never really looked bad on a big CRT TV. The image is bright and there is no such concept as pixels in the CRT world. Try watching Sonic Heroes intro cutscene on Wii connected via RCA you won't believe such image quality even possible with this tech

4:25 man, this one is stark

The funny thing is, watching this you might be left with the impression that this CRT effect is some kind of magical pixel enhancer, but that's not the case at all. The reason these old games look better on CRT than at a pixel level is because they were developed on CRT to begin with. Like literally the monitors they used to draw the artwork were all CRTs (obviously, if you think about it) so the art was touched up in a way that was optimized to look best on that kind of monitor. Unfortunately games today can't really do that because of the rarity of CRT now. Trying to imitate what old games did isn't going to be enough if you're still just drawing a sharpened pixel-perfect image. Relying on a post-processing filter will rarely produce the same quality.

Tip: If you still have a crt tv, buy a nvidia Geforce 9xxx series with s-video out ( if you tv don't have svideo there are some simple circuits using two ceramic caps and a switch that can convert s-video to composite) and configure the screen size at nvidia control panel. The ATI HD 4xxx series are easier to use because the s-video on it is more "plug and play" but, the OpenGL 3.3 support is a hit and miss with some more demanding emulators.

if you dont have a crt and wanna experience retro games as intended you can use sonkun crt shaders for retroarch

And this is exactly why I have a CRT tv in my study :)

This vidéo is awesome because with it you show to the world, and particulary to the new generation the BIG MISTAKE they do by playing those games without considering this aspect and at least search a way to reproduce the original render. Many young people would also reconsider how these games looks like.

I still really enjoy/appreciate seeing the raw pixels, even tho it's not the intended look.

These games were made with a crt in mind so having them pixel perfect shows off the imperfections

I'd like to argue that in the case of Castlevania SotN and Metal Gear Solid, it wasn't actual pixel art, but rather physical artworks that were scanned and downscaled until they fit in the dialogue boxes, then slightly touched to add features like Dracula's red eyes or simply to avoid weird outlines. Still impressive how they managed to fit that nicely without it looking ugly, but this is most definitely not real pixel art.

Love this video

Scanlines are love. Scanlies are life.

i need part 2!!

great example! the beauty of low resolution.

I wish there was a way to get the retro CRT look as a filter for my computer monitors and phone screen. Why isn't there an app for that yet!