I’m super-happy with the current state of fake fuzziness but I get tripped up for PS2-era emulation. Should I go fuzzy or not? It’s right on that threshold where I can clean it up and make something pristine without looking vacant. FFXII with its insane texture detail is a good choice to scale up; cleaner things like MGS2 look good with a layer of CRT blur/bloom.
I’m also interested in replicating the PSX’s peculiar dithering effect. Is that baked into the renderer? I notice most emulators represent it, including Sony’s PSP emulator.
The dithering was a hardware effect IIRC, and can be disabled, and was used to make the display look more crisp on blurry CRTs that would otherwise cause the colors to blend into each other.
Some emulators even do this now, I am pretty sure mednafen supports this.
OHHH MAN I was wondering about that. Super Contra looks so terrible in MAME, and I remembered it being so pretty in the arcade. That would be it, then.
I do wonder sometimes if the fact that our NES was originally hooked up to a C64 monitor affected my perception of the games.
That said, I can’t recall noting much difference when it was eventually hooked to a TV. Though given that my late 90s/early 00 CRTs looked way better than my TVs of similar vintage, maybe that early 90s TV stacked up better to the C64 monitor than a late 80s one would have?
i’d also like some kind of plugin for vlc or other media players that not only makes what you’re watching look like it’s on a vhs tape, but has sliders for simulated tape wear and generations of copying
stuff like this has always interested me because i studied editing in a liberal arts college basement that had both video editing suites and a few old 8 mm tables, this was in like 2002-3 ish, and i remember thinking at the time that VHS would soon feel just as dated as film, and that meant that shortly after it would be come a highly sought after nostalgic aesthetic. a few years after that they cleared out the whole basement and now they just have like 10 mac desktops for everything, and we see more and more stuff like this
i don’t think i’ve ever been more right about anything in my life
Another thing about that part of Bubble Man stage: it makes twitch streams temporarily blurry. Video compressors seem to really struggle with that pixel pattern for some reason.
It’s not unique to pixelated games being played on CRT screens but the topic reminded me how playing videogames on CRT TVs for practically my whole life has given me impressions of visuals which, while perhaps not accurate to what the intended representations, nonetheless create memorable ambiguities. The righthand image of Samus is more appealing and volumetric than the one on the left; it also – separate from official art of Samus – creates questions of identification. In general, I think these sort of questions pertain mostly to secondary figures and environmental details. These lasting ambiguities were strongly present during my first experiences with Super Nintendo games.
This also plays into the look of NES/SNES games, both of which had resolutions much closer to a square than the more rectangular output from other 240p systems. You can even see this in some SNES games rather infamously, where they didn’t account for this and circles look weird when viewed at 4:3 as opposed to a dot-by-dot presentation
Now, if you don’t mind, I have to go get angry at every CPS2 screenshot on the internet
