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I tell you something that will make a big difference for titles pre-2005 or so: playing on a CRT television.
Especially on SNES titles which I played a lot as a kid, the extremely sharp look you get from emulators on flat panel displays just looks wrong.
The CRT flicker gives me headache in no time, even with good maintenanced expensive studio monitors. I didn't had that problem as a kid in the 80s but now as I am older, and used to flicker free flat screen monitors, it is really bad.
What kills me the worst is how piercingly bright some flat panels are. Even through my astigmatism I'm one of those dark mode all the things kind of guys. CRTs never bothered me, I could stare at a bright white blank Word document all day, but my Gigabyte Gaming panel feels like staring into the sun.
The artists also took that into account, used it in their favour.
Source: worked with pixel artists early 2000.
The artists did and the engineers did.
For example, the Apple II achieved 16 onscreen colors via NTSC artifacting. The 8-Bit Guy did a great video on this; programmers could choose like 4 colors, but if you put them next to each other in certain combinations they would turn other colors. Which is why white text would turn green and/or purple at the edges.
The IBM CGA card took it to a whole other level; it had a 4-bit digital RGBI video port for computer monitors and a composite port for televisions. When plugged into an RGBI monitor, you got a sharp picture that would display in one of four four-color palettes: black, white, cyan and magenta, or black, yellow, red and green, both in bright and dark. But if the artist dithered the graphics properly, and the card was plugged into a composite TV or monitor, the same graphics would appear softer, but in 16 colors. Text was harder to read, but games looked better, so business customers could buy an RGBI monitor and gamers could use a TV.
In the 16-bit era, I can cite titles on the SNES and Genesis that took advantage of the limitations of the NTSC standard to get graphical tricks done that the console couldn't actually do. Like transparent water. I think it's in Emerald Hill Zone in Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and in some levels of Super Mario World, where you can enter and exit water that is drawn by rapidly jiggling a dithered pattern back and forth. On a CRT television this blurs into a translucent effect, when viewed on an entirely digital monitor it looks like an opaque checkerboard or grille.
No one is listening to us 😅
Are there CRT filters to blend the pixels?
Sort of. They do add things like blur and scan lines, some even distort the frame to try to simulate the bulbous screen of a CRT. But it's a bit like that VHS filter that Gen Z is so inordinately fond of; it's artificially emphasizing the worst qualities of the medium, while still not achieving the benefits.
Plus, input lag is real. A lot of modern games are designed to take the lag between the console and the display into account, retro games aren't. Playing Donkey Kong Country on an LCD TV made me feel like my reflexes had aged 50 years, hauling out my old CRT fixed that (but made my back feel like it aged 50 years).
I didn't consider lag. That's more than aesthetic.
Some filters are better than others for certain tastes. The glow effect on CRT Royale is what gives me the nostalgia buzz, but it looks much better on 4K displays. On my 1080p displays I use a package that adds a bezel for the display to reflect off of which gives me a similar effect.
I'd rather have a native CRT display, but I'm used to larger displays at this point and I couldn't physically handle anything even in the high 20 inches range.
I’m probably in the minority, but I love that crisp sharp look with perfect geometry that you get on a modern display with no filters enabled.
I’ve always been a visually nitpicky person. When I was a kid I tweaked the hell out of the whole 3 setting knobs and switches on my crappy old CRT. In Nintendo Power, the screenshots were taken off nice computer monitors or something and looked so much better.
If kid me got a chance to play ActRaiser or Super Mario World or even NES stuff like Simon’s Quest, in perfect clarity on a big colorful OLED and using an Xbox elite controller, it would have blown my mind. So now I live it up!
I’m not against original hardware if people want to use it though, especially for speed running.
How did you take screenshots from a monitor? With a camera?
Usually you just copy the backbuffer, you don't need a screen to do it.
Nintendo power had tons of images taken directly from photos of CRT‘s. Some of them may have used your Method, but many of them (Especially contests) Specifically asked readers to send in photos to show whether they’ve done certain things.
You can photograph a TV but making a screenshot was usually done by blitting the backbuffer somewhere.
Did screenshots taken with the method you mentioned have bloom, Like you would see from an image taken from a CRT? I associate bloom in screenshots from being directly Photographed from the CRT.
I guess you can do both ofc ! And maybe you had to with say the C64. The PS1 you could do it through the devkit IIRC.
Those screenshots were taken on Sony studio monitors which are much more precise than home equipment. They're still available fairly cheap, I picked up a pair a few years ago for $35 each. It's the best of both worlds.
I can see the appeal for that... Except for the NES.
I gave my last cartridge blowie a long time ago.
There's nothing wrong with wanting to stick to original hardware, if you already have it or can afford to buy it.
Setting up a Pi or other single-board system as a dedicated retro game emulator is also an absolutely valid choice IMO. It's a fun, generally affordable little project that you can tinker with forever, e.g. changing cases and controllers, UI tweaks, ROM file organization, per-game settings optimization. But I don't think that it's ever been the "best" emulation option for anyone who didn't already have their heart set on "doing something fun and interesting with a Pi".
The smartphone you already have, dedicated retro gaming handhelds, Android TV boxes or sticks, and cheap/secondhand/already-owned PCs (desktop, notebook, or kiosk) all arguably match or exceed the performance and value-for-money of any Pi-based system.
Yet in any thread where someone new to emulation is asking for advice, there's always a flock of folks who suggest getting a Pi like it's the only game in town. It honestly baffles me a little. Especially because almost all of them are just running a pretty frontend over Retroarch, and Retroarch is available for virtually every modern consumer computing platform (and so are a lot of pretty frontends, if that's a selling point).
For context, I've got a dozen or so retro systems, but I prefer to emulate as much as possible.
Emulation is nice because it removes a lot of the friction between deciding I feel like playing a given game and actually playing it. Dealing with worn out controllers, dead parts, wonky connections just to squint at a fuzzy screen. I much prefer seeing it upscaled on my modern screen and grabbing whatever controller is convenient to play with
