Question about old games and CRTs

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PiratePowWow

Limp Gawd
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I keep reading about people who prefer the look of a CRT vs LCD etc for old games.

I have an old CRT projector and an SNES and Genesis hooked up to it and to me it looks absolutely terrible. Why? Because the CRT doesn't have a line-doubler and every other line is a black bar. On an LCD there are no black bars.

So what's the deal CRT folks? Have you lost your minds?
 
PiratePowWow said:
I keep reading about people who prefer the look of a CRT vs LCD etc for old games.

I have an old CRT projector and an SNES and Genesis hooked up to it and to me it looks absolutely terrible. Why? Because the CRT doesn't have a line-doubler and every other line is a black bar. On an LCD there are no black bars.

So what's the deal CRT folks? Have you lost your minds?
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1.) What's a CRT projector? CRT stands for Cathode Ray Tube, which inherently means it's a tube based display.. so I'm not sure what you're talking about.

2.) CRT displays are often superior to LCD technology in color depth and refresh rate. Unless you have a 120 Hz LCD you're usually stuck at 60 Hz. Scanlines < eyestrain IMHO.
 
IdiotCow said:
1.) What's a CRT projector? CRT stands for Cathode Ray Tube, which inherently means it's a tube based projector.. so I'm not sure what you're talking about.
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It's exactly that.

And the OP, don't worry about it lol enjoy your lcd.
 
From what I have read, when LCDs first come out they had inferior image quality to CRTs. I don't think that is the case anymore, they should have at least reached parity.
 
Is this supposed to be a point in favor of people who defend LCDs in the CRT v. LCD argument? "I can play my 20 year old 16-bit games better on an LCD than on a CRT!"

Anyway, this example seems unlikely to me. 99% of LCDs are widescreen, and old games are not, so they would be badly stretched or sidebarred. Furthermore, since they were originally designed to be played on 4:3 CRT TVs, why would they have problems if things were working properly?
 
Projector? So your displaying it on a screen or wall, what size? Blowing up any 480i image will probably look like shit.

I have a high end, like new (seldom used) 27" Panasonic flat screen TV (CRT) and am sure it would look better (from the couch) than any flat panel display playing Genesis/Snes era consoles, heck I think it looks great with Gamecube/Wii games as they are all 480 pixels on a smaller size, high quality screen, it should look good.

Now playing the same thing blown up on a 50" LCD/Plasma will look like shit in comparison in my opinion.

PiratePowWow said:
...So what's the deal CRT folks? Have you lost your minds?
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Sounds to me like your trying to start shit...
 
Old SNES games are going to look like crap on everything except an old ass TV or an emulator. CRT or LCD doesn't really matter.
 
PiratePowWow said:
I keep reading about people who prefer the look of a CRT vs LCD etc for old games.

I have an old CRT projector and an SNES and Genesis hooked up to it and to me it looks absolutely terrible. Why? Because the CRT doesn't have a line-doubler and every other line is a black bar. On an LCD there are no black bars.

So what's the deal CRT folks? Have you lost your minds?
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Get yourself one of those massive Sony CRTs or a quality CRT that was used for engineering or graphic design; you can find those for less than a 100 dollars these days. They will blow away any LCD in terms of image quality.
 
CRT has significantly better color reproduction but bad geometry compare to LCD

LCD has significantly worse color reproduction compared to a CRT but perfect geometry.

A good quality CRT TV will have a combfilter and line doubler as well as progressive scan and if you want to make composite look good, this is the way to go.

If you want perfect geometry then LCD is the way to go and all LCD do convert interlaced to progressive scan since they can only display a progressive scan signal.
 
Sabrewulf... said:
Projector? So your displaying it on a screen or wall, what size? Blowing up any 480i image will probably look like shit.

I have a high end, like new (seldom used) 27" Panasonic flat screen TV (CRT) and am sure it would look better (from the couch) than any flat panel display playing Genesis/Snes era consoles, heck I think it looks great with Gamecube/Wii games as they are all 480 pixels on a smaller size, high quality screen, it should look good.

Now playing the same thing blown up on a 50" LCD/Plasma will look like shit in comparison in my opinion.


Sounds to me like your trying to start shit...
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old projection TVs used high powered CRTs that were glycol cooled. They suffered from horrible convergence issues if the tubes were not in perfect allignment.
 
480i would look awesome compared to what's coming out of SNES/Genesis. They fill the space of 480i with 240p, hence every other line is blank.

Youtube videos of the games look better.
 
Mozex said:
This is a pretty good article on why old games designed around CRTs look like ass on modern displays.

http://nfgworld.com/mb/thread/660
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Great article. It really is hard to get an old game to look just right unless you've got an old TV or an emulator that can fake a crappy NTSC display accurately. The games were actually designed to take advantage of the color bleeding and other messy stuff that cropped up when you used Composite or an RF adapter to make the art blur together better instead of looking like a bunch of pixels.
 
I'd rather emulate console games and play them on an LCD with filtering modes (like HQ4X) than play the on a CRT. It's not 'faithful', but I think it looks better. However, when it comes to some of the older 2D PC games like Fallout and Planescape, I'll take a CRT for that. When it comes to Fallout, the only way to really retain the grainy quality of its artwork is to use a CRT (though a film grain shader would accomplish the same thing).
 
@NKDietrich - Then why do people mod their SNES and Genesis to display RGB/S-video and swear the picture quality is better?

CRT projectors can scale perfectly, but other CRT displays can't because they have 'pixels' similar to LCDs. Just look up close to any CRT and you can see them.

Scanlines - you don't see them on LCDs, you do on CRTs. I can't imagine why anyone would actually like scanlines. Play a sega CD game with full motion video and try it on an LCD then on a CRT - scanlines suck.
 
PiratePowWow said:
@NKDietrich - Then why do people mod their SNES and Genesis to display RGB/S-video and swear the picture quality is better?

CRT projectors can scale perfectly, but other CRT displays can't because they have 'pixels' similar to LCDs. Just look up close to any CRT and you can see them.

Scanlines - you don't see them on LCDs, you do on CRTs. I can't imagine why anyone would actually like scanlines. Play a sega CD game with full motion video and try it on an LCD then on a CRT - scanlines suck.
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Re: RGB/Svideo mods. You claim LCDs are better, others claim analog is better. If you want the better quality analog then you go with a higher quality analog signal.

Other CRTS scale just as well as CRT projectors. Those 'pixels' you are seeing are actually scanlines or artifacts from the tubes maximum resolution.

Part of the reason why people like scanlines is because of nostalgia.
Other people like them because the developers who made the game designed it to look good on a display that had scanlines.
Ultimately it's just personal preference.
 
PiratePowWow said:
@NKDietrich - Then why do people mod their SNES and Genesis to display RGB/S-video and swear the picture quality is better?
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Going from RF or Composite to a SCART or other input definitely improves quality, but a lot of us still prefer the look and feel of an old TV. It's mostly nostalgia, but remember that the artists and programmers on these games were not designing their game with pixel perfect accuracy and contrast in mind.

For example, SNES had a resolution of 256x224 for most games. That's a more "square" resolution than the 4:3 ratio of TVs. So they designed their sprites to look best when stretched. Play an SNES game on an emulator at its native resolution and things are just too tall and skinny.

That makes LCDs very difficult to deal with unless you can force the image to a 4:3 stretch. Then there is NTSC gamma ramp. Things that were meant to be barely visible backdrops due to how an NTSC signal treated dark colors are actually very bright when you use an emulator or higher quality input. It can appear overly bright and washed out, and dark scenes lose much of their effect.

There's really two ways of playing an old console game. You can either go for the nostalgic old school style, or try and make it look prettier through the use of filters. In the former scenario, you're better off with a regular old tube TV, and in the latter, you need an emulator. Either way you're better off than simply plugging an SNES into a computer monitor and hoping for the best.
 
I keep reading about people who prefer the look of a HOTDOGS vs HAMBURGERS etc for old games.

I have an ROOTBEER_FLOAT and an SNES and Genesis hooked up to it and to me it looks absolutely terrible. Why? Because the ROOTBEER_FLOAT doesn't have a line-doubler and every other line is a black bar. On an HAMBURGER there are no black bars.

So what's the deal HOTDOG folks? Have you lost your minds?
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Your experience is different because you are using a different display technology than most of us.

If you don't like your CRT projector because of the black interlacing bars, you can get the same bars on a standard CRT TV, so I don't recommend that technology for you either.

And yes, a pixel on a standard CRT TV is a composition of three color elements that do not overlap, but CRT projectors also have pixels - they are a composition of three color elements that do overlap.
 
The moral of the story is: If you like scanlines you have likely lost your mind? Or, if you like scanlines it is because you only think you like scanlines, but do not in fact like them.

No pixels on a crt projector.
 
Have both types of TVs? I like to keep around a CRT when I feel like busting out the SNES or N64.
 
Kind of sounds like some some definitions are confused of what a CRT and projectors are.
 
SNES looks fine on a projector - on my 800x600 4:3 DLP projector, and on my current Optoma 720p projector. Provided you use s-video. Genesis - this is tricky - it outputs a kind of 240p that doesn't play nice with many modern displays. My Olevia LCD wouldn't display it at all, and my projector had crazy flickering on the bottom half of the screen. I tried a JVC X'eye too...same deal...no dice.

Composite video looks pretty awful on a huge screen anyway. Dot crawl and color bleeding and such, ick. You should see what a console looks like via coax cable. Uck.

As far as CRTs - I love a good CRT (especially over an LCD). But one without a scaler is going to be difficult to use. You should probably invest in a good scaler, or at least a receiver that upscales for you.
 
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