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The Impending CRT Display Revival Will Be Televised (hackaday.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 10 points 1 year ago (11 children)

Literally the only reason old school gamers play on CRTs is because old games were designed for the blurry low resolution displays they provided and so look kind of bad on modern crisp displays. You could just smear vasoline on a modern LCD and get roughly the same effect, but using a CRT is less messy.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    The look of CRT is important to retro gaming but do you know what the most important characteristic of CRTs for retro gaming is?

    No input lag.

    Play OG Super Mario Bros on a modern TV and let me know how long it is before you wanna smash the controller in frustration. The game just feels incredibly sloppy.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Yeah super smash brothers melee is the peak for this. It looks fine on an lcd, and if you suck at it it's fine, but there's a skill level where your TV is hindering your ability to improve and you probably aren't even winning local competition nights yet at that point.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    A modern TV is a really bad example. Most modern gaming computer monitors have grey-to-grey pixel response times measured in nanoseconds. I would not be surprised if that exceeds the fade-time of CRT phosphors.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (4 children)

    No input lag.

    That's wrong. The display is the small part there. And the players reaction times are leagues higher even. Btw, a lot in perceived lagginess is level design and psyche.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    It's not wrong. You can feel it.

    My wife is not a gamer and even she can feel it. She hated playing on our living room TV. Said she felt like she got really bad at Mario Bros over the years or something and was disappointed.

    Bought a CRT; she loves the game again and is still quite good at it actually.

    Reacting to stimulus is completely different than timing inputs in a video game. A few ms of delay isn't really going to register in a reaction test, but if you're using constant time sensitive information on screen to accurately time your movements in a game, you can easily feel lag in the sub 5ms range.

    As a guitarist, I can feel latency down to 2ms if I'm playing through a modeling amp on my PC, especially if I'm playing at high tempos. The faster you play, the greater the percentage of time between notes that latency becomes. The effect is the same in high speed video games.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    It is wrong. I have a comment elsewhere in the thread breaking it down, but the short of it is that you have to include the time it takes to stream the frame to the beam, or else you're giving CRTs an unfair advantage in measurements.

    A good gaming monitor with something like the Framemeister, RetroTINK, or OSSC can give properly unnoticeable amounts of input lag.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    A good gaming monitor with something like the Framemeister, RetroTINK, or OSSC can give properly unnoticeable amounts of input lag.

    Ok, so wait a second here. You're suggesting that buying a "good" gaming monitor (hundreds to thousands of dollars) and an upscaler (the cheapest of the options you mentioned I found for $369 USD is a better option than buying a CRT?

    I found a perfectly good 28" Panasonic CRT on Kijiji for $200 CAD.

    It makes the retro noises, it displays the games the way they were meant to be displayed, and there's no perceptible input lag. It also just fits the visual aesthetic if you have a retro gaming area/room in your house. There's no way I'm paying anywhere near 5-600 USD (up to 1k CAD, basically) to play retro games on a modern monitor when I can have a setup faithful to the experiences I had as a kid in the 90s for $200 CAD.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Good gaming monitors are not expensive. Anything that supports G-sync should be fine. I picked one up off Craigslist for like $100. New isn't much more.

    CRTs are not going to stay cheap for long. They're slowly dying to attrition. If nothing else, the phosphors are dimming over time. In fact, we might be getting towards the end of cheap garage sale pickups already. Especially ones that can be easily RGB converted.

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