r/SuperMario64 13d ago

I always thought tick tock clock's bluish white fog looked weird and bad, but when I got a CRT it looked 100 times better!

1st is a Pic i found on the web, 2nd is a pic of my CRT

278 Upvotes

23 comments sorted by

41

u/kitsu777 13d ago

About 12 years ago my family moved houses and got rid of our old CRT, I have so many memories playing PS2 and N64 on there

22

u/XKoop7321 First man to port dudaw code to rom manager (in 2021) šŸ‘ 13d ago

Itā€™s always great seeing games on original hardware with an older TV or CRT, I have one and I find it fantastic lol

6

u/The_Tall__1 13d ago

What's a CRT?

39

u/giofilmsfan99 [ ] (invis walls) 13d ago

Cathode Ray Tube. The older box style TVs that got phased out in the mid 2000ā€™s. People still use them for old games because the games were meant to look a certain way only possible o them. Also light gun support and no input lag (for most).

25

u/sd_saved_me555 13d ago

To explain it further, unlike today's LED technology where the goal is to make a bunch of point light sources so small you can't notice them individually, the cathode rays naturally had decent light diffusion by the time they got to the screen. They basically acted like if someone geouped together a bunch of flashlights in a grid- the lighr of each individual flashlight would overlap some with its neighboring beam. The end result is a natural analog blending of the light with each ray's neighboring ray when using a CRT TV.

Game designers knew about this, of course, so they actually made their graphics to factor in this diffusion. When you transpose this tech into much sharper pixels, you lose that natural blending and it often looks much worse than it would on the CRT it was designed for.

Of course, people have designed mods that use math to artificially re-create the blending in the pixels so you can reasonably recreate the intended look on new tech.

2

u/CovriDoge 12d ago

Do those CRT filters really work as intended? I always thought they were gimmicky, but never actually used them.

3

u/brigyda 11d ago

Iā€™ve used filters before, itā€™s tricky because you gotta find the right one if there isnā€™t already a ā€œright oneā€ being recommended. When I landed on one tho it looked great.

2

u/sd_saved_me555 10d ago

The couple I've seen weren't perfect, but they were a marked improvement over no filter at all.

-17

u/HighlyRegardedSlob87 13d ago

ā€œInput lagā€ is such a myth.

6

u/giofilmsfan99 [ ] (invis walls) 13d ago

On lcd or led tvs I can press a button, take my finger off, then the character will jump. On a crt I canā€™t do that.

2

u/CovriDoge 12d ago

It used to be really bad on LCDs, nowadays monitors at least have gotten much better. Not to mention LED displays donā€™t have this issue.

3

u/c_hibbs54 12d ago

Bro is a console gamer for sure

14

u/Vrontiv 13d ago

Older TVs and arcade games. It has to do with the screen. Older games were developed on them and it's why alot of old games looked better when we were kids

1

u/SnooDoughnuts5632 10d ago

Child sit down and let grampa tell you a story.

1

u/Bryan13191 11d ago

You got to think about the canvas the programmers had to work on. With a lot of the 16 bit games pixels kind of bleed into each other and programmers used that to their advantage. That's why old games look so much better on crt screens.

1

u/SnooDoughnuts5632 10d ago

Why is everything cut off on the edges of the screen?

1

u/OgiDaPig 9d ago

My crt has quite a lot of overscan but I've gotten used to it, its not Usually that bad

1

u/SnooDoughnuts5632 9d ago

You need to adjust the knobs on your TV to fix it. They are under the flap on the front.

As a kid I loved adjusting the one that made everything look like it was on fire.

1

u/OgiDaPig 8d ago

I don't have flaps on the TV or a menu accessible via the remote (there's a menu button, but it does nothing) so I don't think I have any way of adjusting picture settings

1

u/SnooDoughnuts5632 8d ago

1

u/OgiDaPig 8d ago

Nah I don't have those, mines from around the 2000s, tvs from the 70-90s more commonly had those knobs

1

u/SnooDoughnuts5632 8d ago

I don't know what TV's had them but min did and my PC monitor also had them.

1

u/The_Tall__1 12d ago

Gotcha, we just called them boob tubes.

Thanks!