Scanlines crt screen finally

6 hours ago, DANZA said:

It would be cool if you share that, I would like to give it a go o:

If I can patch a few holes in it today then I'll share a test version. If not, it might have to wait a week before I can work on it again.

So I've been toying around with this. To get a more realistic CRT effect without editing a doom engine's rendering code is quite difficult. This is the best I've been able to come up with outside of using the engine (before/after):

While it isn't technically correct, I think it gives the desired effect. Default settings are tailed for a 1080 screen (at least my 1080 screen). There's a few options to play around with to set to your liking. If you want to play at 320x200 (or not your native resolution) this will only work with Chocolate Doom and Odamex. As far as I know, these are the only ports that handle game resolutions correctly (they do not mess with your screen resolution).

I have attached a development build of Doom Launcher that contains this very experimental feature. If you have multiple monitors the screen filter overlay will be displayed on the same monitor Doom Launcher is on.

DoomLauncher_2.6.4.1.zip

1 hour ago, hobomaster22 said:

So I've been toying around with this. To get a more realistic CRT effect without editing a doom engine's rendering code is quite difficult. This is the best I've been able to come up with outside of using the engine...

Cool! It's good enough, it's the same way emus like PCSXE picture it's scanlines. An option to change the opacity of the overlay would be cool, everything goes too dark as it is.

12 minutes ago, DANZA said:

Cool! It's good enough, it's the same way emus like PCSXE picture it's scanlines. An option to change the opacity of the overlay would be cool, everything goes too dark as it is.

I had spent a lot of time trying to get transparency to work. Unfortunately because it's separate from the app it creates a lot of issues, transparency being one I haven't been able to solve. The work around to get transparency working has crippling performance issues. Hopefully I can work through it soon.

Added an option for opacity. Updated the link in the previous post.

https://www.doomworld.com/applications/core/interface/file/attachment.php?id=57645

Ok, so here's a photo from a pretty decent 19-inch Trinitron clone (aperture grille) tube.

The game is running in DOSBox in a 640x400 (pixel-doubled in software both horizontally&vertically without filtering) 70Hz video mode. Modeline from xorg.conf: "640x400_70.00"  23.35  640 656 720 800  400 401 404 417  -HSync +Vsync (I generated it from the command line using "gtf 640 400 70"). The actual hardware doublescanned 320x200 mode does not work properly on modern Nvidia cards anymore (except maybe if booted to DOS), it just looks blurry. I will check later how it looks running from an actual DOS PC in real 320x200 VGA mode but I think it should be pretty much the same.

From a normal viewing distance slight lines are noticeable but nothing as dramatic as old consoles/computers running on sharp TVs or professional video monitors. As mentioned previously in this thread, in the mid-90s most people have played the game on a smaller and less sharp display and those don't really have visible lines.

Personally I actually prefer the pixelated look, whether the lines are there or not I don't really care about, it's fine either way. To me a blurry picture or visible "scanlines" have never really been reasons to miss CRTs. Instead, I prefer to use CRT displays with old systems only because this avoids any ugly and possibly laggy upscaling, and because the monitor is almost guaranteed to work correctly with all kinds of weird tweaked VGA modes. Or, if we're talking about old console or home computer video sources instead, because the display is guaranteed to not have a shitty deinterlacer and it's also guaranteed that it will not get confused if fed a "240p" or "288p" signal.

Also, here's a close up. Lines are more clearly visible, but would you really sit and use your computer with your nose touching the screen?

For comparison, here is a shot of PlayStation Doom running on an old Sony PVM. This particular model is from the early 1990s or late 1980s. The game is running in "240p" mode like almost all NTSC games on PS1, Saturn and earlier consoles do (PAL games will be in "288p" instead). These modes are really a trick which allows displaying a non-flickering picture on interlaced display at half the vertical resolution. Instead of alternating between whether odd or even lines are active at 60 or 50 Hz every other line on the display will always stay blank. Due to this "scanlines" are much more noticeable even though the display itself isn't nearly as sharp as the early 2000s SVGA FD Trinitron clone.

I sat down in front of a CRT for the first time in over a decade about 18 months ago at a customer's place. My eyes were watering in about a minute. Blows my mind I used to spend hours in front on one. Definitely a piece of old tech I do not feel any nostalgia for.