Classic consoles and ports and modern TVs

I'm wondering how classic consoles that ran Doom in 90s have aged when it comes to TVs and their aspec ratios. As this is largely terra incognita for me, would there be someone who can compare first hand experiences for using, e.g. original PSX "then" and "now". I somehow think "then" was when TVs were mostly more "squarish" while "now" has those wide-screen "cinematic" ones, and wonder how or if games designed to run on the old TVs have changed looks today.

The short and oversimplified answer by someone who doesn't fully understand all the technical details: The lower resolutions produced by older consoles look better, more accurate and have less lag on old CRT tvs than modern screens. The aspect ratio is the least important yet most obvious difference. CRTs display the console's native resolution while LCDs upscale the image using a variety of different methods, which cause all sorts of oddities. Consoles like PSX and older use around 240p afaik, but modern tvs upscale it to 480i and then stretch it across the entire screen, which looks even less accurate. Scan lines also act as sort of a natural filter, making pixels look more rounded and natural.

Someone correct me if I got anything wrong, but here's a video all about it as well.

I used to retro game on a nice JVC I'art CRT back in the day before it stopped working, from there I upgraded to a typical run-of-the-mill smart TV for the obvious 21st century reasons. Up until recently I only used composite (gasp) to hook up my old systems until I invested in HDMI cables from Levelhike via Amazon. These cables pull whatever the highest quality signal is from a system (RGB, S-Video) and upscales that to 720p. The bottom line is that composite looks awful on today's TVs, blurry, smeared, unappealing, but still passable if you have no other options. I'm sure it looked just as terrible on the CRT as well, but since we didn't have the level of information on the subject back then that we have today, I didn't notice or care. I never noticed any additional lag either going from CRT to LCD, and it's always been a non-issue as far as I'm concerned that's been blown way out of proportion these days. Of course these games look amazing and near emulator quality when using cables such as these, but they now show off all the blemishes and such (See dithering) that using lower quality signals on CRTs would hide.

HOWEVER, the whole "retro games look better on a CRT" thought process that has cropped up nowadays is simply a matter of taste perpetuated by the current retro community. You don't NEED a CRT if you want to get into retro gaming, especially since options like Framemeister, Retrotink, and Levelhike exist to get that crystal clear image if you desire it. While the concept of playing the games on "what they were designed to be played on" is one that I understand, it frankly isn't crucial to get the most enjoyment out of your games despite the "professional" reviewers on YouTube telling you otherwise. This is the same phenomenon that happens with anything analog based, whether it's sound or video in origin, and since all these systems only had analog options to display their images there is bound to be debate on what the most "correct" and "accurate" way to play them is.

Latency isn't really an issue anymore. If I run the 240p test suite on SNES on my MiSTer, the analog VGA output to a CRT, and HDMI our mirroring to my monitor, there is no difference in output when recorded at 200FPS.

Doom itself wouldn't change much from CRT to LCD, but there are certainly games that make use of the CRT's qualities for stuff like dithered transparency, and patterns that blur together in specific ways to create the illusion of more detail.

I'd definitely believe it for good monitors these days, but I am morbidly curious, have you done any testing with modern TVs? Their game modes help a lot (playing Project Diva with game mode off by accident was almost magical in how horrible it was), but the impression I've gotten from others is that they still tend to fall short of good monitors.

I suppose it really comes down to nostalgia. I emulate 100% of the time for old console games, don't notice the lag, and am perfectly satisfied with the quality. But growing up playing console games on crt tvs in the 80s until the late 00s (even with just rf and component cables), I definitely think crts look better for lower resolutions, even though I enjoy the overall experience more with modern emulation, and there's no way to undo my lifelong bias at this point.

16 hours ago, Lippeth said:

Consoles like PSX and older use around 240p afaik, but modern tvs upscale it to 480i

Whatever they do with their upscaling, that is the one thing they absolutely don't do. You don't change scan methods in an upscale. If it's progressive scan, it stays progressive. If it's interlaced, it stays interlaced. 

This thread made me remind the old days of gaming, where you, as a kid, saw those strange commercials about games played on ROOM LIKE CTR TVs!!! Was that even possible? I mean,a room where one of the walls was a TV... a catodic cannon could erase a person from existence with that size :0
Probably they were just mock ups, maybe somethings like an inverted cinema screen with a plastic cover on the other side to simulate the glass.

Remember seeing things like this on movies, too.

Imagine playing PSX Doom or Doom 64 on a Tv like that! Probably getting blind after 10 minutes playing :P

You mean a jumbotron?

52 minutes ago, Edward850 said:

Whatever they do with their upscaling, that is the one thing they absolutely don't do. You don't change scan methods in an upscale. If it's progressive scan, it stays progressive. If it's interlaced, it stays interlaced. 

I thought that was strange as well. In the video I linked, they said that some modern tvs mistake a 240p signal as 480i, and then it looked like the scan lines were making half the image disappear because of the conflict. I don't know how reputable that video is, and the subject in general is a bit over my head, though I find it interesting to learn how it all works. I suppose mistaking a signal for something else is different than changing the signal while upscaling and I just worded it poorly.

29 minutes ago, Lippeth said:

I thought that was strange as well. In the video I linked, they said that some modern tvs mistake a 240p signal as 480i, and then it looked like the scan lines were making half the image disappear because of the conflict. I don't know how reputable that video is, and the subject in general is a bit over my head, though I find it interesting to learn how it all works. I suppose mistaking a signal for something else is different than changing the signal while upscaling and I just worded it poorly.

That's quite strange and I question the validity of it. Certainly it seems he's somehow found a TV that does that, but I don't think that's normal.

26 minutes ago, Edward850 said:

That's quite strange and I question the validity of it. Certainly it seems he's somehow found a TV that does that, but I don't think that's normal.

I've seen it myself with a Master System running on an HDTV a few years ago. It's certainly a real occurrence.

2 minutes ago, Blastfrog said:

I've seen it myself with a Master System running on an HDTV a few years ago. It's certainly a real occurrence.

It's a good thing I said "Certainly it seems he's somehow found a TV that does that, but I don't think that's normal."

I've plugged even a Commodore64 into all sorts of modern TVs and capture cards and are yet to strike this issue.

And I was simply pointing out that it's probably a more common problem than you seemed to believe.

53 minutes ago, Blastfrog said:

And I was simply pointing out that it's probably a more common problem than you seemed to believe.

I'd be fully prepared to accept that New Zealand only imports good TVs while America is flooded with crap if that's what you're asserting. :P

Just now, Edward850 said:

I'd be fully prepared to accept that New Zealand only imports good TVs while America is flooded with crap if that's what you're asserting. :P

That would very likely be the case, America sucks in many ways and that's just one more way in which it does.

I'm jealous of all of you folk that have RGB SCART inputs on CRT TVs, I either have to use an RGB to YUV board (which still slightly degrades the picture), or resort to my tiny PVM.

The PS3 has an option to upscale original PlayStation games which really helps when playing PSX Doom on a HDTV. As far as I know all PS3 consoles will play original PlayStation games. I play PSX Doom quite often using my PS3 and it looks pretty decent. I still have an original PSX console and a CRT TV but I haven't used either of them for years.  I also play PSX Doom often on my PSP and I notice it's a little faster as it's the NTSC version and I'm from a PAL territory.

4 hours ago, Gez said:

You mean a jumbotron?

yeah, i suppose that may be what i seen.

Maybe in the movie Richie Rich?

Anyway, hilarious!

Gonna read the entry you linked.

Surely that cannon could fry a chicken in second hahaha

Thanks as always, Gez ;)

3 hours ago, Boaby Kenobi said:

The PS3 has an option to upscale original PlayStation games which really helps when playing PSX Doom on a HDTV.

I'd be curious to see how it looks. PSX Doom actually renders individual columns as unique polygons, it's actually using a software renderer. Maybe the columns themselves would gain extra definition, but I don't think that the number of columns would change at all.

Also, what do you mean by upscale? Do you mean upscaling a low resolution buffer, or outright rendering in higher resolution? I'm assuming you meant the latter.

@Blastfrog Yes, the PS3 offers you the option to play original PlayStation games at a higher resolution, and there's also an option to smooth textures which makes PSX Doom look much better on a high definition TV. 

Smoothing textures is always personal taste; never liked smudged older games. I find myself preferring sharper edges more and more in my games, in the abscence of a CRT TV/monitor.

On 11/8/2020 at 12:02 AM, Boaby Kenobi said:

@Blastfrog Yes, the PS3 offers you the option to play original PlayStation games at a higher resolution, and there's also an option to smooth textures which makes PSX Doom look much better on a high definition TV. 

I can't find any video of that ...

@VGA I cant find any footage of Doom on PlayStation but this video is pretty cool and informative. Skip to 10:19 for PS1 on PS3.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7fCTHu99bk

On 11/3/2020 at 1:41 PM, Mattfrie1 said:

HOWEVER, the whole "retro games look better on a CRT" thought process that has cropped up nowadays is simply a matter of taste perpetuated by the current retro community. You don't NEED a CRT if you want to get into retro gaming, especially since options like Framemeister, Retrotink, and Levelhike exist to get that crystal clear image if you desire it. While the concept of playing the games on "what they were designed to be played on" is one that I understand, it frankly isn't crucial to get the most enjoyment out of your games despite the "professional" reviewers on YouTube telling you otherwise. This is the same phenomenon that happens with anything analog based, whether it's sound or video in origin, and since all these systems only had analog options to display their images there is bound to be debate on what the most "correct" and "accurate" way to play them is.

This is absolutely true; you don't need a CRT to experience an old game to its fullest, since you can play on any display if we're being honest. People point out similar things when discussing whether or not fighting games should be played exclusively with a fight stick (answer: you don't need one, you can play however you want). The point is here that it is indeed a matter of preference, but OP wants to know if there's a significant difference.

In my opinion, it's really hard to tell from other people's perspective, and even from footage. The only way you can tell if it's what you're looking for is seeing it for yourself in real life. You can't really record CRT screens and show them on video, because most of the time, their refresh rates don't match up with recording devices nowadays and make the picture look pretty bad. It's also an issue that the mechanism used to display an image on screen works mostly because it tricks the human eye into seeing a seamless image passing a single ray of light multiple times through a surface faster than the eye can possibly follow. You can't really trick a recording device's lens the same way you can trick the human eye, so what you usually see in footage is what is actually happening, not what you're supposed to see.

On a related note, the way the CRT works by drawing multiple lines a second on the screen is what causes the signature scanlines, but scanlines look extremely different to what people can portray with shaders and filters. On a real CRT, you can't really see the scanlines unless you're really close to the screen, whereas in a modern LCD panel, faking scanlines means you're forced to use some of the pixels in the rendered area be darker, and the effect is very unconvincing to anyone who still keeps a working CRT. This could be (I think?) something that also adds to the bias against CRTs.

As someone who still keeps a working 24'' Panasonic CRT for my old consoles, I can tell you that there's no way you can actually tell how good CRTs are for these things until you've seen one yourself. They're not as dark as most people imagine, and you can't actually see the scanlines. They're pretty much a giant light bulb, so they're a lot brighter than a lot of people expect, and a lot more colorful and clear as well.

As for the games themselves, it varies. Generally, sprite-based games look amazing on a CRT. On the other hand, polygon-based games (mostly 3D platformers) definitely don't look as good and may benefit from an LCD panel. The major advantages of a CRT are the complete absence of input lag, and of course rendering at the proper aspect ratio (although there were a handful of 16:9 displays back in the day). But of course, these last points are a matter of taste, and they're not a requirement to enjoy a game. In my own, personal opinion, however, CRTs are the absolute best for old consoles lol.

On 12/14/2020 at 10:41 PM, hfc2x said:

This is absolutely true; you don't need a CRT to experience an old game to its fullest, since you can play on any display if we're being honest. People point out similar things when discussing whether or not fighting games should be played exclusively with a fight stick (answer: you don't need one, you can play however you want). The point is here that it is indeed a matter of preference, but OP wants to know if there's a significant difference.

 

In my opinion, it's really hard to tell from other people's perspective, and even from footage. The only way you can tell if it's what you're looking for is seeing it for yourself in real life. You can't really record CRT screens and show them on video, because most of the time, their refresh rates don't match up with recording devices nowadays and make the picture look pretty bad. It's also an issue that the mechanism used to display an image on screen works mostly because it tricks the human eye into seeing a seamless image passing a single ray of light multiple times through a surface faster than the eye can possibly follow. You can't really trick a recording device's lens the same way you can trick the human eye, so what you usually see in footage is what is actually happening, not what you're supposed to see.

 

On a related note, the way the CRT works by drawing multiple lines a second on the screen is what causes the signature scanlines, but scanlines look extremely different to what people can portray with shaders and filters. On a real CRT, you can't really see the scanlines unless you're really close to the screen, whereas in a modern LCD panel, faking scanlines means you're forced to use some of the pixels in the rendered area be darker, and the effect is very unconvincing to anyone who still keeps a working CRT. This could be (I think?) something that also adds to the bias against CRTs.

 

As someone who still keeps a working 24'' Panasonic CRT for my old consoles, I can tell you that there's no way you can actually tell how good CRTs are for these things until you've seen one yourself. They're not as dark as most people imagine, and you can't actually see the scanlines. They're pretty much a giant light bulb, so they're a lot brighter than a lot of people expect, and a lot more colorful and clear as well.

 

As for the games themselves, it varies. Generally, sprite-based games look amazing on a CRT. On the other hand, polygon-based games (mostly 3D platformers) definitely don't look as good and may benefit from an LCD panel. The major advantages of a CRT are the complete absence of input lag, and of course rendering at the proper aspect ratio (although there were a handful of 16:9 displays back in the day). But of course, these last points are a matter of taste, and they're not a requirement to enjoy a game. In my own, personal opinion, however, CRTs are the absolute best for old consoles lol.

I agree!

I've never noticed Scanlines on my TV, only if i'm VERY near to them.

What i can tell is that on those TVs the Sprites seem like they are smoother.

Couldn't mimik this on LCD TVs and on Emulators, even if they mostly have such Options (it looks too smooth when using them).

What i recommend is using RGB Cables on modern TVs and depending on your TV, something like the OSSC.

It just helps a lot to make the Games look great.

My old Samsung TV from 2009 was good in presenting Scart-Stuff, my new Bravia isn't.

The Solution is the mentioned OSSC.

To talk about Doom.

Doom on the SNES does look better on CRTs than on a LCD :P

20 hours ago, Azuris said:

To talk about Doom.

Doom on the SNES does look better on CRTs than on a LCD :P

Agreed in this one instance. When I first used SNES Doom with my RGB to HDMI cable I found the excessive dithering used on the ceilings and floors to be extremely distracting.