Atari Emulation of CRT Effects On LCDs 226
An anonymous reader writes "A group at Georgia Institute of Technology has developed a fun little open source program to emulate the CRT effects to make old Atari games look like they originally did when played on modern LCD's and digital displays. Things like color bleed, ghosting, noise, etc. are reproduced to give a more realistic appearance."
xscreensaver's Apple ][? (Score:5, Interesting)
What about the Apple ][ screensaver?
http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/screenshots/ [jwz.org]
I think it did something very similar.
(hey, first post!)
But why!?!?!? (Score:4, Interesting)
And to think that it seems all the rage is to be upgrading Atari's with an Svideo board as featured on hack-a-day a few weeks ago http://hackaday.com/2009/04/05/s-video-from-an-atari-2600/ [hackaday.com] . Honestly I don't know why people want to make their TV's look like a 30 year old TV display. The reason for all that bleeding was the circuitry that converted the video and audio signal to RF and then the deconverting of that signal in the TV. It is beyond me why anybody would want to make something look like it did, instead of how it should look. I grew up playing the Atari 2600 and I thought it was fun, but I certainly am not fond of how it looked. I'm just waiting for my SVideo converter board to arrive so I can upgrade my 2600 to look how it should, not how it did. (And I'm still using a CRT TV as well none of these new fangled LCD TV's). - XSS
Re:CRT user (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm still keeping my ibm p260 alive until something that comes closer to CRTs than flatpanels is out. Even built my own windas cable to fix the g2 issue.
Re:Unfortunately, CRT is still the best for gaming (Score:3, Interesting)
How are you measuring that? I'm sitting here in a bullpen surrounded by 2 year old ~$600'ish (at the time, they're like $200-$400 now) LCDs and a couple of really expensive CRTs. The CRTs are blurry and dim in comparison, by a sickening amount I might add. Actually they bloom a bit, making everything a bit soft. There's not one aspect of those CRTs I'm envious of, and these aren't cheapies.
I haven't even had a laptop in the last two years with display that makes me look fondly at CRTs. The closest I've come is ghosting on the PSP.
Re:Does this mean i can use a lcd in my mame cabin (Score:4, Interesting)
Wait, you need two ports taken up so you can display on a 30" screen?
Crap, I'm still using a single 15-pin D-SUB to connect to my 32" 1080p LCD on my old computer.
Artificing for colors (Score:2, Interesting)
Back then I wrote a drawing program that took advantage of the artificing to draw in color. I knew which pixels in a block could be turned on or off to generate one of up to about 16 colors. Obviously, the smallest blocks were only 5 colors. (Red, Green, Blue, Black, White) So the more detail you wanted your drawing, the less colors available.
If these guys can properly emulate that program properly (sorry, don't have a copy anymore), then they've definitely hit the mark with their attempt.
Ah, the ancient days of programming when the kid with 16k memory was the uber133t. (Of course, back then, you used a different dialect of what eventually became l337 to save precious bytes of memory. And Ascii-bombing was used to play mindgames on the BBSs.)
Re:What's next? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Unfortunately, CRT is still the best for gaming (Score:2, Interesting)
Ghosting hasn't been a problem for 5+ years.
Black-level is still a huge issue. Manufacturures have been trying to correct bad contrast ratio by amping up the backlight, screwing up the blacklevel even more.
It's gotten so bad that TVs have begun cheating and dimming the backlight during dark scenes. Which just turns them into a muddy mess.
Re:Overdid it. (Score:5, Interesting)
You are missing the point. It looks NOTHING like a real television CRT from back then. The effects are just wrong.
Yes, it really does. As a child of that era I feel quite qualified to say "Yup, that's what Pac-Man on my neighbor's Atari 2600 on their 1970's Sears TV looked like." It looked fuzzy, we knew it looked fuzzy, but we still loved it. It was quaint even when it was new, and we knew that but it was seat-of-your-pants gaming. This was the late 70's...Disco was in; everyone's clothing & carpets & cars & wood paneling were brown; Commander Adama was still played by Lorne Greene; Trans Ams were cool; our games were blocky & fuzzy. The world was right.
Oh and computer displays never had artifacts like that. I've had every PC display type from CGA to WUXGA
You're right, they didn't. As a dozen other posts have pointed out, this is meant to emulate what computer graphics sent to a TV through a composite cable looked like. You remember those Radio-Shack metal switchboxes that went between the antenna and the TV's RF input that let you plug in a single cable from the Atari/Commodore/whatever? That one cable carried audio, chroma, and luma, all bleeding into one another. Thus this type of bleed. Nothing to do with Hercules, CGA, EGA, VGA, etc.
Re:Unfortunately, CRT is still the best for gaming (Score:1, Interesting)
Exactly. My parents have a huge 52" LCD which just looks incredible. One day I had some friends over, one of they brought rock band, and when we tried to play, we couldn't hit any of the notes on the guitars, let alone the drums. When we went to the lag adjustment it was something horrible like 150ms.
Go buy yourself a cheap LCD that's cheap enough to not have the anti-ghosting technology or figure out how to enable the "gaming mode". Most computer LCD monitors probably won't have this kind of thing; it seems to be a TV-LCD thing.
I play rhythm games and shumps, and keyboard lag usually is the major problem. They don't make keyboards like they used to.
Also, the reaction time tests don't really reflect how well you would be able to play rhythm or fighting games on a certian setup. If you can see and predict when something is going to happen (like in DDR), you can respond much faster to it. It's not like DDR has a 100ms grace window for you to hit the arrows. This is assuming no lag. However, if you're staring at the screen and you hit the key as soon as the arrow enters the "hit zone", but there's a small lag, it really screws you up, especially if you're not used to compensating for lag.
Re:But why!?!?!? (Score:2, Interesting)
The interesting thing comes with retro-game writers (who write games for the old machines, today) and the graphical styles of the games, which due to being designed and written in emulators on LCD monitors have changed. Old games used to stipple a lot to simulate shades of colours between what the hardware could actually achieve, whilst the newer games seem to have a more flat colour scheme - arguably this could be because the LCDs make the stippling look awful, whereas the CRT would make it look blended.