[?]are scanlines important for you?

For older stuff from saturn backwards then yes, I need my scan lines. The older games without them just look alwful. They dfon't look how they should. If I'm using an emulator I always have scan lines set to 25% to 50%.

Yakumo

 

mmm is there any Slim flat screen RGB crts....? or just a lowrez flat slim crt? cheap mmmmkay?

 

My answer is "depends". I'm a firm believer in "50% scanlines" for 240p/480i authenticity, but I believe they shouldn't be noticeable under normal viewing conditions, they should only accent the picture, so if you're using a simulated screen, they should be offset with extra brightness or be turned off for clarity. For 480i material that's antialiased, I usually think it's OK to deinterlace, but for some 480i 2D games, you still may benefit with scanlines from the interlace to cut any excessive blockiness.

PS: For really retro 2D games I think screen curvature and overscan are pretty important in achieving authentic viewing too.

 

I play SNES on my lovely RGB CRT tv, but i really have no problem at playing it on my LCD tv too... I enjoy both experiences, one is more "oldtime" the other one is more "technical" and outputs the game as was supposed to be.

I don't think that the technica limitations of old times are such an important factor in playing oldschool. AND PLEASE! no curved RGB-less tvs for me!

i started playing games with 1000 times more pleasure when i got a flat crt with rgb cables.

 

Yes it's a good idea to keep a CRT TV just for retro gaming. If you don't have one, you can pick them up for next to nothing nowadays.
I like the Sony Trinitron's, as they seem to have a more vibrant brighter picture.

 

Of course! Developers in 1991 were actually making games to look good on the LCD screens of the future, rather than the RGB monitors in front of them. Right.

RGB-capable CRT TVs are practically free these days, many people have bought HDTV LCD/plasma sets, so the market is saturated with really good CRTs for a pittance. They're all really big and heavy though - even the "slimline" CRTs aren't particularly slim.

 

While on the arcade monitor subject.. is it much work in hooking up my NES to one of them and would the zapper work?

- Need to find a way to play gumshoe and other zapper games when I upgrade to a new TV =/

 

I think he got his words mixed up...

I played Genesis for years as a kid through coxial with mono sound and look at me now!

You guys are lucky with your RGB Scart crap.

 

Truthfully, nearly everybody else around the world did too and most developers took this into mind hence all the dithering effects in 8 and 16-bit games.

babu: zapper games will work on an arcade monitor as long as it doesn't use "100/120hz technology" or have significant lag. If you use a 15 kHz or true 15-33 kHz monitor, that will be fine. The only difficulty is in RGB modding your NES or finding an arcade monitor with composite input.

 

Ah France with their dodgy SECAM system was the reason why Peritel / SCART was born in the first place. If only Quebec had decided it wanted SECAM instead of NTSC and you'd would have been laughing.

Isn't this question more one of "Do you think Retro games look utter tripe on HDTVs and CRTs are much better?' Scanlines are a moot point, as they generally look shite on HDTV regardless of the options and interference, if I want to play an old games machine then I would use a CRT, simple as and if I want to play an old game then I would play an old machine....

 

If you found one with Composite in, then it should function exactly like a normal television.

EDIT: would refresh rate be an issue for the NES zapper? I thought it was just a photosensitive diode, wouldn't the 100hz screen just be doubling the blanked frames?

Maybe so, but there are people (even within this thread) who think that upscaled composite = great. I've met several people who swear emulators look nicer than the real hardware. It's just odd to me.

Yeah, I played my SMS via RF for many years and I thought it looked great. I also used to think that fish fingers were the pinnacle of culinary excellence, and that alcohol was revolting. None of these beliefs have stayed with me into adulthood.

 

It is!

Upscaled COMPOSITE is pretty fucking nasty though.

 

you can buy a tv set with scart rgb for really little nowadays.

 

Not in the US you can't, at least not according to most posters here. Shipping on a large CRT to the States... I dread to think what it'd cost.

 

A game can choose to poll the diode at any time, so even if the input video is in it's "hit box" state according to the video going into the display, the display is still displaying part of the last frame since you can't frame double until a complete frame is finished rendering. Depending on when the diode is polled, a game could miss any hit boxes made with raster effects, or even more likely just miss hit boxes because the game is in a blanking state when the display is ready or the display is in a blanking state when game is ready due to lag/flicker respectively. (No flicker if it's a fixed pixel display but additional lag, and if it's a CRT there's twice the flicker).

Right, the only way is to find an international TV here by chance.

 

Calpis & Alchy > Great, thanks. Might just get me one in that case

 

I agree with you there, thats why im using Dscaler, which uses my computers video card, to do the upscaling. Its a cheap way of using an expensive external upscaler, i guess. So like i said, its NOT my TV or capture card doing the upscaling, its my video card and Dscaler doing the upconverting and outputting a native 720p signal through the VGA to my TV. If you compare that method to just hooking up the system normally side by side it looks much, much better than the system by itself.

 

You're still upscaling composite, though, so irrespective of the quality of upscaling it's going to look shit, and it'll be further degraded by the rubbish ADC in your TV card. If it works for you that's great, anyway.

 

Scanlines were once very important and for years I wouldnt have played games any other way but now I prefer it without scanlines ! Weird :shrug:

 

dunno (cuz i'm very idiot)