Yes, you’re all doing it wrong…by doing it at all.
Original hardware, especially CRTs, is increasingly difficult to find and getting more expensive and less reliable by the day (both of my N64 are completely dead right now - just from sitting unused in a dry cupboard for a few years).
Love it or hate it, this is the future of retro gaming.
Honestly, I hate the CRT aesthetic. I grew up with CRTs. Leaving them behind for LCDs was one of the greatest transitions of growing up. By all means, enjoy them if you do, but I don’t.
It’s not just the look of it, but the art and games were designed with the limitations of CRT in mind. Not all games off course. An example is the transparency effect on Genesis / Mega Drive:
Shaders are not only useful for CRT emulation, but also to get the look of handhelds:
Does this shader also replicate the horrific motion blur that the display of the original GameBoy suffered from?
Ah jeez, this picture triggered the earworm! Now that song is in my head!
No, I don’t need it.
If there was a good crt shader I’d love to use it. Haven’t seen any good ones yet.
Now I’m curious what your criteria are. Do none of the shaders shown in the video appeal to you? To me at least, they look remarkably close to several types of old CRT TVs that I remember.
I only know of filters in emulators I’ve used for nes, super nes, Genesis, gb advance, dolphan, duckstation, and whatever other emulators over the years.
None of them have had a crt shader that’s good.
I’m currently toying around with ares (the only fully cycle-accurate SNES emulator) and it has a lovely selection of CRT shaders (that are also available for other emulators). Try out crt-maximus-royale (or the half-res-mode variant). At least to me, the latter looks perfect, with just the right amount of blur, distortion, bloom and scanlines - and it comes with lovely details, like the bezel reflecting the image in real time and speaker grills filling the rest of the screen.
Someone uploaded a gallery with various games to reddit that shows just how versatile this shader is:
https://old.reddit.com/r/RetroArch/comments/1ag834e/while_mega_bezels_is_great_and_all_i_think_the/
You’ll never catch me using filters like these voluntarily. Inject those crisp pixels straight into my vein.
