The good ones aren’t “blur”, they’re “subpixel rearrange”.
It takes about 4x4 square pixels to emulate the subpixels of a single round one… just like it takes about 4x4 round pixels to emulate the subpixels of a square one.
All pixels are a “blur” of R, G, and B subpixels. Their arrangement is what makes a picture look either as designed, or messed up.
For rendering text, on modern OSs you can still pick whichever subpixel arrangement the screen uses to make them look crisper. Can’t do the same with old games that use baked-in sprites for everything.
It gets even worse when the game uses high brightness pixels surrounded by low brightness ones because it expects the bright ones to spill over in some very specific way.
That’s still some Vsauce level reaching that “we don’t actually even see anything”. The tech doesn’t matter when playing and if it looks blurry, then it is blurry.
I said that it doesn’t matter. Only the end result does. There is no game I would play on a CRT simply because it looks worse. It’s not an objective fact but my preference. I don’t care how you are trying achieve the “CRT look” since it looks like shit and I don’t want to see it.
Have you checked the examples…? I feel like we’re going in circles. There are cases where the CRT looks objectively better, supporting examples have been provided, technical explanation has been provided… it’s up to you to look at them or not.
If you wish to discusd some of the examples, or the tech, I’m open to that. Otherwise I’ll leave it here. ✌️
The objective part is in whether it matches what the creator intended.
Sometimes they intended crisp contours, like in ClearType; sometimes they intended to add extra colors; sometimes they designed pixel perfect and it looked blurry on CRT; very rarely they used vector graphics or 3D that can be rendered at better quality by just throwing some extra resolution.
Many artists of the time pushed this tech to these limits, “objectively better” is to emulate that.
That looks bad sure but I wouldn’t look at that closely anyway and the filtered one looks even worse. I have played that game without any filters and I didn’t get any urges to use any. I have also played it on CRT but there wasn’t any choice back then.
I was a crisp pixel diehard for like 20 years even despite growing up with CRT, because I remember in the 80s-00s trying hard to get the clearest picture (RF->SRGB->S-video->Composite) and it felt like, “what’s clearer than exact pixels?”
And then I tried a good CRT filter that emulates not just scanlines and noise, but subpixel effects, and it really changed my mind. The graphics really were designed to be displayed with those analog “imperfections,” and if you lived in that era, you kind of took for granted the things that worked well with the natural CRT blur while pursuing image clarity. Bringing back the CRT effects was a revelation.
Like, even handheld emulation filters that mimic how those particular LCD screens functioned often give a better experience since game designers took that into account.
I don’t know if someone growing up with only emulated square LCD memories would feel the same, and I’ll always take pixely LCD over bad CRT emulation, but I’d suggest to give it a try with good filters.
Square pixels are a filter just as much as CRT filters are. In fact, they distort the image even more. Even leaving aside all the things that just don’t work right in square pixel land, turning every pixel into a square messes up the aspect ratio of a lot of old consoles. Everything ends up squished and stretched because it wasn’t designed for square pixels. You can call that distorted funhouse mirror version of old video game art “crisp” if you want, but in reality it’s just the cheapest and worst filter.
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.
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:
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:
There are two variants, one with motion-blur and one without. Besides that, often shaders have additional settings. One can change settings and save it as a new Shader Preset and use that instead. I have described it here: thingsiplay.game.blog/2024/10/19/…/8/#learn-and-e…
Thanks. I shall avoid the motion blur variant as best as I can, because that’s one of several aspects of this device I do not remember fondly.
I borrowed a friend’s Game Boy for an afternoon when I was a kid and I was so disappointed by it (primarily the screen, but also poor ergonomics and the limited nature of its games) that I lost nearly all interest in gaming for a year.
Getting the settings right for video is critically important, too. Scaling needs to be done with the nearest neighbor pixel method, not more modern blend methods.
Seems pretty interesting! Not sure how I’ll feel about a roguelike take on a souls game but if the price is right I’ll definitely get it.
Also looks like the Nameless King and the firekeeper (in a cloak) in the trailer! Could be cool if it’s all integrated into the story nicely and not just a lazy way to fill things out
I guess I’m worried it will lose some depth but to be fair I have no reason to assume that. Maybe the movement and new combat mechanics will give it more of a roguelike feel too, seems faster paced
To answer the OP, it’s an expandalone with flight mechanics and new powers. Regular Elden Ring is also a co-op action adventure game, but more notably in this trailer is that none of the other players are phantoms, meaning that, like they said in a previous interview, the “seamless co-op” mod and its popularity has influenced how they’re handling multiplayer going forward.
My big question is whether this can be played singleplayer or if it’s designed from the ground up to be multiplayer, since the trailer put a lot of focus on it being co-op. Man, I’m hyped either way!
I actually still own one of these Alienware Alphas (a Windows variant). Traded out the HD for an SSD and it’s surprising how much they could be overclocked.
Now that Steam OS is leaps and bounds better I really do hope Valve try again with this kind of gaming PC. It’s been a great entertainment center PC.
If I recall correctly at the time I bought mine, the specs and price generally made sense. But I honestly doubt that Valve will be partnering with anyone for this in regards to hardware after the steam deck’s success except perhaps as an alternative to windows. It would honestly be better for most consumers to have that alternative in store. We want steam os to become more popular.
I could have sworn they removed it and replaced it with opt in but this is worse. minecraft.wiki/w/TelemetryIt says they removed it in snapshot 18w21a to comply with the GDPR but re-added it in snapshot 21w38a and since then.
Spammer? Their lasts two posts were 2 weeks ago and 1 month ago. What the fuck are you talking about?
I’ve seen the video, he wants to sue but I’m not sure the process has started yet.
I don’t know, but he seems to have actual contract breaches to sue over, a real stake in it as a mod developer. Mojang is trying to just force out every mod with a weapon more historically recent than the crossbow.
Ultimately I think this is going to be another case of gamers voluntarily ignoring overreach and allowing corporate complete sovereignty over the software. Just like the Ubisoft game deletion thing, “StopKillingGames”. Gamers just don’t want to get in the way of Bobby, Phil and Guillemot.
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