The following message keeps repeating itself everywhere: to play retro games correctly, it is necessary to have a CRT monitor or screen, that is, those with tubes that we saw in homes. However, this is not necessary thanks to the filters to emulate the behavior of these screens, as is the case with the Royal CRTa plug-in for RetroArch that uses 4K monitors that we recommend you use.
There’s nothing more elite than retro purists when it comes to gaming, they’re still the equivalent of the vinyl lover, telling you vinyl sounded purer. However, they are right when it comes to TVs. This led to the development of solutions to be able to recover the Look and Feel of tube televisions on current screens.
Games of yesteryear were not designed for LCD screens
It should be borne in mind that tube screens do not understand the concept of pixels, but that the electron beam is responsible for drawing a line at full speed and that color changes are due to voltage variations. However, the transition between colors ends up generating a series of colors that are not seen when transmitting the same image to a CRT. Moreover, the creators of old video games have used this peculiarity to their advantage, as can be seen with the example below.
The image in both cases is the same; However, in the CRT, there seem to be more pixels than there actually are, but that’s always a side effect of how these types of monitors and TVs work. That is to say, it is the classic failure transformed into something positive after being used positively. Would it be possible to mimic this effect? Well yes, we only need to represent each color variation as a pixel and know how they would be represented in order to emulate it. Which brings us to the fact that we have to work with a higher resolution than the original system in order to represent these changes more accurately.
CRT Royale, to emulate the behavior of a CRT on an LCD
The direct answer is no, but what we can do is that the image you receive from the system allows us to get closer to how it works by modifying the final image. This is achieved through a series of computer shaders which take the final image generated by the graphics card and through a series of changes generate an image which, when viewed from an OLED or LCD monitor, appears to be transmitted to a television. conventional via an analog video signal, and even with the differences between the use of composite, RGB and other video systems used at the time.
A clear example is CRT-Royale, a plug-in that is part of RetroArch and which, among other things, even allows us to emulate the famous curvature of old tube TVs to revive the experience. All this without having to search for a fully functional old television, at a good price and which does not have a single broken capacitor.
