/vr/ - Retro Games

As far as I'm concerned, the issue is less one of whether CRT or LCD is superior and more one of how image magnification gets handled. The advantages of CRT is that its simple as far as adjustments go. It's all pretty much handled on the CRT's end.

You want to hook old shit up to an LCD, you have to upscale it, of which there are various methods of doing so, which inevitably spawns its own conversation about what tools you use. Do you emulate or use some form of original hardware? Do you you use an upscaler? Should you use filters, and if so, which ones? How do you handle displaying a 4:3 image on a 16:9 screen? If I went through the trouble of setting shit up on an LCD, I imagine I'd probably defend it myself. Similarly, if you didn't grow up with a CRT or have a bug up your ass about authenticity, I can see why the kids would say it looks like a shitty filter they can't turn off.

Usually I don't think its much of an issue for 3rd generation and lower, since your sprites were pretty simple. The issue is more pronounced when you've got shit like shading and line art or polygons with low res textures.

The only real problem I have is when people think overly blocky shit with super sharp edges are how things are SUPPOSED to look. That's how the raw image looks when magnified, but it doesn't account for how things were expected to be displayed. Its like old comic printing, where they didn't use solid colors, but used dots. It looks fine on paper, and then it gets more obvious if you scan it at higher resolutions because the trick used which makes the human eye perceive a different color stops working.

Its basically the issue of going low res to high res requires information to be created, while similarly going high res to low res causes information to be lost, and both tend to be clumsy. Upscaling you tend to find some middle ground between blocky and blurry, and downscaling you lose detail, which can be important if things like text become illegible.