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by LocalH 1929 days ago
Resolution is rapidly reaching the point where it won’t be the limiting factor in properly simulating a vector display, at least in a “good enough” fashion. Similar to how resolution and refresh rate improvements are making it feasible to simulate a raster CRT.
1 comments

At this point, one of the primary limiting factors is the reality that the majority of folks using and implementing emulation technology probably have never seen a vector display in the flesh.

Conceptually, emulating a vector display is easy. They are unique but not thaaaat magical.

1. You have a certain amount of bloom

2. You have decay time function

3. You need, perhaps, a surprising amount of dynamic range? If you've seen something like an Asteroids cab in person, the bullets are super bright (with correspondingly larger decay times) relative to everything else

But, how people are interested in implementing that kind of thing and have access to a real vector display in order to study it? I suppose sufficiently good recordings of vector displays might suffice so maybe it's not that dire.