People go so overboard on this stuff, the amount of ghosting on the DOS example is insane. I don’t want to spoils anyone’s fun but that’s not really what most screens looked like back then.
Most screens, no. But that one half-dead trash-picked screen that stands out in your memory as emblematic of that time in your life when you were building computers with your own two hands? Certainly.
if you're talking about cutting edge CRTs, many of the last generation actually beat flat panels for years. Some may still in some aspects.
There were plenty of junk CRTs out there used for text only display with insane levels of persistence and other issues that lead to a very unique appearance. It's also sort of moot at this point. The existing CRTs out there that have this behavior have degraded over the years. No one makes new high persistence CRTs that I am aware of. So it's mostly down to our memory of them.
I actually have a flat panel that has over 2 decades degraded and now has some weird persistence going on.
CRTs still run circles around basic cheapo TN panels when it comes to color fidelity, dynamic range, viewing angles, and refresh rate. Upper-mid-to-high-end LCD screens have gotten vastly better, but the baseline is still pretty low.
Most of them weren't, but some were. If all you were doing was looking at screens of text, a long persistence phosphor could be desirable[0].
I've got one that is inside an Apple II monitor. Can confirm, the image looks very flicker-free, but has pretty bad ghosting if you're looking at anything that scrolls. It looks cool but is pretty rough to do any work on. The other green CRTs I have are barely more persistent than a regular black and white TV, and I've never heard of a long persistence color monitor.
> "I don’t want to spoils anyone’s fun but that’s not really what most screens looked like back then."
I don't really see the problem with what's written on the tin here; it's called retro-term and not vintage- or classic-term, after all (I didn't read the project's webpage). In other words: It's correctly advertised as something new that's just fashioned on something from yesteryear. So you can really go overboard with technically inaccurate, kitschy glitchshit that's so popular with crowd. Of course, historically challenged people will fall into the trappings of a romantically distorted past they never were a part of. As they always did and always will. But that's just life.
Amusing that it can lead to a romantically distorted future for those terminal users.
As someone who came up in that era, I would never want to regain those barrel distortions or incoherent pixels I saw in some of the heavy-handed retro terminals. I paid good money for flatter CRTs and also jumped to LCD with a digital input (DVI) as soon as it was a general option I could justify on a work computer order.
I'm also happy not to be hearing the constant whine of CRT coils, HDD drive motors, or even so many cooling fans these days.
depends on how the brightness/contrast was set on the tube. if someone came in to a screen that was off and did not allow it enough time to warm up, it was common to see people adjust these knobs in the mornings. eventually, the tube would warm up, and things would just be too bright.
The single most annoying thing with these old displays was the flicker. Whenever I use one of my real old home computer era monitors it is the only thing that makes it unbearable after a while.
But I'm not surprised they don't go overboard with that in the emulators. They'd probably have to add PSE warnings if they did.
My sister tried to go through broadcast school, with great difficulty especially when she got through the video editing classes. Turns out she has photosensitive epilepsy and all the exposure to CRT monitors made her quite ill. You couldn't convince her to go back to the CRT days for all the tea in China.
It's almost like a caricature of a CRT. I can see the novelty, but hope that people aren't lead to believe monitors looked like this.
I think what bothers me most is the horizontal line that slowly moves across the screen every few seconds. It's an artifact of recording a CRT on film and doesn't occur when you look at a real monitor...
A horizontal-line artifact (not the one depicted in the shader) could totally happen, if you were over-driving a monitor with a higher pixel clock than it was happy with. With this kind of artifact, the two halves of the image would also be slightly horizontally misaligned with respect to one-another, too.
It could happen in home computers connected through the antenna input. I think if power was slightly off the desired frequency this could also happen, but we’d need to test.
It also happens with digital cameras for similar reasons, due to CCD scanning. But yeah, that doesn't happen looking directly at a CRT.
The bloom is also too blobby, because it's a gaussian blur. I ran into the same issue trying to implement a similar effect. The bloom shape needs to sharper to look realistic -- which also means unfortunately a non-separable blur.