Interesting article. I hope their engine gets to the point where it actually looks like CRT instead of the blocky filters we see nowadays.

Here’s an entertaining video showing the difference in retro games on crt and lcd screens. It’s pretty incredible if you aren’t aware. Games back then were designed on CRTs and can look awful on LCDs in comparison.

https://youtu.be/bC-8y2R6IxI?t=166&si=D6K2v28RIR4bACQ3

...What?

>But a CRT isn’t a camera filming the world. Its a physical device that generates an image as an output of physical process. [...] That’s not a post-process overlay or filter effect, its an entirely different mental model of what it means to draw or render an image. I think this is why I struggled when trying to bolt this onto a modern engine. The foundations between the two models is just so fundamentally different. At this point, I was already beginning to consider my options. I was half inclined to give up.

An LCD or an OLED are also not cameras. I honestly don't understand what insight this person believes they've stumbled upon.

This is also very mystifying:

>The frame is never a single instant, its a culmination of integrations over time.

Strictly speaking, a CRT doesn't understand frames. It just fires whatever intensity of electrons is indicated by an analog signal at any given time as the magnets steer the beam across the screen in whatever pattern has been designed into them. If the tube is controlled by a digital source, there will likely be some kind of framebuffer of some size somewhere on the pipeline that stores at least a full scanline, and nowadays invariably a complete frame, so a DAC can convert the values in it to the analog signal expected by the gun.

The entire article supposedly addresses the "why", but after getting to the end, I still don't understand the why. What's wrong with Unity or Unreal architecturally that this guy's engine addresses?

My advice to anyone even minimally interested in retro games or just clear motion in the image is to get a cheap crt monitor and play a bit with it. You'll surely will appreciate that even against today monitors they hold their ground very well (not in brightness, though) and easily surpass them in motion clarity.

We did lose quite a lot when we trasitioned to lcd screens.

You can't accomplish this with a shader?