Its more than nostalgia. The games actually look better because thats what they were designed with.
Nowadays people seem to use nostalgia as some hand waive to dismiss something as unnecessary or invalid. But in this case it is actually necessary, old games just do not look good on any display technology other than CRTs. Shaders come extremely close, and if you have an HDR compatible screen that gets bright and vibrant enough, shaders can be nearly comparable to real CRTs.
adam_y@lemmy.world 1 month ago
[deleted]scrion@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Sorry, tactile response from a CRT?
adam_y@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Yeah, when you turned them on they frequently had push buttons with satisfying resistance and a click.
As an object they had their own tactility, often solid and heavy (as opposed to the sort of articulated physicality of most modern monitors). You could often feel the static electricity across the glass.
They even had their own sounds. The hum of warming up, the whine and clunk of being turned off.
When we talk about nostalgia it’s often the sensations adjacent to the activity that we are talking about.
Jesus_666@lemmy.world 1 month ago
You forgot the degaussing sound for those screens that had that feature.
*KLONK*
SolOrion@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
I remember I had a CRT as a kid that had the deepest button press to turn on. It felt like it was a whole 3 inches of travel- realistically I’m just remembering it like that cuz I was 8- but that was the best button. You could feel it actuate at the end, and even hear it. And CRTs had a presence about them. In hindsight, I was probably just hearing the whine and didn’t realize it.
Idk CRTs had their own vibe. Objectively, the crazy resolutions and crisp screens we have todays are better but in some less definable ways they feel lesser.
scrion@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Oh, I did grow up before video games were a thing, so I am aware of how CRTs worked. You just made it sound like CRTs would somehow provide tactile feedback while gaming, which I couldn’t place at all, given the context.
adam_y@lemmy.world 1 month ago
And I forgot the smell and the heat too. That warm ozone thing a lot of them had going on.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 1 month ago
not to mention how you’d have to hit them to get them to work half the time. upper left corner.
Flamekebab@piefed.social 1 month ago
Now that I have a lovely HDR display, I kinda want to give this a bash. It also makes me wonder about CRT filters for non-emulated games. Fallout 2 looked amazing on a CRT, for example.