Atari Emulation of CRT Effects On LCDs

An anonymous reader writes "A group at Georgia Institute of Technology has developed a fun little open source program to emulate the CRT effects to make old Atari games look like they originally did when played on modern LCD's and digital displays. Things like color bleed, ghosting, noise, etc. are reproduced to give a more realistic appearance."

Comments

xscreensaver's Apple ][?

[orospakr]

What about the Apple ][ screensaver?

http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/screenshots/

I think it did something very similar.

(hey, first post!)

But why!?!?!?

[xetovss]

And to think that it seems all the rage is to be upgrading Atari's with an Svideo board as featured on hack-a-day a few weeks ago http://hackaday.com/2009/04/05/s-video-from-an-atari-2600/ . Honestly I don't know why people want to make their TV's look like a 30 year old TV display. The reason for all that bleeding was the circuitry that converted the video and audio signal to RF and then the deconverting of that signal in the TV. It is beyond me why anybody would want to make something look like it did, instead of how it should look. I grew up playing the Atari 2600 and I thought it was fun, but I certainly am not fond of how it looked. I'm just waiting for my SVideo converter board to arrive so I can upgrade my 2600 to look how it should, not how it did. (And I'm still using a CRT TV as well none of these new fangled LCD TV's). - XSS

Re:Does this mean i can use a lcd in my mame cabin

[Khyber]

Wait, you need two ports taken up so you can display on a 30" screen?

Crap, I'm still using a single 15-pin D-SUB to connect to my 32" 1080p LCD on my old computer.

Re:Overdid it.

[ktappe]

You are missing the point. It looks NOTHING like a real television CRT from back then. The effects are just wrong.

Yes, it really does. As a child of that era I feel quite qualified to say "Yup, that's what Pac-Man on my neighbor's Atari 2600 on their 1970's Sears TV looked like." It looked fuzzy, we knew it looked fuzzy, but we still loved it. It was quaint even when it was new, and we knew that but it was seat-of-your-pants gaming. This was the late 70's...Disco was in; everyone's clothing & carpets & cars & wood paneling were brown; Commander Adama was still played by Lorne Greene; Trans Ams were cool; our games were blocky & fuzzy. The world was right.

Oh and computer displays never had artifacts like that. I've had every PC display type from CGA to WUXGA

You're right, they didn't. As a dozen other posts have pointed out, this is meant to emulate what computer graphics sent to a TV through a composite cable looked like. You remember those Radio-Shack metal switchboxes that went between the antenna and the TV's RF input that let you plug in a single cable from the Atari/Commodore/whatever? That one cable carried audio, chroma, and luma, all bleeding into one another. Thus this type of bleed. Nothing to do with Hercules, CGA, EGA, VGA, etc.