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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."
What about the Apple ][ screensaver?
http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/screenshots/
I think it did something very similar.
(hey, first post!)
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
And does their program eliminate motion blur and the poor contrast of LCD to make it looks like a CRT?
No but the 21st Century did.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
One of the most widely used Blargg's NTSC libraries. Many console emulators make use of them. This new one just looks to be more advanced than most of the preceding ones.
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.
I'm betting you're using a Monster Cable. That other guy has to use two because he is using normal cable.
Emulating old stuff:
286 without math co-processor - Install Vista
trig function lookup tables - You would be surprised that they are still being used (both in paper and in code)
film - you mean like 35mm? There are filters in most semi-advanced photo programs that will emulate this.
typewriters - http://www.instructables.com/id/Typewriter-Computer-Keyboard/
horse dung smell in the streets - Go live in NYC, open the window and take a deep whif
Morse code - Well, everything is still binary these days so technically it's similar to really fast morse code.
the black plague - Swine flu?
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
The tech to get the response times so low does tend to jack colors and produce some odd artifacts, but none of those relate to how quickly it displays the data on the screen, not as far as I've ever heard anyway.
The 2ms 'response time' is just about the pixels response to the electrical signal. In other words, those 2ms means: this LCD can change a pixel from black to white in 2ms. It doesn't mean: this LCD will change the pixel 2ms after the computer or console tells the screen to change the pixel.
Since a couple of years, LCDs have a 'image enhancement' mode that adds some lag, from 40 to 105 ms. This is precisely to have a buffer that lets the chip preprocess some stuff and reduce ghosting or other things. I think that the 15ms or less to change a pixel is also possible only because of this processing.
You can't say that 105 ms is not noticeable, and this is probably what the GP is talking about. And DLP HDTVs seems to have up to 250ms of lag.
However, modern LCDs have also a 'gaming mode' with (virtually) no processing lag, but with the usual ghosting and other LCD classic issues.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
CRTs have better black levels and better colors. On the other hand, they have fussy geometry adjustments (and you can never get them as perfect as an LCD), moiré patterns, and are generally much fuzzier than LCDs.
My LCD provides a sharp, high-resolution image with low power consumption in a small package at a low price. All of those factors (sharpness, resolution, power cosumption, size, price) matter more to me than the areas where CRTs continue to lead (color reproduction, black level).