Making Old Games Look Good On Modern LCDs?

75th Trombone writes "I'm a fan of several old PC games — the Myst series, StarCraft, Diablo, etc — with 2D graphics that run at a low, fixed resolution. These games all look horrible on modern LCDs. If you run them at their original resolution, they're tiny, and if you upscale them they get all sorts of blurry, pixelly smoothing artifacts. My ideal goal is to run these games at exactly double their original resolution — running 640 x 480 games at 1280 x 960, for example — so that each original pixel takes up exactly a 2 x 2 block of screen pixels, yielding graphics that are perfectly crisp and decently big. I've tried arcane settings in graphics card drivers (new and old), I've tried forcing the OS to run at a given resolution, and I've tried PowerStrip, all to no avail. Short of writing a new, modern engine for my favorite games, is there a reasonable solution to this problem?" There have been many community-supported graphical overhauls of classic games — feel free to share any you know to work well.

Comments

Possible Starcraft Solutions

[slifox]

A quick google search turned up the following for Starcraft. You probably want to do a bit of in-depth research before running these binaries... they may be buggy, fake, etc

One way might be to play Starcraft in windowed mode:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=72621

Or use a "high resolution" mod. There seem to be a lot of defunct mods like this that probably never worked too well, but the first link might be worth a shot:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=97122
http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16643
http://freenet-homepage.de/ToiletGame/download.html
http://www.gamethreat.net/forums/user-downloads/38147-resolution-hack-release-4-0-a.html

Re:Possible Starcraft Solutions

[MistrBlank]

Starcraft plays fine in a VirtualBox which creates a custom tailored windowed mode without much hacking. Also there is a high likelihood that you have an old Windows Key for 98 or XP to run it on.

If you don't install support for the virtual mouse drivers you can keep it locked in the VM.

If you run VM on Linux you can run Compiz and turn on ADD Helper to black out the rest of the screen.

RealMYST

[gehrehmee]

For Myst anyways, RealMyst impressed me. Actual 3d models of the puzzles, so you walk where you want. Totally playable in my opinion, and they managed to make it not distract much from the puzzles and art of the thing.

Try dos games.

[sjwt]

your problem is you are not looking old enough, try runing DOS games in Dosbox, nice scaling options there.

Re:Try dos games.

[naz404]

The ScummVM emulator for running classic Lucasarts games like Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle and the Monkey Island series also has a nice set of scalers and graphics filters.

Re:Try dos games.

[commodore64_love]

I find that those old 1970s and 80s games run better on Atari 800, Commodore=64, and Amiga emulators. For one thing these computers have fixed specs, so they are as easy to use as a console (plug and play). No need to mess with annoying DOS, sound, or graphic card settings.

For another the Atari, Commodore and Amiga were typically the best versions of the games with more colors and better sound than the PC DOS versions.

 

Re:Buy a cheap CRT

[denmarkw00t]

Actually, forget eBay, there are plenty of CRTs available at thrift stores (Goodwill, Salvation Army), presumably on Craigslist, and one of the best gaming CRTs I ever got came from a yard sale.

I know we're nerds, but we too can purchase old televisions at low prices, face-to-face with an actual person ;)

See "Atari Emulation of CRT Effects On LCDs"

[fractalVisionz]

"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."

From Slashdot story Atari Emulation of CRT Effects On LCDs.

Re:See "Atari Emulation of CRT Effects On LCDs"

[commodore64_love]

>>>They took into account that the old TVs couldn't handle 640 width however it will still send the signal so only a few phosphors will get hit in a pixel thus creating color.

Bzzz.

Your explanation is wrong. NTSC televisions can easily handle 640-or-more pixels per line, per the original 1930s design spec. The problem is the addition of color (NTSC-II). Chroma resolution is only 150-160 pixels across due to the color signal beng bandwidth-limited to 2 megahertz. So while a television can display hi-res black and white perfectly, the overlaying of the chroma component leads to color "smear" across the image. It's the same effect as when you watch an old movie and the actress is wearing a striped B&W blouse, but instead it appears to be slightly colored.

Also: There will never be any chroma blur in the up/down direction. The scanlines on a television are sharp and distinct, with 486 visible vertical resolution. I think that's the flaw in the Enduro image, where they showed the sunset rainbow as an orange blur. On a real TV that would never happen.

Trivia - the old Atari console could display 128 colors (16 discrete colors * 8 shades).

GOG

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you try looking at Good Old Games?
I get all my "oldies" from there, they look good, well just as good as they looked on your old CRT.

Sylvain

Re:hqx

[retro83]

http://web.archive.org/web/20070717064839/www.hiend3d.com/hq4x.html and http://web.archive.org/web/20070717064839/http://www.hiend3d.com/bin/hq4x_src_c.zip

Try this

[jlebrech]

http://scale2x.sourceforge.net/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_art_scaling_algorithms

Windowed Mode: VM

[Anonymous Coward]

To get old games into "Windowed Mode" I often run them in a VM

These games are old enough that a VM can handle their graphics card needs & the underlying CPU can run them through a VM at at least the original CPU speed.

Re:virtualization

[mcvos]

It's not about the size of the window, but the size of the pixels. I think I once managed to get dosbox or something similar to run Elite 2: Frontier using pixels that were 2x2 times as big. Worked very well.

My comments on the issue...

[jez9999]

Heh, this story could almost have written by me. It's the reason I held out so long on getting an LCD instead, and why I have my beloved Samsung CRT sitting still in the loft.

I was actually quite surprised that ZSNES at 640x480 fullscreen mode, whilst there is a small noticeable interpolation effect, looked quite good. Perfectly playable once you have the graphics being displayed... I almost forget I'm not on a CRT.

What has been a problem, though, is fast movement. This seems to be a problem inherent to LCDs. :-( Try emulating Sonic 1 (MegaDrive/Genesis) on a CRT vs an LCD. On the CRT, no problems. On the LCD, the rings in particular look fainter, and darker... well, everything seems to look a bit darker as you're running. I guess this is a small form of ghosting, and I don't think there's any way to get round it on an LCD. Any tips would be appreciated. But, I'd say that if you wanna play Sonic or the like, use a CRT.

By the way, I'm using an NEC MultiSync EA191M.

NSFW

[Anonymous Coward]

A bit off topic, but the nfgworld.com story was posted by someone whose avatar is a topless anime character, which is most likely not safe for work for the majority of slashdot's readers (whether you agree it should be or not).

Luckily I'm at home, but a warning would be nice.

Re:A solution for some old RPGs (Ps:T, BG, IwD)

[sa1lnr]

I used this process for Planescape Torment

http://thunderpeel2001.blogspot.com/2009/01/planescape-torment-fully-modded.html

Worked a treat, though widescreen v2.1 is linked there it worked fine with v2.2.
I had to used the nVidia fixer near the end as I have an 8800GT.

For Baldur's Gate using the Baldur's Gate II engine I use easytutu

http://www.usoutpost31.com/easytutu/

And for Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura I use drog black tooths unofficial patch, high resolution patch and high res town maps. iirc you have to install the official 1.0.7.4 patch before these two.

http://www.terra-arcanum.com/downloads/

they are both under "Arcanum" -> "Unofficial"

Re:Remember the "Turbo" button?

[LinuxIsGarbage]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpeedStep

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerNow!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool'n'Quiet

No Turbo button necessary!

Re:Buy a cheap CRT

[DJRumpy]

Not true. With proper scaling, you can take a small image with a 640 width and scale it up to HD resolutions with good results. Their called scalers, and chances are, if you've bought a DVD or Bluray player in the last few years, it has one built in.

Good software scalers, are Lanczos, and Bicubic (with Lanczos giving a sharper result in my opinion).

If you use something like Dosbox, or one of the old emulators, you can often choose a decent scaler option which helps to alleviate your graphical woes. As with anything so subjective, try each and see which looks better to your eyes. You can definnitely get workable results, even with an LCD display.

Re:virtualization

[compro01]

You'll get much better results using scaler=super2xsai or hq2x

Further info on available options and results here.

Re:Old Games on Faster Computers can be tough

[Delkster]

Games old enough to have timing issues on new computers are probably from the DOS era, and DOSBox might come to the rescue. Among other things, it allows you to adjust the speed of the emulation.

Re:Buy a cheap CRT

[Anonymous Coward]

They have scalers that are designed for pixel art. Examples are super eagle and hq2x. They have excellent results you cannot get with just an integer ratio scaler.

Re:Buy a cheap CRT

[bonch]

Do people know what the "death panels" comment was mockingly referring to? There really are government panels in public health care systems that hold meetings to decide if you're worth rationing money for to address your illness.

Re:Buy a cheap CRT

[AndersOSU]

which is so much worse than insurance industry panels in private health care systems that hold meetings to decide if you're worth rationing money to address your illness.