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

Buy a cheap CRT

[Andorion]

Problem solved. http://www.pricewatch.com/monitors/

Re:Buy a cheap CRT

[Andorion]

Actually, forget the pricewatch link, just check ebay. Plenty of 17-19" monitors for well under $100.

Re:Buy a cheap CRT

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget ebay, check Craigslist. Chances are somebody in your neighborhood has an old CRT in their basement they want to sell for $15.

Re:Buy a cheap CRT

[fm6]

Well, that will solve the problem for the next few years. But those old CRTs will die eventually, and then what?

Also, having a second monitor just to play old games is a pain, especially when that second monitor is a space hog.

Re:Buy a cheap CRT

[Lord Bitman]

Actually, forget Freecycle, you probably already have an old CRT laying around somewhere that you just don't want to use because it takes up so much space.

Re:Buy a cheap CRT

[Anonymous Coward]

I love how everyone posting in this thread disregards the question asked and poses a solution that doesn't actually solve the problem.

I don't want a fucking CRT taking up desk space, and I'm sure the person posing the question doesn't either - or he wouldn't have asked. Hm! Food for thought.

Re:Buy a cheap CRT

[Mprx]

Those scalers work well with photographic content, but fail miserably on the pixel art you find in old games. The only scaler suitable for pixel art is simple unfiltered integer ratio pixel duplication.

Re:Buy a cheap CRT

[Mister Whirly]

Because 99% of people who use them aren't trying to play 10 year old games on them, so they don't care about that aspect.

Re:Buy a cheap CRT

[DJRumpy]

They are nothing alike other than being algorithms used to resize data

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

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

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

Bicubic gives you a sharper image. Is is preferred over bilinear when enlarging an image (this sharpening is also what causes the artifacts you're referring to).

Bilinear makes for a much softer image. It's preferred for reducing an image since reducing the image tends to sharpen it. A little softening can be desirable in such cases, which makes for a good use of bilinear.

They are most definitely not the same.

Re:Buy a cheap CRT

[iamacat]

That would be a step up from insurance industry panels in private health care systems that hold meetings to decide if they can interpret some small print in the contract to exclude your medical procedure, or dump your coverage because you didn't disclose ache that you had as a teenager. I mean, when there is a finite pool of money, rationing is inevitable. Giving record bonuses to CEOs while letting patients die on the other hand is pretty sleazy.

Re:Buy a cheap CRT

[Christojojo]

Why is rationing by either acceptable. Istead of taking the insurance cos place why does the Government do what it was designed to do GOVERN> I hate arguments that people say well the other side is doing it so we willl do it too therefor its better bs. IF the Government would prevent the Insurance companies from backing out or writing dishonest policies then I would have agrred with it. As this stands we will have the government decide when we die instead of a private company gee I feel sooooo much better.

virtualization

[areYouAHypnotist]

I haven't tried it myself, but what about virtualization? VirtualBox has an addition that lets you run windows at any size you want (in windowed mode).

For DOS games.

[brandorf]

Well, for DOS games, DOSbox can do a number of different scaling modes. From the Wiki: normal: nearest-neighbour scaling (big square pixels) scan: like normal, but with horizontal black lines tv: like scan, but with darker versions of data instead of black lines advmame: smooths corners and removes jaggies from diagonal lines advinterp: identical to advmame rgb: simulates the phosphors on a dot trio CRT As for old windows games, I hope to hear something else. One last note, Myst was re-released as a "Masterpiece Edition" with higher resolution re-rendered graphics.

Forget eBay, Craigslist - Freecycle :-)

[billstewart]

Hey, there are people out there who'd be happy to just have you take the clunky thing.

Re:Try dos games.

[sopssa]

The article poster lists several favorite games of his that he wants to play, and your suggestion is to find older, different games?

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

[commodore64_love]

I don't like how they presume everyone had crap TVs or poor Ataris.

Take the Enduro image - it never looked that bad on my real set. The playfields were a solid color (no noise), and the sunset was a rainbow of distinct colors, not a blurry orangish mess. In fact most Atari games look quite crisp, with visible pixels, on my original unit and original CRT.

Re: It's either that are buy an expensive...

[PingSpike]

I fail to see how a different LCD technology, that suffers from the same limitations in non-native resolution scaling that all LCD monitors suffer, is the answer to the problem. The colors may look a bit better, but since at least 2 of the games discussed in the post used 8-bit color that doesn't seem to be the sticking point.

Re:2xSal or hqx in a gpu driver?

[Abcd1234]

Wine is an emulator(yes I know that it claims not to be, but it is). It emulates Windows(or at least a part of windows) on Linux. Yes it emulates system calls instead of emulating an OS, but that's really neither here nor there.

Uhuh. So, what, glibc just emulates the POSIX standard? Mono emulates .NET? OpenJVM emulates Java? Because these are all precise analogous to Wine (which is an independent, portable implementation of a wide variety of Windows APIs).