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

[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

[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 ;)

Re:Buy a cheap CRT

[bemymonkey]

I have two you can have for free. They're here in Germany though... shipping might be a bit expensive ;)

Re:Buy a cheap CRT

[sopssa]

Actually, forget Freecycle, since.. eh, what are we talking about?

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

[xaxa]

I advertised a 17" CRT on Freecycle (London). I didn't expect any replies, but had several! One was from a woman who said she was disabled and would send a taxi round to collect it, but as it was only 10 minutes walk I carried it to her house. She turned out to be a research scientist who'd got an unusual disease (and couldn't walk). She wanted to research it but couldn't get any funding. So, she'd given up her job and was doing her research from home.

This was 2 years ago, maybe now it'd need to be an LCD.

Re:Buy a cheap CRT

[runyonave]

Actually forget about using that old CRT in your basement. It's probably won't work anyway. I would recommend getting in contact with John Titor and going back in time. Much easier than finding a monitor that can play those old games.

Re:Buy a cheap CRT

[Gulthek]

But but, how could she afford healthcare then?

According to top Fox News scientists everyone part of a public health care system is technically already dead.

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:Buy a cheap CRT

[mjschultz]

Actually, forget about John Titor and going back in time. I would recommend asking Slashdot what they think to do. Much easier than going back in time.

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

[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.

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.

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

[supersat]

I once wrote a tool called "StarPatch" that lets you run StarCraft in a window. It works by 1) patching a calls to CreateWindow and some DirectDraw initialization functions, 2) patching calls to DirectDraw's Lock and Unlock to return a fake video memory pointer, and 3) periodically copying the fake video memory to the real video memory.

The source code is almost ten years old at this point, but I've made it available again at http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/supersat/starpatch.c. You'll need to tweak it to work with anything other than StarCraft 1.10, but you can modify it to scale up pixels, etc.

- Karl

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).

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.

Re:virtualization

[compro01]

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

Further info on available options and results here.

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.

[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: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.

 

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.

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

[Soul-Burn666]

A mod was released for these games which pretty much handles higher resolution. It does that not by up-scaling but rather by showing you a larger section of the hand-drawn pixel-perfect game map, keeping the original crispness.
The mod can be found here.
Nice example screenshots for Planescape: Torment here.

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"

2xSal or hqx in a gpu driver?

[Rufus211]

A number of emulators already have good algorithms for scaling fixed-pixel images that preserve the sharpness while removing aliasing. Wikipedia of course has a page on Pixel art scaling algorithms. The 2 best ones out there are 2xSal and hqx.

The problem is that these only work within emulators that implement the algorithms. This clearly does not work for something like StarCraft. Graphics drivers (both ATI and NV) already have options to scale between virtual and physical resolutions. The ideal solution would be for them to offer different scaling algorithms that can be picked - standard bilinear or a modified one for classic games. Everything "just works" then and you get nice graphics.

I'm not going to hold my breath on ATI or NV ever officially implementing this in their release drivers. However I'm wondering how hard it would be to add an option like this to one of the open source linux X drivers, or maybe even to Wine/DosBox. Also for windows isn't there a way to intercept graphics calls (along the lines of what FRAPs does)? Would it be possible to create a wrapper program that intercepts all the graphics calls and adds a scaling algorithm after each frame is drawn?

Re:2xSal or hqx in a gpu driver?

[Rufus211]

And then I notice that DosBox already has this implemented: http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Scaler

It should be fairly straightforward for Wine to implement a similar feature.

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).

hqx

[numbertheo]

TFA has examples exclusively involving line art and that's pretty much the worst case for standard upscaling techniques. The scaling technique you're been searching for is hqx. Too bad there isn't any way to get it.

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

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]

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:See "Atari Emulation of CRT Effects On LCDs"

[jellomizer]

Actually a lot of software written back then was designed for crap TVs. You run these programs say a PC program now you see that it is in 640x200 b&w images. While at the time it had a bunch of colors, at a lower resolution. 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. Or even when we get further along where we got actual computer monitors the old systems had such a low DPI that made EGA look like really good graphics, as the Low DPI rounded the pixels slightly and if you dithered the pixels they will actually blend and create new colors to the eye... Then when people got the newer higher DPI monitors those EGA games began to look very blocky, thus needing VGA with more colors to make the games have better graphics. A normal 320x200 pixel (normal resolution) today on an average monitor will take 6x6 pixels or more on the screen to preserve the same size.

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).

software scaling

[mambodog]

I dunno, on my 1920x1080 display old games look pretty good using Nvidia (driver) scaling (fixed aspect ratio, scale to fit vertically). Maybe just because its sufficiently high res, scaling artefacts are not particularly noticeable.

Forget eBay, Craigslist - Freecycle :-)

[billstewart]

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

Old Games on Faster Computers can be tough

[billstewart]

There are other problems with playing old games on newer computers - depending on how they handle timing, you'll find that the
Space Invaders zoom down and kick your ass
in ways that they just didn't at the original speeds.

Maybe virtualization can give you a way to slow them down?

Meanwhile, Nethack works just fine...

Re:Old Games on Faster Computers can be tough

[SCPRedMage]

Meanwhile, Nethack works just fine...

Amazing how you never have to worry about turn-based games playing too fast, isn't it?

Re:Old Games on Faster Computers can be tough

[mcvos]

Meanwhile, Nethack works just fine...

Amazing how you never have to worry about turn-based games playing too fast, isn't it?

Or ascii-based games running into problems with tiny pixels or miss-matched resolutions.

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.

Isometric 2D RPGs

[WaroDaBeast]

For Infinity engine-based RPGs — the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale series, plus Planetscape Torment —, you can use the Gibberlings 3 widescreen mod. I have also been lucky with Arcanum, since Terra Arcanum hosts a high resolution patch that works perfectly.

Try this

[jlebrech]

http://scale2x.sourceforge.net/

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

Re:get some sun

[maxwell demon]

I don't think there are many games released for the Sun platform. And those that exist probably run just as well with Linux on a normal PC. No need for expensive hardware.
And BTW, what's that "outside" you are speaking of? :-)

Blocky scaleup

[sfraggle]

I'm the author of Chocolate Doom, which deliberately maintains the low resolution of the original game, but has to run in modern, high resolution screen modes. One of the problems with Doom is that the graphics are designed for non-square pixel modes (the original game ran in 320x200, stretched to a 4:3 aspect ratio screen), so there's the double problem of having to scale everything up to work in a square pixel screen.

I developed a technique that does a blocky scale-up, interpolating the edges of the blocky "pixels" appropriately, so that you end up with a fairly decent looking result. I don't know if this is useful to the developers of programs like DOSBox, but the code's there if anyone wants it.

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.

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.

Cheap solution...

[KevinColyer]

Try squinting?

Remote Desktop

[cbhacking]

This is going to sound weird, but if your version of Windows supports it, Remote Desktop may solve the problem. You can specify the size of the RD window, and a full-screen application running on the server's remote session will treat that as the maximum display resolution (meaning your graphics card should be able to stretch StarCraft to a 1280x960 RD window happily enough).

Technically this even works for 3d-accelerated games (the DirectX commands are sent across the network and executed on the client's GPU) but for something as old as StarCraft that won't even matter.

The catch is that client (non-server) versions of Windows don't allow you to RD from computer X into computer X again, so you'd need to have another computer somewhere with StarCraft installed, preferably located on a LAN.

Virtualization should also work just fine, especially since there's no risk of 3D acceleration stuff being a problem with games that old. If you have Win7 (Business or higher), you don't even need to install a second copy of Windows yourself; just install Virtual XP mode, have it start in a window (rather than the rootless mode usually used) and set the window's size appropriately.

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: 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.

A pixel is not a little square

[noidentity]

Repeat after me: A pixel is not a little square. CRT monitors reconstruct an image using something closer to a gaussian distribution, rather than a crisp rectangular one as you'd get if you simply doubled pixels. The graphics of games made when CRTs were common were made on CRTs and thus take advantage of this. The video game console emulation crowd has faced a similar issue, only there it's more than just a CRT; there's also the distortions introduced by the various composite video encoding schemes (color bleed, fringing, artifacts). You might think that removing these distortions would improve the image, but you have to realize that the artists viewed things on the same systems, and thus tailored the art to look good in those circumstances. It's sort of like a web page designer getting a page to look just right in a buggy browser, even though it looks all wrong in one with proper rendering; here you want the buggy browser, at least if you want to see the page as it was intended.

The thing that gets me is that a high-resolution LCD could horizontally display exactly what a Trinitron CRT did, as the vertical stripe phosphor pattern matches that on most LCDs. The scaling algorithm would need to simulate the blurred-edge electron beam and mixing between pixels. There would be some sub-pixel action too, as on a CRT.