Emulating on a CRT

[BIGOLLBUTTHOLE]

Playing games from n64 era back doesn't feel 100% right on an lcd display, or a crt montior , is there a way to hook up old coaxial tvs via hdmi, dvi, or vga?

 

[Kippykip]

There are ways:

HDMI to RCA and VGA

Spoiler: big ass image so its in a spoiler

and VGA to RCA/S-Video

 

[Monty Kensicle]

I haven't heard good things about those kinds of cables on Amazon. The HDMI one won't work because it needs a constant 5V signal composite doesn't provide.

 

[Walker D]

I would go with a vga to component system ...probably your best bet (if your tv had a SCART input, then you could use it in place of the component)

 

[Foxi4]

Normally your best bet is SCART, but North American gamers are usually out of luck in this regard. Technically you could get an HDMI to Composite/Component/S-Video converter box (the cables *won't* work right for reasons mentioned above) or a VGA box, which is probably the easiest and cheapest solution for you.

 

[cracker]

This isn't really my forte but I think the most reliable method would be using a powered HDMI to digital coax box and running that through a powered digital to analog box. I'm sure there are HDMI to analog boxes out there but they would be grey market due to the HDMI licensing restrictions on analog conversion with the standard.

 

[Soopy]

You can always grab an Oculus Rift and it will emulate you playing on an old CRT TV. This also removes any latency issues that current LCD's have. Here's a link to a concept video of someone playing the gameboy.

 

[Depravo]

Can nothing be done with custom filters? This is how my SNES emulator looks running at 1920 x 1080 on a LCD display.

Spoiler

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

Yeah, I was gonna mention what Dep did. A lot of emulators nowadays have filters that can give your games the old "CRT" feel.

 

[Psionic Roshambo]

Buy an old CRT and hang on to it... lol

Best way to emulate old systems in my opinion.

 

[Silentsurvivor]

There's no easy way to output it to a CRT TV. Converter boxes won't do it, because they can't output a 240p signal, only 480i at best, and your games will look terrible like that - not to mention the output lag; I bought one and it was simply terrible, lots of flickering and the minimum it could go was 800x600, complete garbage. I think the only way is using one of those Arcade VGA graphics card that output 240p, but they're just... really expensive and not easy to use.

I say: Get a CRT MONITOR, as in, an old computer monitor, and not a CRT TV. They are smaller, CHEAP, and they will look even better than a CRT TV, as they will obviously take VGA cables and you can adjust it to 240p, using a filter for interlacing. Retroarch does the job, and it looks pretty damn good, much better than you'd ever get with composite:

Spoiler

This page here as all the info you need about this, under the "15HZ vs 31HZ Displays" section:
http://filthypants.blogspot.com/2014/03/tvs-and-retro-gaming-emulation.html

 

[BIGOLLBUTTHOLE]

I have an emac g3 the screen on it is amazing, the speakers are amazing, but it being powerpc i haven't tried but I highly doubt it could play up to n64 games

 

[Sakitoshi]

There's no easy way to output it to a CRT TV. Converter boxes won't do it, because they can't output a 240p signal, only 480i at best, and your games will look terrible like that - not to mention the output lag; I bought one and it was simply terrible, lots of flickering and the minimum it could go was 800x600, complete garbage. I think the only way is using one of those Arcade VGA graphics card that output 240p, but they're just... really expensive and not easy to use.

I say: Get a CRT MONITOR, as in, an old computer monitor, and not a CRT TV. They are smaller, CHEAP, and they will look even better than a CRT TV, as they will obviously take VGA cables and you can adjust it to 240p, using a filter for interlacing. Retroarch does the job, and it looks pretty damn good, much better than you'd ever get with composite:


This page here as all the info you need about this, under the "15HZ vs 31HZ Displays" section:
http://filthypants.blogspot.com/2014/03/tvs-and-retro-gaming-emulation.html

tried that yesterday and man... looked fantastic, very crisp image and with natural scanlines.
I set my Samsung Syncmaster 551v to 2048x240, launched zmz(with snes9x core, scanlines 25% to force 224 pixels height or else the game was stretched to 240 and 50% and 100% scanlines make the image too dark because lower the bright of the non-scanlined rows) and fired up Super Mario World and couldn't believe how good it looked. loaded a couple more SNES games and everyone looked excelent. now I need to test with PSone and N64 and see what happen.

 

[cracker]

Isn't it funny how we grew so accustomed to CRTs that we think that half the screen being darker looks better/normal?

 

[Fat D]

Well, the games were designed to compensate for that...

 

[Silentsurvivor]

tried that yesterday and man... looked fantastic, very crisp image and with natural scanlines.
I set my Samsung Syncmaster 551v to 2048x240, launched zmz(with snes9x core, scanlines 25% to force 224 pixels height or else the game was stretched to 240.

You don't need to set 25% scanlines at all, you just need to adjust the Overscan. I don't know how ZMZ handles that, but basically, SNES with Overscan on = 240 pixels native, as it adds black borders top and bottom, so no stretching or anything else needed, it's basically the pure image. When you set it to crop Overscan, it'll be 224 pixels only.

Isn't it funny how we grew so accustomed to CRTs that we think that half the screen being darker looks better/normal?

Well in an actual CRT there's glow as well as color blending and bleeding that compensates for that, in the end the screen doesn't look darker at all... In fact it'll look brighter than your usual emulator image depending on how you adjust your color/contrast/brightness. It's not just a bunch of lines added to the screen, there's shadowmask as well as phosphor too. CRT shaders from emulators can't replicate it perfectly, not yet, as that would need much higher resolutions - even above 4k. With 4k coming now we'll start to see some very nice CRT shaders, but still not as perfect as on an actual CRT.

 

[Sakitoshi]

You don't need to set 25% scanlines at all, you just need to adjust the Overscan. I don't know how ZMZ handles that, but basically, SNES with Overscan on = 240 pixels native, as it adds black borders top and bottom, so no stretching or anything else needed, it's basically the pure image. When you set it to crop Overscan, it'll be 224 pixels only.

the overscan option doesn't exist on ZMZ, the only solution I found was set 25% scanlines, think on ZMZ as ZSnes interface but with the Snes9x or bsnes core.

Well in an actual CRT there's glow as well as color blending and bleeding that compensates for that, in the end the screen doesn't look darker at all. In fact it'll look brighter than your usual emulator image depending on how you adjust it.

also CRT screens have infinitely better contrast than any LCD and even my Vita was put to shame for how bright and colorful SMW looked.

 

[Silentsurvivor]

the overscan option doesn't exist on ZMZ, the only solution I found was set 25% scanlines, think on ZMZ as ZSnes interface but with the Snes9x or bsnes core.

Well that's what I thought. Well if it works OK that's fine. Does it stretch the image to the correct 4:3 aspect ratio at least?

 

[Sakitoshi]

Well that's what I thought. Well if it works OK that's fine. Does it stretch the image to the correct 4:3 aspect ratio at least?

there is a checkbox to force 4:3 but I have it unchecked to fill the whole 2048x240 and use the monitor adjust to fill the whole monitor. 2048 is a multiple of 256 and 512 so it's perfect for the multiple horizontal resolution the SNES does. now the problem is with games that use 448 pixels height, but there are very few that I don't really care.

for PSone emulation I'll need to set 3840x480 to fit all the resolutions it can do, but I'll also need to force scanlines on 240p games. I'll see once I got home.