this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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Yeah, very much this. I think it's tied in to how vision works - We don't perceive the world directly. What we see is a bunch of cludges and hacks that our brain uses to assemble a coherent picture from a bunch of very bad sensors. Like I think your eyes can only really see what's directly in front of you and most of your peripheral vision is just cludged together from things you've seen recently, which is probably why, like, people can sometimes sneak up on you and claerly be in your peripheral vision and you don't notice htem bc you were focused somewhere else.
It didn't really matter that Lara was a bunch of polygons or the dinosaurs in Turok were like 50 tris or whatever. Your brain will fill in the details. When I think about the actual experience of playing games decades ago I don't remember the actual graphics. My brain has assembled sort of a representation of that where Lara Croft is "high poly" and shadows and lighting work and the movement system wasn't a nightmare.
The brain filling in the details is exactly how to word it. I play Dwarf Fortress and it's as vivid as the latest Ubisoft game because that's the best simulation available. Whatever is missing from it, I add the fidelity.
yea like you have to imagine the cart full of magma entirely because they still haven't fucking fixed that bug years later
It's the same dog sprite for every dog, but each of them looks like an actual individual dog once I read the descriptions. If the 2044 equivalent of Dwarf Fortress has dummy-ass graphics, my experience of perceiving it will be exactly the same.
I always struggled to explain to people that after about hour 13 of a marathon df run i would more or less literally stop seeing the code and just see my dorfs running around.
Also these games were designed to be played on 640x480i CRT screens (or 720x576i if you lived in Europe). Everything, from the textures to the special effects to the menus. I've been upscaling stuff in PS2 games, and it's hard to get some effects and textures to display correctly, as they're designed to take advantage of CRT scan lines and resolution scaling. PS2 games rendered at 512x448i resolution, if you were lucky there was a 480p mode. PS1 games at half that resolution. Of course they look terrible on a modern gigantic 4K (3840x2160p) flat screen TV or monitor. Anyone that has played these older games on original hardware hooked up to a CRT TV knows that they looked better than how they are represented now.
Has anyone tried making a screen overlay that simulates CRTs?
There are various rendering presets in emulators designed to simulate CRT effects (like scan lines and softness/blur filters), but it's not great really. Cathode ray tube televisions worked very differently to modern flat screens, for instance pixels aren't strictly defined, so they can render any resolution, up to their maximum supported resolution, without upscaling issues. This also means the pixel edges are less harsh, even at max resolution..A lot of the text in menus/subtitles, and textures in games, are designed to take advantage of this softer look, and when displayed on a modern flat screen, look really blurry and have poorly defined edges. Or they have weird aliasing that you'd never be able to see on a CRT due to the "softness" of the pixels. Shadows and blacks/greys suffer a ton here, even in high quality textures without compression artifacts.
The best way to get close to the original look on a flatscreen is to use an HD texture pack with a faithful/true to original design with an emulator, or create one yourself. So redoing all the textures and text for an HD flat screen, trying to recreate the original look as much as possible. But not everything can be re-created, like an effect in a menu that takes advantage of CRT scan lines is just going to look like a line traveling across the screen, not matter what is done to "upscale" it. There are some very good results out there for GameCube games in particular. Lots and lots of work though to make one yourself, I know because I'm trying to lol.
As for your original question, some people are trying to do just that
But even in that video where they get the smoke and cloud effects to look correct in the introduction, slippys picture, the text and the blue part of the aircraft look worse on the "LCD CRT", because of what I said earlier.
lol skill issue
Oh it doesn't happen to me. I used to do it to other people bc I learned to be extremely quiet for trauma related reasons when I was a kid.
Not that people don't sneak up on me, mind. They do. But my limbic system is burned out and i no longer fear death so my startle response isn't very strong.