The Peach meme: On CRTs, pixels and signal quality (again)
19 comments
·October 13, 2025Lerc
I wonder if anyone has employed the services of a hyperrealistic artist to depict the image they see on a CRT.
Given their ability to generate a painting that appears identical to a photo, could they depict how the image appears to them, eliminating any loss from mechanical capture.
mapontosevenths
I have a Retrotink 4k. I mostly use it for VHS transfer these days, but it's original purpose is upscaling retro game images and applying various masks and filters to make the game look like it's using a CRT on a modern display.
It works beautifully, and you no longer need a clunky, heavy, dying CRT. I'm sure the purists will say it's not the same, but I've done sides by side comparisons IRL and it's good enough for me even when pixel peeping. I prefer the emulated CRT look on a modern OLED to the real thing these days.
amlib
I do something like this for my old game consoles, except that I pipe them trough an old analog video capture card that supports 240p60 and use the video processing module in Retroarch to do the capture with minimal lag. After adding some fancy CRT shaders and other image adjustment carefully tailored for this, the image comes out looking great! I sometimes toggle the shaders off and wince at the "raw" digital capture. I actually bought this capture card back in 2008 for this purpose but detested using it until around 2018 when I started using it in conjunction with retroarch and CRT shaders.
For that period it even shaped my perception that analog video and specially n64 graphics were always bad, but all that was vindicated by those shaders, it really does make a big difference, and made me find a new appreciation for n64 graphics in particular.
There is some internet misconception that the inherently "blurry" output of an n64 is bad (And sure, some games are just ugly/bad from an artistic standpoint), but it's actually the smoothest image any analog console will ever produce when hooked up to a proper CRT or CRT shader, and it's consistent across all games because of "forced" high quality AA in all games. Even the next generation of consoles seldomly used AA.
CharlesW
Apologies for the off-topic question, but I'm so curious: How is this useful for VHS transfer?
kowbell
Not OP but I assume "VHS Transfer" meant "transfer to a digital format" i.e. digitize. The Retrotink is a fancy "composite/component/vga-to-hdmi" box, so you can do: VCR playing a VHS -> Retrotink -> HDMI capture card -> computer saving that to a file.
trenchpilgrim
An OLED with a great filter is good enough for most gamers other than archivists and hardcore collectors, yeah.
rendaw
The peach on the author's CRT looks pretty awful, as does the photo. I'm curious what sort of CRT produced the meme image. Maybe it can't be done by a real CRT, but the author's CRT doesn't look anything like the example from the CRT database they have below.
They also said the impression is different since it's so close up - what does it look like at the size you'd really see it in game?
CrossVR
> I'm curious what sort of CRT produced the meme image.
The article mentions later that it's a PVM-20L2MD [1]. This is a professional CRT monitor for medical devices. It uses the same signals as a consumer TV, but comes with a higher quality tube that has a sharper picture.
dmonitor
He seemed to test it on a bunch of computer monitors, and not a standard 480i consumer television set? The different shadow masks phosphor patterns change how things look
drougge
The C= 1084S he uses is a more a (very good) PAL TV than a computer monitor, even if it was sold as a monitor. So "576i" in your terminology. (It was also sometimes sold with a TV tuner, or at least the earlier 1084 (same picture tube AFAIK) was.)
gwbas1c
When I played NES and SNES as a kid, the resolution was so low that I only saw pixels. (Edit: I saw whole pixels when using the RF switch.) To this day, when I go back and play those games on modern consoles I just can't use CRT emulation.
Maybe I just didn't play games that used tricks to get around the pixels?
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That being said, I remember that "New Super Mario Brothers" on Wii appeared to use a CRT trick to try and make the background flash in a boss room. I always played my Wii in 480p, so it just looked like there were vertical lines in the boss room.
RiverCrochet
I grew up playing Atari, NES, SNES, and PS1 games on old TVs most of the time, sometimes not the best quality. I also remember that often in 80's arcades, it was guaranteed for at least one or two machines to have CRT issues; colors not aligned, skew at the top/bottom, burn-in (common), screen too bright, etc. All part of the experience and quite nostalgic for me.
The NES had a particular quirk with its NTSC output that I always thought was very characteristic of NES. I found this article a few years ago, and was fascinated that work was done to really figure it out - https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/NTSC_video - and it's awesome at at least some emulators (FCEUX) seem to use this info to generate an experience quite similar to what I remember the NES being when I grew up. But I don't think any NES game graphics really depended on this for any visual output. All NES games had jagged vertical lines, for example.
LennyHenrysNuts
I still have three working CRTs. A monochrome monitor for the Atari ST, a Sony Multiscan VGA and some random Phillips thing I saved from the skip.
I still play Diablo I on the Sony to this day. Wonderful monitor. I will cry when it finally dies.
karmakaze
This reminds me of my favorite way of watching movies at home was on a 1365x768 plasma TV at 24fps. I really didn't like 1080p, 120Hz, and 4k that came after it. Great for sports and news, not so much for fiction.
christkv
Reminds me about https://github.com/mausimus/ShaderGlass it's pretty fun to use with emulators.
aquova
I really wish ShaderGlass supported Linux. If there's a good(ish) alternative that anyone knows about, I'd love to try it out.
This is fun to see right now. I've been playing around with CRT shaders in retroarch for the last few days. My main goal is to use the [CRT-Beam-simulator](https://github.com/blurbusters/crt-beam-simulator) at 120hz and get some sort of CRT slot or shadow mask at the same time. I've landed on some settings I enjoy for N64 games, and it really has improved the experience for me.
On the post's notes on the Sonic waterfall effect, the [Blargg NTSC Video Filter](https://github.com/CyberLabSystems/CyberLab-Custom-Blargg-NT...) is intended to recreate that signal artifact, but similar processing is included in a lot of the CRT shaders that are available. I found that RGB had a visual artifact when moving that made the waterfall flicker, but composite didn't, so I played on that setting. Running it with the beam simulator is probably causing some of that.