I can imagine that this could be a way to adjust the effect as needed.
Windows has built-in color filters already but to my knowledge it does not allow to customize them, though. Open this in the run dialog (Win+R) to directly open to the appropriate settings page: ms-settings:easeofaccess-colorfilter
I have an eMac with a CRT screen, and it seems to be missing nearly all of the artifacts people associate with a CRT screen. I'm guessing vintage TVs were worse than the eMac.
Most pseudo-CRT effects just suck and have little to nothing in common with actual CRT's from back then. There are great CRT shaders though, some of which are shown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cAhQl0TSdc (CRT lottes is fairly decent)
Computer monitors were much higher quality than TV's (and even higher if a Trinitron CRT, as many Mac monitors used), and a 2002 CRT was higher quality than a 1985 one.
The CRT shaders seem to really try to recreate what it looked like when an NES was running on an average department store TV in 1985. And to my eye and memory, the strength of the effect is pretty spot-on -- Super Mario Bros was definitely quite blurry and color-fringed when I played it back then.
Some of it was NTSC and composite video's limited bandwidth smearing stuff together, but quite a bit of it was the less capable beam shaping and less precise phosphor masks on TV-grade CRTs.
Basically, yes, vintage TVs were terrible and made up for it by being very blurry.
The appearance of a high quality CRT cannot be accurately reproduced on most commonly available flatscreens. Specifically, most flatscreens have much more motion blur; this becomes apparent when you drag a window back and forth across the screen and try to track the text in that window with your eyes. The text all blurs. Then, try moving the screen itself back and forth the same way, again tracking the text with your eyes. Even though the screen is sideways back and forth, your eyes should be able to track the text which remains crisp.
A brand new tape with a commercial release on it was pretty good quality. It went straight from master to VHS. But in the early days of VCRs new tapes and movies were too expensive for most people so everyone shared copies of stuff. Watch a copy of a copy of a copy on VHS and that's when the real wackiness starts. Each analog copy generation gets worse and worse.
I think it would be difficult to even reproduce the bad quality of the pirated version of Terminator we watched as kids. With regard to this I think the shaders would need to be more dynamic.
It's like that webcomic where the guy complains he has a fetish for JPEG artifacts because he grew up downloading porn in the 90s...
Personally I don't understand it. Pixel art looks way better crisp than blurred to hell with fake scanlines and a TV bulge, and I lived through that era
Probably a difference in the screens used. Like I'll play an old videogame on a modern screen and it'll look substantially worse than it looked on a CRT.
Most people who attempt this effect don't have a reference CRT. They don't realize that the scan lines bleed and become fuzzy on the screen and are not perfect lines like the shader makes.
Minor point: don't have a common consumer grade TV of that era for reference. Actual "reference grade" CRTs of the time (such as the Sony PVM series) look almost as crisp as the perfect lines of modern retro-emulation.
Since the video game developers of that era certainly had access to reference CRTs while building games, you’re experiencing something closer to how it was originally intended to be seen.
Had a small issue with "All displays" input: the lower third of the glass does not render. If I choose one display or the other individually, it works fine.
If you use picom as a compositor you can write glsl shaders, there is some work being done twords doing full out CRT emulation at a desktop rendering level, I found the repo below[1], but on my monitor the shader does this distortion at the bottom so I think it could be improved slightly. I'd really like to see someone get the glsl shaders from libretro[2] working with picom.(which the project in OP did) if any GL wizards reading this have any advice I'd be eternally greatful
Thats.. a bit outside of what I am capable of, but maybe one day I will try maybe
Also thanks, I really appreciate the links and information in general
