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The TTL RGBI 320x200 one looks pretty accurate to me when compared to a real 15.7khz 200-line CRT, and the render of Crystal Caves on a double-scanned VGA also looks about right as compared to an early 90's 14" VGA CRT.

Can't comment on the others, though.

In Part 2 (monochrome) the Apple II green monochrome is spot-on accurate and the Amber MDA 80x25 textmode is pretty good except that the background contrast is quite poor. A real amber MDA monitor has much deeper blacks.




The contrast issue is what I notice the most. CRTs had much more "glow" and "bleed" I guess


Many of the retro takes on CRTs seem to over-emphasize the scanlines and (perhaps in pursuit of capturing the CRT "glow") also end up over-doing the background. On a properly adjusted CRT you shouldn't be able to see any scanlines at all in areas that are displaying pure black, unless you're viewing the display in an extremely dark room.


Yeah I don't see the scanlines at all on the CRT I've been using


(Author of the script here): appreciate the observations. Pretty much all of these parameters (scanline intensity/sharpness, pixel blur, glow/halation, blackpoint for the background) can be adjusted to taste in the configuration files. :)

I tried to show the range of possibilities in the screenshots/video samples, e.g. higher-res EGA/VGA with no visible scanlines, and some amber monitor shots with deeper blacks, etc. Admittedly, this script is geared more towards simulating lower-resolution CRTs - mostly because my approach entails a large oversampling of the input.


I'm impressed with the results from your lo-tech batch file approach. The output is really quite nice.

It turns out that real CRTs also have a number of user-adjustable parameters, which of course makes it impossible to define any sort of "canonical" or most-accurate preset. :)

(Like this weird paper-white monochrome CRT that uses P7 phosphor, designed for 350-line MDA but can also handle a greyscale 15.7khz 200-line CGA input... the scanlines are so sharp that it looks 100% fake!)


Yup, multisync/multi-scan sure complicates things. :)

I'd still like to give it enough flexibility so that a preset can at least be accurate to a particular mode of operation. I actually went down the rabbit hole of looking up a precise persistence curve for the P39 phosphor (as used in the IBM 5151) - found conflicting data, but a friend will be helping out with a video and an ad-hoc program to get some results, so we'll see!




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