I get your point, but also on the other hand, art is subjective, and people subjectively appreciate older / imperfect versions of things. Consider film grain - it's an artifact, an unintentional or unwanted side-effect of how films used to be made. But because it was a part of a production, people wanted it back - it gets added artificially to modern films, added as filters to video games, and video encoding has special features to support it without affecting compression negatively too much. Or take video games, particularly 2d / pixelart ones - they were built for CRT displays and relatively low resolutions. They can remake them now with multiples of the original resolution and fidelity, but for many people it loses some of it. Some art doesn't translate at all - take this digitized artwork from Castlevania, which was digitized specifically for display on CRT displays but which loses all charm (e.g. the eyes reduced to a single pixel) when rendered somewhere else: x.com/CRTpixels/status/1408451743214616… But this probably applies to film as well; if a film was made for a 35mm projector from the 70's, it won't look good or anywhere near that "experience" on a modern day 4K OLED display without editing. At the end of the day I think the viewer should be given options and choices. And for a good while it looked like they would - with DVD and blu-ray offering options like different audio tracks, camera angles, and different versions of the same film in one package. But that never materialized because I suppose it's only a wish from purists. And at that point they're competing with piracy and internet hobbyists like the article.

Example of how the art of the time designed for soft edges and blur. Notice the single pixel eyes in the sharp version, and how the bleeding of the original display works to the arts advantage. x.com/CRTpixels/status/1408451743214616…...

Not all developers are/were equal. Some of the comparison shots between the raw bitmap and the CRT image can be absolutely shocking with talented artists. x.com/CRTpixels/status/1408451743214616…

Dracula, Castlevania: twitter.com/CRTpixels/status/1408451743… Tina, Final Fantasy 6: twitter.com/CRTpixels/status/1461386650… (Amano concept art of her: static.wikia.nocookie.net/finalfantasy…...) The "retro pixel art look" is misplaced nostalgia by people who were too young for the original releases of these games and may have played them on early emulators. Developers knew what they were doing and worked hard on making it look good on the actual hardware; we're just recovering that in software.

The example in this tweet is amazing: twitter.com/CRTpixels/status/1408451743… Single red pixels bleed into each other, creating eyes that span multiple pixels. It's an incredible effect.

> What is the future for RGB-output video cards looking like? Are there more specialised cards still in production? Sadly, no graphics card manufacturer still makes cards with native analog RGB output and, AFAIK there haven't been any since ~2015. There may be cards which have analog output but it's not natively generated with variable analog timing (dot clocks etc). Instead it's created as a native digital signal and then converted to analog, at which point it's no better than adding an analog converter externally to an HDMI or Displayport output connector (this is pointless and not worth doing). On the positive side, there are a ton of used graphics cards with native analog output available on eBay for dirt cheap (or free if you have PC hobbyist friends or access to a typical corporate or edu recycle pile). Arcade cabinet games which output to CRT monitors stopped being made by around 2005 and game consoles which hooked to CRT TVs ended with the sixth generation (PS2, Gamecube, Dreamcast). This is good news because emulating the vast majority of arcade cabinet and console games up through the early 2000s doesn't require a fast GPU or CPU so using an older GPU with native analog output does everything you need (and saves a lot of money). The last, best GPU made with native analog output was the Radeon R9 380x launched at the end of 2015. I have this card in my arcade cabinet emulation system (plugged into a 2014 HP ProDesk 600 G1 with i5-4590 Haswell CPU (~$70 used on eBay)). This PC is more than fast enough to perfectly emulate everything relevant to CRT gaming and the 380x GPU is substantial overkill. Being the last analog output card, the 380x is overpriced on eBay at >$50 but I only got it because I have a quite rare Wells Gardner D9200 quad-sync industrial CRT made specifically for arcade cabinets and that monitor is fairly unique because it can scan up to 38Khz (800x600 resolution). No games originally designed for CRTs use resolutions that high so it's only relevant for some PS2 games, and only then if I use non-authentic, 2x upscaling or HD texture packs in the emulator. So, I might theoretically, occasionally actually need the otherwise uselessly excess power of the 380x. If you're not me, just use almost any Radeon graphics card from 2012-2014 which can be had for ~$10-$15 to drive your CRT with GroovyMAME. Card compatibility list: emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Gr…). GroovyMAME forum: forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/boar… > And are these tri-/quad-sync analog CRTs still manufactured? All CRT manufacturing stopped around 2010. I was fortunate to buy my industrial-grade, quad-sync CRT new directly from the manufacturer in 2009. However, there are lot of used CRT TVs locally available from Craigslist and thrift stores, many of them for free or close to it. Higher quality CRTs like the Sony PVM and BVM series made for video production studios and broadcasters are now collectables selling for astronomical prices. However, high-quality consumer TVs from the late 90s and early 2000s, like Sony WEGA and any of dozens of models based on the well-regarded Sony BA-5 chassis, can be had in good condition for fairly reasonable prices. Many of these can also be modded to accept direct analog RGB input in addition to composite or S-Video, elevating their quality significantly higher (Modding Guide: sector.sunthar.com/guides/crt-rgb-mod/s…). With the exploding interest in CRT retro gaming (for example: reddit.com/r/crtgaming), I'm surprised no one has yet restarted CRT manufacturing but CRTs are pretty complex beasts, essentially a kaiju-scale vacuum tube with arcane analog driver circuitry bolted on. > I feel like modern television hardware is only just beginning to catch up To be fair, with expanded color spaces, higher contrast, wide color gamuts (HDR10 etc), high-nits, faster gray-to-gray response times, black frame insertion and VRR, the latest, most expensive digital flat screen tech is getting closer in many ways. I can imagine it maybe getting there in the future but, unfortunately, the hardest part may be actually finding a modern television without ads, apps, online updates and DLC bloat. Although I'm a retro purist and will never part with my beloved CRT-based emulation cabinet, I know not everyone is quite as obsessed or may not have space for such a system. So, it's important to also share that in recent years modern GPU-based pixel shader CRT emulation has gotten impressively closer to emulating analog CRTs, including shadow masks, analog glow, glass warping and even ray-traced bezel reflections. If you can't play on a real CRT, I encourage everyone to at least play games which were originally created for CRTs via CRT emulation. It's easy to do and retro pixel art looks so much better when presented as originally intended. See this image comparison: x.com/CRTpixels/status/1408451743214616…. Without CRT scanlines and phosphor glow, the art looks terrible and is just completely wrong. Check out Retroarch's shader community (forums.libretro.com/c/retroarch-additio…...) and ReShade.

Analog video: - RGB (including VGA) and component (YCbCr, green/blue/red RCA jacks) video are theoretically lossless encodings. S-Video blurs color information (chroma) horizontally, but has theoretically unlimited brightness (luma) bandwidth horizontally. - Composite video (single yellow RCA plug), as well as RF, encodes color as textured patterns (a 3.58 MHz sine wave in QAM with variable amplitude and phase) added to a black-and-white signal. TVs rely on various filters to separate color and brightness information, inevitably resulting in horizontal color blur, some degree of brightness blur, and (with some video sources and TVs) horizontal changes in brightness being interpreted as color, or changes in color being interpreted as brightness dot crawl. - - Some games were actually built to rely on composite video to blur color horizontally (twitter.com/CRTpixels/status/1408451743…), or even smooth out dithering (twitter.com/CRTpixels/status/1454896073…). As for my personal setup, I mostly play GC/Wii games (rather than earlier generations of consoles), and run it through a component cable (lossless) at 480p (no interlacing), through a GBS-Control transcoder/scaler, into a Gateway VX720 17-inch Diamondtron VGA monitor. This monitor is useful because it's relatively compact compared to large TVs, has excellent geometry and no audible whine (31 KHz is ultrasonic), and is sharp enough to be used as a computer monitor. The downside of using this monitor with console games is that the phosphors are too fine to add texture, the image (electron beam focusing/scanline size) is too sharp to act as antialiasing like a real TV (so I have to simulate it with bilinear scaling to 960p), and it cannot display 240p games properly unless upscaled like you were displaying on a LCD. Sometimes I also plug this monitor into my PC (RX570 -> plugable.com/products/dpm-vgaf) and use it as a second monitor. I bought this DP++-to-VGA dongle because I heard that DP-to-VGA dongles are less likely to have image quality problems than HDMI-to-VGA dongles, but unfortunately most of my devices don't have DP ports so I can't use this dongle with any of my laptops. Additionally, my monitor doesn't broadcast EDID data when the front power switch is turned off (I power it down when not in use to reduce CRT wear). And my DP++-to-VGA adapter identifies itself as an "unrecognized but present output" when the VGA cable is unplugged or EDID is missing. So for my computer to properly recognize my monitor, I have to first power on the monitor and plug in the VGA cable to the dongle, then plug the dongle into the DP port (and if it's already plugged in, unplug it first, DP latch and all). I used to have a 24-inch flat-screen Trinitron SDTV given away by another person. Unfortunately, the screen geometry linearity was poor due to high deflection angles (objects were wider in the left and right of the screen, causing scrolling 2D games to warp and distort unnaturally) and wide pincushion at the top of the screen. Additionally, the TV only ran at 15 KHz, did not support 480p from my Wii (which improves fine detail in fast motion), and had painful levels of high-pitched whine requiring I wear headphones and/or put layers of sound-muffling clothing around the TV's vents (and set up a forced-air cooling fan to replace the obstructed air circulation). I ended up giving it away for free (after two people on Facebook Marketplace ghosted me). Sadly it's now common for eBay and Marketplace sellers to offer CRT TVs and monitors at absurdly inflated prices, waiting for a desperate buyer to pay hundreds (or thousands for BVMs and widescreen PC monitors) of dollars for a monitor, or most likely sitting on their listing for months on end with no takers. These listings tend to clog up search results if you're looking for a CRT TV. I'd advise you to look out for the occasional "free TV" Craigslist/Marketplace listings (and mythical "free VGA monitor" offers), or see if any electronics recyclers will sell their CRTs to you at a reasonable price ($40 for a 17 inch VGA isn't a small amount of money to drop, but it's downright generous compared to the average eBay scalper).

The reason they want to emulate CRTs is because the pixel art of some 2D games are designed around the artifacts of CRTs. twitter.com/CRTpixels/status/1408451743…...

Thing is, CRT displays do a kind of smoothing on pixels twitter.com/CRTpixels/status/1408451743…