How do you 'Amiga'

[Toni Wilen]

(If someone already didn't know it) I hate CRTs. I hated them in 1980s. Vacuum tube based technology was obsolete already in 1960s. Only good thing is (was) best motion clarity in low refresh rates (as in 50/60Hz).

Like Daedalus said, there are too many myths and legends and all of this has been discussed dozens of times already. (even more than IDE Max transfer! )

Last few years my rule has been: Get good VRR monitor (with low range less than 50Hz and of course compatible GPU) if you want good and smooth emulation experience without most usual annoying LCD side-effects. All other options are much more complex and needs tweaking and adjustments etc..

[gimbal]

I feel so old, I had to google what VRR is. Sounds promising indeed. I need to replace mine soon so I'll keep that in mind...

[nikosidis]

Originally Posted by gimbal

I feel so old, I had to google what VRR is. Sounds promising indeed. I need to replace mine soon so I'll keep that in mind...

Haha, me to

Have to check out VRR.

I'm just going from what I see and experience. From what I seen LCD and Plasma have not done it regarding Amiga Games and scene prods. but I'm open for anything if it can better it.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

Get good VRR monitor (with low range less than 50Hz and of course compatible GPU) if you want good and smooth emulation experience without most usual annoying LCD side-effects.

Stutter is indeed annoying so VRR is a must, luckily in 2021 monitors which support it are common as muck.

But for me, an infinitely more annoying LCD side effect is the fact that old games simply look awful on them. You can hate the tech, no problem, but the fact remains that 240p games were made for, and on CRTs, and look best using this technology.

Sure, we can say it's "subjective", but you can apply this to any discussion and render it meaningless. If somebody prefers the modern look, it's fine, but to me it's rather clear that in many cases it's at least partially caused by a) the old TVs becoming unfashionable b) nearly 2 decades of exposure to the emulators/screenshots from LCDs.

For that reason, whenever I actually use an emu on an LCD (rarely, but it does happen) shaders are a must. Similar to VRR they came a long way and are now very good, not a substitute for a CRT yet, but getting close. I recommend anybody new to the subject who wants to stick with LCD displays to at least try them out. There are threads on this board where they are discussed more in-depth, eg: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=104864

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

Vacuum tube based technology was obsolete already in 1960s.

Er, no it wasn't. Color TV's didn't go all 'solid state' (except for the picture tube) until the 1970's.

I have a Toshiba Satellite 310CDS laptop (Introduced in 1996) and the dual scan passive matrix color LCD screen is awful. Not just slow, but patchy brightness, grainy blacks and bad 'ghosting'. No matter how much you adjust the brightness control it doesn't look good. Any reasonable CRT of the day would beat it on everything except geometry.

We didn't use LCD monitors back then because they didn't exist, and when they did were horrendously expensive and not that great. Here's a review of 3 models from boot Magazine in 1998. On the Panoview 745 (US$2400, equivalent to US$4000 today) "Contrast was so bad, we couldn't see any definition in menu tabs". The Philips Brilliance 4500AXC ('only' US$1900, equivalent to ~US$3100 today) had "superior image quality than the Panoview" but suffered from "stuck pixels, ghosting, and dubious font definition".

No wonder we stuck to our CRT monitors for many years. I had a very nice 19" CRT monitor on my A3000, which I only got rid of because I sold the A3000 and the monitor was too bulky and heavy to cart around (I took it to the local recycling depot and left it in a line of old monitors in the yard outside. The very next day someone rang me asking if I had a monitor of that type. Luckily the weather had been fine overnight, so they got a perfectly good working monitor for free!).

[Toni Wilen]

I meant: no display device should have had vacuum tubes after 1960s. CRT TVs shouldn't have existed in this timeline

Unfortunately there was no replacement technology until much later.

Sure, we can say it's "subjective"

Yes, it is. And thats why I won't suggest any specific shader/etc "how it looks" options when someone asks. Only possible option is: try and choose the one that you prefer.

IMHO most "CRT" shaders look really weird and don't seem to have much in common with real back in the day 108x CRT look.

[Anubis]

This quickly moved into 'I wanna my scanlines' threat...

Still not sure why people insist on those...

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

Only possible option is: try and choose the one that you prefer.

Which was the point of my post.

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

IMHO most "CRT" shaders look really weird and don't seem to have much in common with real back in the day 108x CRT look.

There are many different shaders out there. Some are corresponding to different types of CRT displays and input signals, some are fantasy extrapolations. The best ones are fully tweakable, so it's no problem to make one look like 108x monitor, which in itself was nothing special - just another CRT tube (often of inferior quality to RGB-capable TVs from that era, never even mind later ones). And it's not like they were a standard, eg in my area everybody I knew connected to TVs.

Originally Posted by Anubis

This quickly moved into 'I wanna my scanlines' threat...

Still not sure why people insist on those...

Well, this subject is a big part of "how do you Amiga" after all. To me it's much more important than some minuscule hardware differences of the computers themselves.

And, luckily, nobody has mentioned scanlines yet They're vastly overhyped btw, no TV or monitor had as thick ones as many people imagine them to be these days, and they're not the only reason that makes CRTs awesome.

[nikosidis]

When most retro stuff where made, it was made with CRT displays for the good and the bad. Gfx were made back then with scanlines in mind. Without it, it does not look right to me. Sure can be emulated but from what I seen it does not look like the real thing.

I would say good CRT displays are most for the good. Still today they give fantastic picture with great contrast and colours.

When LCD displays started to be normal they looked so washed out with bad contrast and slow response. Recent years they started to be much better but the picture still look at little artifactual to me. At least when things are getting dark. LCD native contrast will never be great.
Plasma and OLED are much better but they are not used in monitors.

Just like "Dreadnought" said. This is very much a part of the topic.
This is why I tried to use WinUAE with a CRT monitor before I went back to original hardware.
WinUAE with a CRT gave me more of the real deal than if you put it the other way around.
Connecting original Amiga hardware to a LCD screen.
One of the problems with Windows and WinUAE is that it is problematic to send out the original Amiga screenmodes. GFX-cards do not support that low resolutions anymore. I tried to create some in advanced, Nvidia settings, but it was a hit and miss thing. Complicated to say the least.

Anyway, VRR and a compatible GFX-card.
Still today that cheap LCD monitors does not give good picture quality.
What money are we talking here?
I'm sure a lot!! Much more than a used 1084 monitor. Even if that monitor would cost 400 Euro.
It will not be right aspect either. Even if you can have blacks on the side I do not like it.
Real 4:3 is what counts to me.

[daxb]

Scanlines seems to be a religion. Do you believe?!

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by daxb

Scanlines seems to be a religion. Do you believe?!

Originally Posted by dreadnought

They're vastly overhyped

Anyway, if we were talking about Yet Another Accelerator, or why A500 is < or > than A600, I guess it would be fine...

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by Anubis

Still not sure why people insist on those...

I don't insist, I just think they look cool.

[Anubis]

Originally Posted by gimbal

I don't insist, I just think they look cool.

Sure, for how long?

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by daxb

Scanlines seems to be a religion. Do you believe?!

Right.

In reality, as nikosidis pointed out, games were generally designed to look good on CRTs. The scan lines in non-interlace cause the picture to be darker, so lighter colours were chosen to compensate for this. When the same graphics are displayed on an LCD they look washed out unless 'scan lines' are introduced to reproduce the original display.

On the other hand it is possible to have too much gap between the scan lines. I have an NEC multisync CRT monitor that is annoying to use in 15kHz because the gaps between the scan lines are the same height as the scan lines themselves. This makes the picture very dark and 'thin', like looking through fine Venetian blinds. This is the price you pay for having a sharp picture in 31kHz on a multisync CRT.

CRTs also have more smoothed and rounded pixels caused by the shape of the electron beam. On an LCD screen the low resolution pixels come out as little squares that make the image a lot more 'jaggy', and vertical lines are hard edged instead of being a bit smeared. Thin vertical lines were often made thicker to compensate for the smoothing, which then makes them look too thick on an LCD screen.

In composite video the low chrominance bandwidth causes color bleeding and changes the look of the image. Games designed for computers that normally connect to a TV via composite or RF (including some Amigas) were usually optimized to minimize bleeding, or in some cases even made use of it to get a different effect. Here too the dark parts between the scan lines help to increase contrast and make the picture look sharper.

A good shader would reproduce composite artifacting when appropriate. However I play ZX Spectrum games on my A1200 connected to an LCD TV in composite, and it looks almost identical to a real Spectrum without the emulator having to do anything!

[SquawkBox]

Well, if you don't have deep pockets, the answer is pretty simple : Get an A500 with Gotek and stick with emulation for accessing WHDLoad installables (as long as the native screen is displayed on a CRT).

[lyzanxia]

I myself tried emulation and loved it back then. But went with real hardware just for nostalgia reasons I guess.. nothing beats a yellowed real a500

Like said, an a500 with a gotek and rgb2hdmi (also has scanlines option ) works fine for most stuff.

[P-J]

Depends what you want to do, I guess. For gaming I use my phone with RetroArch + WHDLoad and a Razer Kishi. Almost the entire Amiga game library in your pocket.

[UberFreak]

Currently using two setups, mostly for demo watching.

1. For OCS stuff: A500 512kb+512kb, kick 1.2/1.3 switcher and Gotek
2. For AGA: A4000/060 with RTG and scan-doubler (auto switchable)

Both running on CRT (PVM + VGA monitor).