Literally the only reason old school gamers play on CRTs is because old games were designed for the blurry low resolution displays they provided and so look kind of bad on modern crisp displays. You could just smear vasoline on a modern LCD and get roughly the same effect, but using a CRT is less messy.
The look of CRT is important to retro gaming but do you know what the most important characteristic of CRTs for retro gaming is?
No input lag.
Play OG Super Mario Bros on a modern TV and let me know how long it is before you wanna smash the controller in frustration. The game just feels incredibly sloppy.
No input lag.
That’s wrong. The display is the small part there. And the players reaction times are leages higher even.
It’s not wrong. You can feel it.
My wife is not a gamer and even she can feel it. She hated playing on our living room TV. Said she felt like she got really bad at Mario Bros over the years or something and was disappointed.
Bought a CRT; she loves the game again and is still quite good at it actually.
Reacting to stimulus is completely different than timing inputs in a video game. A few ms of delay isn’t really going to register in a reaction test, but if you’re using constant time sensitive information on screen to accurately time your movements in a game, you can easily feel lag in the sub 5ms range.
As a guitarist, I can feel latency down to 2ms if I’m playing through a modeling amp on my PC, especially if I’m playing at high tempos. The faster you play, the greater the percentage of time between notes that latency becomes. The effect is the same in high speed video games.
It is wrong. I have a comment elsewhere in the thread breaking it down, but the short of it is that you have to include the time it takes to stream the frame to the beam, or else you’re giving CRTs an unfair advantage in measurements.
A good gaming monitor with something like the Framemeister, RetroTINK, or OSSC can give properly unnoticeable amounts of input lag.
Yeah super smash brothers melee is the peak for this. It looks fine on an lcd, and if you suck at it it’s fine, but there’s a skill level where your TV is hindering your ability to improve and you probably aren’t even winning local competition nights yet at that point.
A modern TV is a really bad example. Most modern gaming computer monitors have grey-to-grey pixel response times measured in nanoseconds. I would not be surprised if that exceeds the fade-time of CRT phosphors.
A modern TV is a really bad example.
Not when it comes to console gaming.
Still important for console gaming depending on the game, so there are console gamers who will opt for a monitor over the TV. PVP games and rhythm games being one. I got taiko and that felt off until I hooked up my switch to the monitor.
Its more that people will use and adapt to what they have as opposed to not being relevant. Even TVs gamers will try to get ones that have lower input lag in game mode. But, monitor is still the preferred route.
Static_Rocket@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Honestly surprised nobody has tried to sell some bolt on diffusing/screen mask for this reason