How to Play Your Retro Games as Authentically as Possible

Gizmodo

5 days ago

It's more than mere nostalgia. Old games still look better on older screens. As much as you may love playing that past favorite from your childhood, the games you're emulating on your LCD or OLED displays don't look anything like they did back in the day. No, it's not that your high-contrast HDR display is somehow not good enough for 16-bit pixel art; it's down to a combination of screen technology, system emulation, and the forward march of display resolution sizes. There are a few expensive ways to bring back the old-school feel, but fear not. There are more than a few affordable solutions to relive your games the way they were meant to be experienced.
Before we get started, let's take a moment to mention the collection of modern systems that do a great job of making your games feel true to the original, but on modern systems. There's a growing number of emulation devices that can play older cartridges without any need for conversion cables. Ignoring the fact that handhelds are much easier to get into than the bigger consoles, there are numerous Game Boy-like devices that cost less than $100. We've enjoyed models like the TrimUI Brick and Anbernic RG34XXSP, but despite their pedigree, the most fine-tuned Game Boy Color recreation is currently the ModRetro Chromatic with its pixel-perfect screen. However, if you don't want to deal with ModRetro lead Palmer Luckey's other job as an arms dealer, you could check out the Analogue Pocket. Beyond handhelds, there are many controller options that recreate the feel of older systems, from Nintendo's own GameCube controller exclusive to Switch 2, to Gulikit's Sega Genesis-like Elves 2 Pro device, to 8BitDo's mod kits for the Nintendo 64 controller that lets you play them on modern systems. You don't have to look too hard to find something that emulates the feel of retro content.
Strange as it sounds, acquiring the gaming hardware and software is the easy part. The true test of your retro chops is how far you'd go for a quality screen. The olden days of gaming were built for big, boxy cathode-ray tube televisions. These screens sat in front of an array of vacuum tubes capable of shooting electrons to display images on a phosphorescent screen. Those color images you see on your childhood TV were created by controlling three separate beams representing the three primary colors: red, green, and blue. Recreating that effect on a flatscreen isn't easy, even with official console remakes. The Atari 7800+ lets you play both Atari 2600 and Atari 7800 cartridges from any TV, though it won't offer picture-perfect visuals. There are future systems like the upcoming Analogue 3D that can play your N64 cartridges on a 4K display with 'CRT reference quality' even on a flatscreen. Unfortunately the system was delayed until next month, with the console maker citing tariffs for its ongoing shipping issues. Soon we'll even have a Commodore 64 emulation machine, but the problem will continue to be sourcing a screen that will display these games accurately to how they appeared at the time.
When you get up close and personal to a CRT TV, you'll start to see a collection of phosphor dots generating each of the colors you see on the screen. Game developers of the time understood this technology and built their games around it. Pixel art of today looks blocky—and while that has its own charm—a game present on a CRT TV with scanlines muddled these individual pixels together, akin to how an oil painter blends colors on a canvas. It created an image that would look like actual art, rather than a blocky approximation of an image. Today's larger screens with higher resolutions only exacerbate the problem. The old 8-bit titles of the NES days ran on screens showing 256 x 240 pixels. A 4K panel displays images at 3,840 x 2,160. The picture has to upscale by 15 times to display fully on a modern television, and that will simply look piss-poor compared to what you're used to.
Some systems produce better visuals for old-school games. The NES Classic emulated some of Nintendo's most-touted games with better fidelity than most third-party emulators. However, the reason games looked the way they did is not only a result of the limitations of the consoles themselves but also of the screens. For a full explanation, check out this video from YouTuber Displaced Gamers, which breaks down how CRT standards—all those that remained unchanged for decades—helped inform how game developers created games with and for CRT televisions.
Which brings us to the problem with emulating games today. LCD technology does not present scanlines natively, which means every time you play Street Fighter II on today's flat panels, it will look blocky and unappealing. Not only that, but games were built with the squared, 4:3 screens of yesteryear. That matters for more than just resolution. Super Mario Bros. was a platformer innovator because it kept the screen moving in line with Mario from screen to screen, though it also allowed players to traipse backwards up to the screen edge. Few games up through the GameCube and PlayStation 2 era accounted for widescreens. Out of all the retro games Nintendo has made for Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscribers, only Super Mario Strikers supports the 16:9 aspect ratio natively.
You can simply buy a CRT TV or monitor secondhand, hook up a retro console to its old ports, and play away. But those of us who aren't collectors or don't have the space for even more screens have to be far more choosy.
As far as old monitors go, you won't have much difficulty finding a CRT device on eBay or through other resellers. As retro gaming has become more popular, prices on older tech have gotten untenable. If you're shopping around, you also should get to know the terminology. You'll see some old CRT monitors claim they are 'NTSC'. That acornym denoted the U.S. standard for analog TVs throughout the 20th century before the popularization of digital displays. You should look for one of these TVs if you're trying to accurately depict the scanlines of games from your childhood. Meanwhile, PVM TVs were professional-grade monitors that could produce clearer images though they won't be as accurate as what the average 1980s console owner would expect. If you don't plan on transforming your basement into a recreation of your gaming den, you're better off with a monitor. For example, the Commodore 1702 color video CRT monitor from 1984 is compact enough to fit on most desks, plus they fit the time period. They also go for well over $200 on eBay, not accounting for delivery. Sony Trinitron monitors and TVs from back in the day could easily cost than $300. If you can't find one cheap online, you're better off searching your local thrift stores for a piece of TV history rather than paying exorbitant prices to ship your heavy TV across the country.
In today's retro-fueled environment, it is easier to connect an old console to a modern TV. Upscaling devices like the RetroTINK-5X Pro can take old-school consoles and their limited resolution up to 1080p. With a few extra HDMI converstion cables, you would be good to go. The big problem is your games won't look accurate on a modern TV. If you want to see the old-school pixel art in its prime, modern conversions are on the wrong tack.
What if you don't have an old-school console but happen to have an ancient CRT TV lying around? With enough time, patience, and money, you could potentially hook up a modern system to a CRT TV. At the very least, you'll need an HDMI-to-AV adapter, but it's often more complicated. Depending on the system you're emulating, you may need to convert an image to a lower resolution, in which case you'll need a separate transcoder or downscaler. Most people are better off finding modern ways to recreate the look of retro titles using software.
What if you can't acquire a CRT TV and you instead want to play official retro recreations or use definitely not-official emulators? Nintendo's own gallery of retro titles includes the option for a scanline filter applied over the game image. However, this is more of an aesthetic choice than anything. The scanlines effectively break up an image so you're not seeing every individual pixel, but they're not introducing the blur needed to fully merge pixels into a more seamless image. The best virtual recreation you can achieve is through third-party emulators and shaders. These are a separate instance of visuals on top of whatever game your system is rendering. With some visual trickery, modders have managed to craft visuals so close to CRT, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference unless you looked at each frame pixel by pixel.
First, let's briefly discuss what emulation is. Essentially, independent creators recreate the hardware of a console, whether it's a Commodore 64 or a Nintendo Wii U, as software. The more powerful the system, the more complicated and demanding the emulation. This means you can play any number of homebrewed games built for these systems, but most players use them to play games ripped from their cartridges or discs, collectively known as ROMs. The emulators are, for the most part, legal to download, but ROMs exist in a much more tenuous state. We can't tell you how or where to get ROMs, and if you emulate ROMs you should know the legalities of it in your region (typically boiling down to only playing ROMs for which you own a legal copy of). Gizmodo doesn't condone piracy. But you can feel safe dealing with the emulators or the front-ends to emulators, namely Retroarch.
Thankfully, the active scene of retro emulation offers us great options for emulating games and old-school visuals alike. Emulation platform RetroArch is open to a host of shaders that can offer an image as close to CRT as possible. Of course, you'll still lack those wavy lines and the static-fueled glow that was emblematic of old-school play. There are a legion of independent developers creating CRT shaders, all of which have different flavors that try to maximize the accuracy of the on-screen image. Shader packs like Mega Bezel go as far as to include options that simulate the curvature of non-flat CRT TVs. Others may add a green filter or a 'VHS effect' to introduce more visual distortion to an image. For the sake of actually playing your games, simpler is better. The issue with this is, depending on your shaders, you could introduce stuttering or frame rate dips, depending on how capable your system is. Shaders are very CPU dependent, and if you device isn't up to the task you may need to hold off on some more intensive shaders in favor of others.
RetroArch's shader library is extensive, and anybody starting out will likely be confused out of their gourd. To enable a shader in RetroArch, you need to be in a game then access the 'Quick Menu' (by default F1 on keyboard) then go to 'Shaders' and turn them on. From there, you'll see a laundry list of shader presets to enable, and it's not easy to find you're looking for. Mega Bezel, for instance, is found under 'shaders_slang, bezel, Mega_Bezel.' Even then, you'll find so many to choose from, and you can even create your own preset. CyberLab on Libretro forums created some of my favorite preset shader settings, though you need to install them into the correct folder yourself. You don't necessarily want to use the same shader for every game, either. A Game Boy look won't be anywhere near the same as what you should see on CRT.
RetroArch is compatible with most systems you can think of, including hacked consoles. The issue is, by itself, it can be a complicated piece of software to use, especially on PC. YouTuber Russ Crandall on his channel Retro Game Corps has a great starter guide for the software. Simplicity is paramount, which is why my personal favorite emulation device is the Steam Deck, and it's what I recommend to most people who want to play games up through the PSP and still use some intense shaders. For ease, I prefer EmuDeck, which is a larger collection of emulators that install all in one batch, making it easy to plug in your various ROMs without much fuss. It also installs RetroArch, which makes things easy. Installing new shaders you find online can be complicated, since the Steam Deck hides some folders in desktop mode, but YouTube channel Retro Crisis has some videos to help you navigate the file path.
The next thing you need to think about is the size of your native display compared to the game you're playing. If the emulated content was made for a screen at 240p or even 480p, then you may not get the correct look if you let it upscale naturally. For games that used to run on handhelds like the Game Boy, it's better to adjust for integer scaling. This ensures the game upscales by a whole number rather than any decimals. Now, when you're playing your game, you won't have a blown-up ultra-wide image that matches the device's native widescreen. If you're more focused on console emulation, then different shaders may require you to input different settings into RetroArch. For instance, Mega Bezel asks users to disable integer scaling and allow for its custom TV framing.
There are so many dials you can turn to achieve some extra fidelity with your retro games, no matter the size and resolution of your screen. As hard as you work to fine-tune each shader, emulation and shaders will never offer anything as evocative as a static-filled CRT screen. But we can get close, and for the sake of playing some great games with modern amendities, close is more than good enough.