Bleed for me: undoing Atari 2600 emulation perfection
Via Ian Bogost (author of the recently mentioned book Racing the Beam, chronicling the life and times of the Atari 2600), a new project to make Atari 2600 emulation more authentic by re-introducing the 'undesirable' qualities of CRT televisions that have since been stripped away, qualities like color bleed and flicker that programmers purposefully relied on.
Above, one of the five solutions by Georgia Tech Computer Science students which will eventually be worked into 2600 emulator Stella as a configurable option to bring that razor sharpness back into its proper fuzzy un-focus.
See more about the ongoing project at Bogost's site.
A TELEVISION SIMULATOR - CRT Emulation for the Atari VCS [Ian Bogost, via grandtextauto, via waxy]
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#1 – 3:00 PM April 23, 2009
ENDURO!
I never played that one back in the day, but I discovered it on the Activision Anthology for the GBA and fell in love. Very impressive and one of the few 2600 games that doesn't require rose-colored glasses to play in the present.
Also, I hope they build things like this into NES emulators next. People always talk of pixels but I never really saw (or see) individual squares of color when I played (or play) games on an actual NES. Not like it's a terrible thing to have crisp, clean video on a computer monitor, but the option is nice.
Anonymous Anonymous
#2 – 1:14 AM April 24, 2009
This comparison would be even better if we could see pictures of the games on actual CRTs, using original hardware to run them.
MagerValp
#3 – 1:29 AM April 24, 2009
I'm sorry, but I really have to protest. This is not simulating CRT televisions. Reducing the complex interaction of the color encoding, the color carrier, the bandwidth limits, the electron beam hitting phosphors, and all the other details that make up a CRT based display system into texture, delay, blur, and noise filters is... underwhelming, to say the least. Doubly so as it appears to be done on RGB pixels, and not YUV and the frequency domain.
While it's certainly true that there are picture imperfections, there's a lot more to it than that. There are some efforts at simulating it properly though, most notably in the VICE emulator suite, where they've had emulation of PAL color encoding for a few years now, and recently added even more details like even/odd line phase shift.
It's also a bit scary to see that people seem to think of modern (i.e. TFT) displays as better. CRTs' main disadvantage were sharpness and size, but in nearly every other respect they were actually better: sporting wider color gamut, better contrast, resolution independence, no latency, and supporting a wider range of vertical scan rates. While a modern TFT is better suited to the everyday tasks of users today, they're a major stumbling block when it comes to emulation.