It’s just this comparison. 
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That’s what it looks like on my sets. I’m at work so I can’t upload pics, but it is only red that does it. I notice it most on the SNES with Yoshi’s Island. I’ve never tested PS1 with anything other than PS2 component output. At least not in the last decade!
I follow the CRT_Pixels account on Twitter. There’s a little too much drama for my taste and I feel like it is an uphill battle trying to show CRTs through photos and even digital video captures (unless you go all out with equipment), but I am a sucker for CRT photos so I just don’t interact beyond looking at the comparisons.
No matter how you word it or display the differences it doesn’t stop people from acting like it’s a competition/telling them what they should like.
Showing what something would look like on an actual CRT isn’t telling anyone that they should like it more or that their preference is wrong yet people will always see it that way.
Hell, I have a number of CRTs and love the original look but I also am fine with the waterfall in Sonic not looking like the designers intended while still recognizing how amazing it was that things like that were made.
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I’m right there with you. I’m a CRT die-hard but I know it is just not everyone’s bag, and stuff like modern upscalers and emulation looks great on flat panels. I wonder sometimes how much of this is just made up/straw man stuff. How many people are arguing in good faith (not just being pedantic) about composite/RF blending and aspect ratios, and how much of that is just people repeating the fact that those people are out there?
I mean, I think composite blending is neat and it is cool that some games use it to make things transparent/more solid, but others don’t. In some games circles and squares are deformed in 4:3, others at 8:7. It just isn’t a monolithic thing and no one solution is perfect for all games. I’m sure not changing cables and inputs on a per-game basis.
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It’s almost as if someone is throwing a CRT at them or something if they don’t agree.
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Great points. I agree.
Symphony of the night is classic for this.
All the circles in that game are ellipses (clocks etc).
I played around with the vertical size on my monitor to stretch it out, and that cuts off the main menu. Am I doing it wrong? Or is the game wrong?
There are plenty of methods of displaying the games in period accurate ways, whether it’s original CRTs or filters, who cares how anyone enjoys them.
Composite blending is even an option on some Mister cores.
The whole thing is another form of gatekeeping the elusive “true retro game enthusiast”, and trying to defend subjective enjoyment to exclusion of all others is pointless and divisive.
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SotN is weird in a number of ways on a CRT, size wise. Certain things will always be cut off unless you make sure to show like all the under scan area, but if you do that there will be dead space in a lot of other scenes. Last time I tried fiddling around with it it felt like it wasn’t just resolution differences between gameplay, cutscenes, and menus, but that each were offset differently too.
Lol. Sadly, I’d buy this faster than the OLED model.
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Me too!
OMG
SCART and VGA input card for L5 owners (appears a few others per Castlemanias website too)
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This is amazing, Martin is a cool dude too - he helped me troubleshoot my 129x clone board when I got a test board.
Videos like this make me so jealous of anyone with a 20L5 though.
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Holy crap. I really wish this kind of card existed when I was building my setup. It would’ve saved me some shelf space so that I never needed to go down the bnc matrix rabbit hole.
If I ever need more shelf space though, I’m definitely buying this and removing the bnc switch from my setup.
Yea, I really wish it were a more common set so that more people could own it. I wish I bought two of them when I had the chance (and I did actually have that chance) knowing just how rare they would be now. That was only 4 years ago.
In an ideal world, the 20l5 would be a dime a dozen and they’d still be making sets like it today.
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It makes me wish I didn’t pass on the ones that I did. Like every single one of the high priced games I held out on; “oh I’ll just see if I can get it cheaper later/elsewhere”.
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I’m pretty sure Mario 64 exhibits this anomaly around the assets in the top right even when using an upscaler. I recall going through troubleshooting when seeing this on my PVM as well as OSSC… only for Mario 64 and only in the top right area like your screenshot. I came to the conclusion it’s just built like this into Mario 64.
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So sad. I finally dug out my Atari 800XL but the little JVC tv I found by the road isn’t working anymore. When I powered it up last month it seemed fine but now it’s weird…the OSD displays bright and clear, while the picture itself is suuuuper dark. Everything is pitch black unless I jack up COLOR, PICTURE, and BRIGHT to max and even then I can just barely make out bits of color. I love the look of this set but I guess it wasn’t meant to be.
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Have you tested it with another console to make sure it’s not the 800XL?
Yeah, my VCR looks equally terrible on the JVC and the 800XL works great on another TV. Here are some pictures of the Atari on the JVC with settings maxed: Imgur: The magic of the Internet
Colors are freaky and after a few minutes it slowly goes dark until I unplug the power, so something is dying for sure. It all just struck me as weird since the OSD is bright and clear as day. Probably not worth pursuing since I have no repair skills. :[
Yeah the OSD is probably hooked up internally through RGB, so it’s a completely different circuit that the input path.
What inputs does it have, just RF?
That makes sense. Yep, JVC C-1320 from 1991 so pretty dang old but would’ve been perfect for the 800XL.