Yeah I think of it as a stream of analogue brightness or colour data with an accompanying timing signal to make an electron gun fire in a set pattern, which our vision perceives as a persistent image.
CRT technology is IMO one of the greatest technical achievements in history for the time at which it was developed. From 1925! this is what New York, probably the most advanced place on earth at the time (?), looked like in 1925:
Here’s something cool - what came before CRTs.
The Nipkow disk. Scan lines!
That was a neat video!
I was asking something about this at the shmups forum and didn’t get any answer for it yet, but I kept headbanging on the subject that if 240p can be read to line multiple with scanline support, why the @#$% doesn’t the ossc have the ability to read from either field to produce the same effect with up to 5x multiple and have the same scanline options? Isn’t it practically doing that with 240p already??
I’ve tested a few things out on my end on some equipment (dvd-vcr combo) and from component 480i out, I was able to get a complete field separation like I do with 240p content, but I’ve no choice but to deal with ossc and it’s current method of output for reading interlaced signals. People would say you have to get an extron to restore 240p, but that’s just stupid when we have a device that probably could be updated to pull the lines already.
Also the 240p thing being “fake” is a lot of reasons why people see it as 480i on HDTV’s. It’s being processed as such because it’s getting 480 lines to begin with. Some don’t even know how to detect because much of it has to do with a similar method to Nintendo’s “Double Strike” technique (i.e. 60 fps on single line by being tapped twice instead of once)
Is there any more info on the subject for us to read into?
Now I’ve been binging on youtube CRT stuff.
A really great vid on how CRTs work:
Probably a hardware limitation. 5x mode is pushing the OSSC as it is from what I understand.