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24" Widescreen CRT (FW900) From Ebay arrived,Comments.

XoR_ said:
That sounds pretty amazing. Didn't knew that there exist method to reprogram video mode in real time by software.
Too bad I don't have any compatible GPU on hand to play with.


240p 120Hz with BFI looks very similar to standard VGA 480p60 with "scanlines" effect. There are differences but not really that big.
Each line actually draws in the same time - horizontal frequency is the same.
Brightness is the same, just in one case you drop 50% of the pixels by not drawing whole frames and in other case you don't draw every second line.

And VGA monitors usually don't have luminance to spare for such things so you do get rather dark picture. Unless its one of these super hiper bright models.

Sharpness itself... it is like kinda much more PVM than PVM ever is.
That said 240p on 21 inch PVMs is very comparable to 480p with scanlines (or like I said 240p120 + BFI) on smaller VGA monitor and it already is a bit too clinical. I mean 14 or at most 15 inch.
Just if you take 21 inch VGA CRT which is showing nice scanlines at even 768 lines and draw much much less lines you get image which does looks ridiculous.

That said I wouldn't say VGA CRTs are hopeless.
In fact you can always set very high vertical resolution and use CRT shader.
I did comparisons between just MISTer FPGA scaler on 17 inch VGA CRT vs 17 inch JVC professional monitor with very similar CRT tube between them and was able to get result which looked almost identical.
Also unlike dropping whole lines or whole frames CRT shaders typically don't loose as much brightness and can reproduce very specific coloristic effects older games often depended on for proper looks.

Not sure if emudriver works with non-240p modes though.
I guess I'll need to get some Radeon for testing.

Otherwise I yesterday got OSSC Pro and will be testing its 240p/480i capabilities on PS5 Pro 😃

BTW. You are totally right with the "get TV" angle. You can grab especially big CRT TVs for the price of driving in to someone house and just taking it from their hands and big TVs have relatively much sharper picture and dare I say it: very optimal. Kinda like I have 15 inch PVM and it has 'optimal' sharpness. Big Trinitron TV is just scaling such medium size PVM up. And another advantage of big TV is price. PVM and other professional monitors are crazy expensive.
Of course VGA monitors aren't super expensive yet but compared to big TVs...


You don't need or even want video modes like 256x240.
There wouldn't be any difference compared to e.g. 2048x240 and you don't really know if this game for a system which seemingly only has 256 pixels wide like SNES isn't really using some tricks and only looks good with 512 pixels wide. Not to mention some systems have different resolutions like Genesis/Megadrive has games with 256 and 320 pixels wide.

Of course probably want emudriver anyways if like EI says it was specifically made to resolve all issues with video mode switching.
Alternatively like I say you should rather use very high resolution (integer multiple of system's vertical resolution) and use CRT shader. Much better effect than trying to have real 240 lines which in an ideal form so with BFI doesn't look any different than most basic 480p with scanlines.
Click to expand...
genuine 240p looked prettier to me than high resolutions with filters, but it is true that 2560x240p looked the same as 256x240 and 320x240.
 
juanme555 said:
genuine 240p looked prettier to me than high resolutions with filters, but it is true that 2560x240p looked the same as 256x240 and 320x240.
Click to expand...
It depends on the filters and even more on what you yourself like.
Many people rave about something like bigger 21 inch PVMs as reference to how 240p should look like but to me it looks about the same as scaled up small 15-15 inch VGA CRT and already not ideal.
I like how smaller 14-17 inch professional monitors look like and this is what CRT shaders/filters can give once paired with very high resolution.

Also VGA has no genuine 240p because when you read 240p it is implied it is 15KHz signal so also 60Hz. If you modded VGA monitor to support 15KHz signals then you would get brighter picture with thicker scanlines thus less gaps.
Of course if you run 240p on VGA CRT at 31KHz but don't add BFI you don't loose any brightness by dropping any form of pixels and image kinda looks nicer than just line doubling. Then however you do get worse motion clarity because then you have double ghosting - a kind of sample&hold motion blur. In fact sample&hold motion blur is kinda like CRT with frame rate going in to infinity. And many sample&hold displays didn't even have that but rather they did flicker but at very high frequency. Often 175Hz.

----------------------------------
Anyways, just got OSSC Pro and testing it.
It can produce 240p/480i for 14KHz TVs and all that.

However the other feature which I hope will work without much issues but which I never heard anyone mention is: fixing 1080p on VGA CRTs.
I can use 1080p on my consoles on FW900 just fine but there are geometry issues near the edges because blanking periods are too short because 1080p signal was never intended to be consumed by CRTs or at least in the raw form. Upscaler can help with that by rescaling signal to be CRT compatible giving fixed geometry.

What could perhaps also be possible would be 1440p but here it would be much harder starting from needing really high bandwidth input which upscalers currently don't really have and HDMI to VGA adapter. All high bandwidth adapters I have heard about are DP to VGA. Of course if upscaler could capture 1440p from PS5 I could then use HDMI to DP for 4K resolutions and then my Delock to do actual D/A conversion.
For now however not even normal resolutions like 720p or 1080p work on PS5. Reported bug. Looks to be a HDMI handshake issue. Also HDFury VRRoom didn't help with different issue. Kinda disappointing but I was able to test downscaling and BFI adding using HDMI to VGA adapter.

Anyways, I got add-on with Composite and S-Video so now I can get all sorts of high quality 15KHz signals to my VGA monitors 🥰
 
XoR_ said:
It depends on the filters and even more on what you yourself like.
Many people rave about something like bigger 21 inch PVMs as reference to how 240p should look like but to me it looks about the same as scaled up small 15-15 inch VGA CRT and already not ideal.
I like how smaller 14-17 inch professional monitors look like and this is what CRT shaders/filters can give once paired with very high resolution.

Also VGA has no genuine 240p because when you read 240p it is implied it is 15KHz signal so also 60Hz. If you modded VGA monitor to support 15KHz signals then you would get brighter picture with thicker scanlines thus less gaps.
Of course if you run 240p on VGA CRT at 31KHz but don't add BFI you don't loose any brightness by dropping any form of pixels and image kinda looks nicer than just line doubling. Then however you do get worse motion clarity because then you have double ghosting - a kind of sample&hold motion blur. In fact sample&hold motion blur is kinda like CRT with frame rate going in to infinity. And many sample&hold displays didn't even have that but rather they did flicker but at very high frequency. Often 175Hz.

----------------------------------
Anyways, just got OSSC Pro and testing it.
It can produce 240p/480i for 14KHz TVs and all that.

However the other feature which I hope will work without much issues but which I never heard anyone mention is: fixing 1080p on VGA CRTs.
I can use 1080p on my consoles on FW900 just fine but there are geometry issues near the edges because blanking periods are too short because 1080p signal was never intended to be consumed by CRTs or at least in the raw form. Upscaler can help with that by rescaling signal to be CRT compatible giving fixed geometry.

What could perhaps also be possible would be 1440p but here it would be much harder starting from needing really high bandwidth input which upscalers currently don't really have and HDMI to VGA adapter. All high bandwidth adapters I have heard about are DP to VGA. Of course if upscaler could capture 1440p from PS5 I could then use HDMI to DP for 4K resolutions and then my Delock to do actual D/A conversion.
For now however not even normal resolutions like 720p or 1080p work on PS5. Reported bug. Looks to be a HDMI handshake issue. Also HDFury VRRoom didn't help with different issue. Kinda disappointing but I was able to test downscaling and BFI adding using HDMI to VGA adapter.

Anyways, I got add-on with Composite and S-Video so now I can get all sorts of high quality 15KHz signals to my VGA monitors 🥰
Click to expand...
eh no, 240p just means 240 vertical pixels on progressive scan , it cant imply 60hz because pal and ntsc had different refresh rates, i would grant you that you definitely wouldnt think of 120hz but thats why retroarch has bfi.
In any case, you are objectively correct in that pc crt's are too sharp, the real ideal pic is just composite or RF , i dont think that 3rd through 5th gen games should be sharp, a BVM/PVM is way too sharp, but despite all the hard work and great progress that's been made in software filters and even hardware scalers like the retrothink , its still not as convincing as genuine 240p whether its 240p 50hz, 60hz or 120hz with bfi , something feels off in 2D games and these filters make 3D games look way too cartooney, an ideal monitor would be something that had a range from 15kHz up to 90 something kHz , these were called multi-sync monitors and they are even more rare than 16:9 crt monitors , but the few people that have them must be having the time of their lives.
 
Like I said I was able to approximate how JVC TM-1750C looks on some cheap 17 inch VGA CRT using MISTer FPGA scaler filter. Not sure RetroArch shaders because I prefer FPGA or real hardware but I guess that should also be doable - though if good shader exists I have no idea.

-----------------------------
BTW. I didn't disable HDCP on my PS5 and otherwise OSSC Pro can take HDMI directly from PS5. Much easier to setup than using VGA cable and much better image quality.
Unfortunately OSSC Pro doesn't have csync on HDMI output and I would need sync combining circuit to connect output from HDMI to VGA converter to my PVM to test 240p/480i on real CRT. Something I guess I will need to fix myself. Otherwise my LG 48GQ900 WOLED supports all 15KHz resolutions and I confirmed that OSSC Pro displays all 1920 pixels in the horizontal direction - which is actually amazing and why I wanted such scaler.

jbltecnicspro said:
All ten of you. :D. Nah it's good stuff though. I just wish we could make another scan-out display like a CRT. Sony made a laser projector that scanned out like a CRT. I'll bet it had great motion clarity and contrast.
Click to expand...
OLEDs can be made like that and given how they are momentary panel power limited more than pixel luminance limited you could have very narrow strobe width which is super duper bright thus giving lagless bright image without noticeable sample&hold blur.

And this is technically possible even today!
Its just display manufacturers don't really care because they are soulless corporations whose engineers better also be soulless and not passionate or they will only suffer seeing how what could be perfection is wasted on stupid decissions.
Like there exist bugs in many displays which are never fixed correctly, nothing is done, and if something is then next time around you see the same issues.

LG G5 - how is it possible it has so much banding?
Didn't anyone at LG look at the TV before release? Is it really that hard to make display without banding?
I have LG 48GQ900 - I figured out LG never looks at what they sell. Most likely firmware is done in India by people who never saw the TV. Also automated testing doesn't exist.

So yeah, even though it can be done the issue here is that you can have OLED with sample&hold so we won't be having proper strobing anytime soon 🫨
 
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