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KickStarter CRT Emulation?

smaug

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Looking for CRT emulation programs that help Baldur’s Gate (Any IE Game), Fallout etc have crisp sprites like how it’s supposed to look.
 

smaug

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What monitor does the IE games look best on?
 

Bester

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The best way I found is to play EE, have zoom at 200%, and use linear something (turns off sprite smoothing). It's not great, but it's better than the alternatives.

I imagine this must work pretty well on 4k monitors.
 

Dysterkvist

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Play the Beamdog EE.
The EE look absolutely terrible, not to mention what they did to the glorious grey stone UI. They had some promising modders working on restoring the old look, but then they all got banned for some reason.
 

overture2112

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Not only does it look bad, but the UI is also extremely buggy. I did a multiplayer play-through recently and regularly the dialogue area would crap out if you used pause as an npc initiated a conversation. I had a smoother experience playing the original with a friend over a null-modem cable over a decade ago. It's impressive how bad it is given 99% of the enhanced edition changes were them applying some fixes from free public mods and yet they were in development for years.
 

Sensuki

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Looking for CRT emulation programs that help Baldur’s Gate (Any IE Game), Fallout etc have crisp sprites like how it’s supposed to look.

If you have a recent-ish graphics card you can use GPU-based Integer scaling. Otherwise you can do what I'm currently doing and use some software to do it.

https://tanalin.com/en/projects/integer-scaler/

I'm currently playing BG1 Vanilla with this, my monitor is 1920x1080, it essentially doubles the pixels to present a 1280x960 image with black bars around it. The pre-rendered backgrounds do look a bit more pixelated but it looks crisp otherwise. The main issue is that when using mouse scroll you need to scroll all the way to the edges of the screen rather than just inside the box (not sure if there's an option to make the mouse stay in the window), I found decreasing my mouse DPI to 400 made this easier than using a higher number.

I miss my 24" Sony widescreen CRT monitor :( (and also my LaCie 22")

edit: Uploaded pic from my phone
jVS1XlN.jpg
 
Last edited:

Bester

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I'm currently playing BG1 Vanilla with this, my monitor is 1920x1080, it essentially doubles the pixels to present a 1280x960 image with black bars around it. The pre-rendered backgrounds do look a bit more pixelated but it looks crisp otherwise. The main issue is that when using mouse scroll you need to scroll all the way to the edges of the screen rather than just inside the box (not sure if there's an option to make the mouse stay in the window), I found decreasing my mouse DPI to 400 made this easier than using a higher number.
This program can do the scaling + solve the mouse issue: https://store.steampowered.com/app/993090/Lossless_Scaling/
 

Bester

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does it work in non-steam games? (I have W7 x64 too, says min support W8)
Yeah, it's got nothing to do with Steam other than it's being sold there, and it's DRM free. If I remember right, after you buy it, Steam will download some free game and you may think this is where the software is, but it's misleading. It's just a game to demonstrate functionality. You gotta tick the "software" checkbox in Steam to find the program. Took me a while.

e76dd009917d970fdc54f9916a19e7ef.png
 

AngryKobold

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Real CRT emulation for resolutions in range 320x200 - 640x480 is impossible until LCD displays reach an "impossible" density of displayed pixels. Then, in theory, it could be possible to implement a shader imitating CRT dot matrix. And it's going to be only a dosbox and emulator thing. Until then, the best you can get with so- called "CRT emulation" is emulation of a crappy TV display.

Can't understand why you guys try to play BG and IWD in the original resolution. Even in 1999 the view was way too narrow. Only the transition to 800 x 600 fixes it. Mods like WeiDU were invented for a reason.
 

commie

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Hate to say the obvious but just buy a CRT. Find a spot for it and bring it out for the old school feelz. Syncmaster 17 inch from 2003 is about the best you can get for a quality v price(they get exponentially bigger at 19 and 21(I know as I tried to put a 24 kilo 19 inch on my desk...didn't work). I had to leave my CRT's behind when I moved, but want them back as the lack of input lag, refresh and eye popping colours blow away any LCD's except the nosebleed priced ones.

EDIT: luj1 mentioned this monitor already. Noticed after I posted. He's right.
 

Jack Of Owls

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I had an NEC/Mitsubishi Diamondtron 20" CRT monitor (the last Diamondtron CRT they made for this size, I think) that was fucking beautiful. But the QA on it was absolutely the worst I ever saw for ANY consumer electronics product I bought. I went through 3 of them in 2 years. I don't think I'd ever go back to CRTs though.

ETA: as for CRT emulation, I only use it for 16-bit games in software mode using emulators. I use EasyMode but it has a terrible over the top scanline look for any background or predominance of the color grey. I don't know why. It's just the color of solid grey that looks bad
 

Sensuki

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Real CRT emulation for resolutions in range 320x200 - 640x480 is impossible until LCD displays reach an "impossible" density of displayed pixels. Then, in theory, it could be possible to implement a shader imitating CRT dot matrix. And it's going to be only a dosbox and emulator thing. Until then, the best you can get with so- called "CRT emulation" is emulation of a crappy TV display.

Can't understand why you guys try to play BG and IWD in the original resolution. Even in 1999 the view was way too narrow. Only the transition to 800 x 600 fixes it. Mods like WeiDU were invented for a reason.

The Widescreen mod for BG1 isn't working properly for me, and I refuse to use EE. I've used TuTu but didn't like it, prefer the original BG ruleset and spawn system for BG. For IWD etc where Widescreen mod does work, I like 1280x800 etc
 

deama

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If you have windows 8+ and don't have the dwm (compositor) disabled, you can try software BFI (black frame insertion) which will make it look much closer to CRTs, cause they used BFI natively (well, it's not like you could disable it).

Here's a link:
https://github.com/fuzun/desktopbfi/releases/tag/v1.1
just double click it and it'll start it's work.
-Keep in mind that it'll reduce your brightness, so you'll have to up it to compensate.
-For some reason the taskbar didn't get the BFI treatment, this isn't a problem in games as it's not visible, but may be a problem browsing in the desktop, though this may not apply if you have windows 10 (I had 8.1 when I tried).
-Make sure you have a 120hz monitor at least, because this will basically half your refresh rate. Yes it will still say 120hz, but half of those will be black, and keep in mind, make sure to limit fps to half your refresh rate otherwise you'll get these weird "skip" moments where it will feel like frames have been lost or something like that.
 
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My CRTs never looked anything like what "crt emulation" looks like.
 

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