Are you a retrogamer?

[Cerebralbore101]

HoloDust said:

SanAndreasX said:

That's why I said "kinda."

I like playing old games I grew up with from time to time. I'm not dedicated enough to it to clutter my living space with bulky old TV sets that look like they're ready for the bin. I also do use original consoles in a lot of cases, but I have a RGB to HDMI converter box to play them on my 65 inch OLED TV, and they play and look just fine. I also buy re-issues on modern hardware when they become available. I'm definitely not dedicated enough to retrogaming to spend $275 on a PS1 copy of Suikoden II when I have a great port of it for my Switch that also comes with the first game, and even for those games where I was lucky enough to buy them new back in the day, like Valkyrie Profile, I am just as happy to display my original 2000 copy on my shelf and load up the PS5 version when I want to play that. Ditto with Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, which I did buy new on Gamecube 20 years ago but can now play on Switch 2 without having to plug and unplug hardware. Forget trying to track down a working original Bally Astrocade and then having to hook it up, when BallyAlley has the system's entire library available through MAME. 

Back in days, before advanced shaders were possible, I often enabled one of those interpolating upscaling algorithms, like Eagle, 2xSal, hqx, xBR and similar. They do make 2D games from 80s look like remasters of a sort, but for me anything is better then straight up original raw pixels on modern displays (since they were never meant to be experienced in such a way).

I think as technology gets better, we'll be seeing more stand alone boxes that have enough juice to run heavy processing that either emulates CRTs or do real-time ML upscaling (or both, so that user can pick preferred option).

Cause sooner or later, all those CRTs will be dead, and I'm hoping to see good enough replacement for them by that time.

A lot of professional tubes are rated for 100,000 hours and up. They will all be dead one day but sets that get the proper maintenance will last another 30-40 years at least. 

As far as tech that properly emulates a CRT we have that in the RetroTink 4k. It's not PVM level perfect but really does rock for simulating good consumer sets. 

Oh and someone has been working on an open source CRT chassis for years. Once that is finished a lot of old tubes will be restorable and moddable.