ShaderGlass – Overlay applying retro shaders on top of Windows desktop (opens in new tab)

A brand new tape with a commercial release on it was pretty good quality. It went straight from master to VHS. But in the early days of VCRs new tapes and movies were too expensive for most people so everyone shared copies of stuff. Watch a copy of a copy of a copy on VHS and that's when the real wackiness starts. Each analog copy generation gets worse and worse.

And I've never seen a shader remotely as bad as a VCR losing sync with the tape :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nm6qzQGTBPc

I think it would be difficult to even reproduce the bad quality of the pirated version of Terminator we watched as kids. With regard to this I think the shaders would need to be more dynamic.

It's like that webcomic where the guy complains he has a fetish for JPEG artifacts because he grew up downloading porn in the 90s...

Personally I don't understand it. Pixel art looks way better crisp than blurred to hell with fake scanlines and a TV bulge, and I lived through that era

Probably a difference in the screens used. Like I'll play an old videogame on a modern screen and it'll look substantially worse than it looked on a CRT.

Most people who attempt this effect don't have a reference CRT. They don't realize that the scan lines bleed and become fuzzy on the screen and are not perfect lines like the shader makes.

released videos were made to be more resistant to interference

recordable VHSes for home use needed to be editable without mastering equipment, so they are more subject to deterioration

If you use picom as a compositor you can write glsl shaders, there is some work being done twords doing full out CRT emulation at a desktop rendering level, I found the repo below[1], but on my monitor the shader does this distortion at the bottom so I think it could be improved slightly. I'd really like to see someone get the glsl shaders from libretro[2] working with picom.(which the project in OP did) if any GL wizards reading this have any advice I'd be eternally greatful

[1] https://github.com/j-k-tech/picom

[2] https://docs.libretro.com/shader/crt/#

[2.1] https://github.com/libretro/glsl-shaders

I was just wondering the same thing. The closest I’ve found with my Googling is: https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term

Most pseudo-CRT effects just suck and have little to nothing in common with actual CRT's from back then. There are great CRT shaders though, some of which are shown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cAhQl0TSdc (CRT lottes is fairly decent)

Computer monitors were much higher quality than TV's (and even higher if a Trinitron CRT, as many Mac monitors used), and a 2002 CRT was higher quality than a 1985 one.

The CRT shaders seem to really try to recreate what it looked like when an NES was running on an average department store TV in 1985. And to my eye and memory, the strength of the effect is pretty spot-on -- Super Mario Bros was definitely quite blurry and color-fringed when I played it back then.

Some of it was NTSC and composite video's limited bandwidth smearing stuff together, but quite a bit of it was the less capable beam shaping and less precise phosphor masks on TV-grade CRTs.

Basically, yes, vintage TVs were terrible and made up for it by being very blurry.

The appearance of a high quality CRT cannot be accurately reproduced on most commonly available flatscreens. Specifically, most flatscreens have much more motion blur; this becomes apparent when you drag a window back and forth across the screen and try to track the text in that window with your eyes. The text all blurs. Then, try moving the screen itself back and forth the same way, again tracking the text with your eyes. Even though the screen is sideways back and forth, your eyes should be able to track the text which remains crisp.

I can imagine that this could be a way to adjust the effect as needed.

Windows has built-in color filters already but to my knowledge it does not allow to customize them, though. Open this in the run dialog (Win+R) to directly open to the appropriate settings page: ms-settings:easeofaccess-colorfilter

In case it's interesting for you, Windows and macOS have OS-level support for this:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/use-color-filter...

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/change-color-filter...

Could that be from different resolutions?