I'm sure I'm just repeating what you already know but... They're accurate for (most) aperture grille CRTs but completely inaccurate for shadow mask CRTs. Sony had aperture grilles patented for its Trinitron screens right up until the late 90s so they're a tiny minority, especially of televisions contemporaneous with things people commonly emulate so as to look original.
You're right about the softening though in the circumstances you specify — I had in my head the emulators that chuck a huge high-contrast complete pixel wide line in between every line of real pixels, just adding yet more unrealistic contrast. I guess a proper emulation would separate luminance and chrominance, filter the two separately and the latter much more aggressively, then apply a weighted sampling that simulates a shadow mask. You could do it all on the GPU relatively easily. On 2 February 2012 11:12, Simon Owen <[email protected]> wrote: > On 2 Feb 2012, at 10:43, Thomas Harte wrote: >> emulator authors tend to be quite parochial and superstitious about this >> stuff for some reason, hence e.g. the mostly invented black scan lines a lot >> of them like to insert. > > I find a partial scanline effect helps soften a harsh pixelated image, and > reduce the softness of the filtering done during stretching with some video > drivers. So even if they're not technically accurate I find it somehow looks > a bit more balanced than the pure image. There's probably also an aspect > that it makes it look more generated, which fits with the feel of being > emulated — so you're probably right! > > Si >
