How to play retro games with the best graphics quality

If you've tried it, you'll have noticed: today's 4K TVs are marvels that offer image quality we couldn't even have imagined just a few years ago. And yet, if you connect any console from before the Play 3 or Xbox 360 (PS2, Wii, Mega Drive or Neo Geo, to give a few different examples) they'll look worse than they did on your tube TV in the nineties.

The problem is that retro consoles did not design their image with a digital 4K display in mind, but rather CRT televisions, analogue signals and very low resolutions.

So when we talk about playing retro video games with the "best graphics quality", what we're really talking about is improving the quality and fidelity with which we see them, because the console's graphics power was what it was.

And there isn't one single perfect solution here, but many imperfect ones, or ones that depend on taste. We can look for the image closest to the original, maximum sharpness, the best motion, the greatest convenience, or a balance between all of them.

In this article, which could be considered the second part of this other one where I told you about what retro games actually looked like at the time, I'll go through these possible routes, focusing on the ones I consider most interesting today.

Why do retro games look better on a CRT?

First, a couple of videos so you can see the differences.

8- and 16-bit consoles:

Here I link you to another video with more modern games.

Why do these differences occur?

On a CRT, the image is not built in the same way as on a modern LCD or OLED.

On a modern digital display we have a fixed matrix of pixels. If we show a 320 × 240 image on a 4K panel of 3840 × 2160, something (the display itself or an intermediate scaler) has to decide how to turn those few original pixels into the millions of pixels on this TV. And depending on the scaling method, the image may look sharper or blurrier.

A CRT, however, works differently. An electron beam sweeps across the screen line by line, causing the phosphors to emit light. There is no digital pixel grid equivalent to an LCD's, and the resulting image also depends on the tube, the signal used, the cable, pixel geometry, brightness and many other variables.

That's why the characteristic look of Mega Drive, SNES, Neo Geo or PlayStation depended not only on the image generated by the console, but also on the television itself and the cables.

That's why two CRT displays showed the same console differently. And that's also why talking about a single "CRT look" isn't really correct either.

Motion is the big advantage CRTs still retain

Now that you know, at least broadly, the difference between the technology in old and modern displays, let's get to the real advantage of CRTs.

On a modern display, scanlines -the typical black lines between pixels- and the curvature at the edges of the screen associated with CRTs are relatively easy to simulate.

What is genuinely difficult to match is motion.

A conventional LCD display works using sample-and-hold: it displays each frame and keeps it visible until the next one arrives.  

On a CRT, the phosphor lights up as the beam passes and then its brightness falls quickly.

That's why a game scrolling at 60 frames per second can look noticeably clearer in motion on a CRT than on a 60 Hz LCD, even though the LCD has a vastly higher resolution.

This is especially noticeable in games with fast scrolling: Sonic, Thunder Force IV, Metal Slug, F-Zero, or practically any fast 2D arcade game.

You might think things change with newer 120 Hz or 240 Hz displays, but as I'll explain later, that's not exactly the case.

First, let's look at the different image options for retro games.

Option 1: original console + CRT + different connections

If the goal is to reproduce the original experience, this combination is the best:

Original console > good analogue signal > suitable CRT.

You don't need to buy one of those enormous 29-inch TVs that, with a backside that big, are now impossible to fit into a home. A 4:3 CRT of around 14 to 21 inches is usually a much more practical solution.

In fact, for systems that are mainly 4:3, such as Mega Drive, SNES, Neo Geo, N64 or much of the PS2 catalogue, it makes even more sense than looking for a widescreen set.

Another important point is to distinguish conventional CRT televisions from the many European 100 Hz models. The latter could be fantastic for television and interlaced video (especially if you liked that home-video effect in films that I hated), but they processed the signal before displaying it.  

That's why the traditional 240p/288p and 50/60 Hz system is better, since these consoles output images at these refresh rates depending on whether they were PAL (Europe) or NTSC.

The video connection matters almost as much as the television

At this point we need to explain why the same console can look very different depending on how we connect it TO THE SAME SCREEN.

To simplify things quite a bit, if we want to preserve as much information as possible from the analogue signal, the order is

RGB > S-Video > composite video > RF.

That doesn't mean composite is always "bad", but almost. Yes, certain games and graphical effects can actually look better because of the way composite blends colours and details, if the developers took that into account.

But if what we want is fidelity and definition, RGB is usually the reference on consoles that support it. And avoid RF (the one that connected to the TV aerial and was tuned like another channel) like the plague.

Applied to each console

PS2, for example, works brilliantly over RGB SCART on a European CRT. The Neo Geo and probably its future AES version are other examples of excellent image quality over RGB.

N64, however, is a different case. PAL consoles do not provide RGB out of the box and, depending on the model, may support S-Video (Super Video), so a CRT with an S-Video input can be especially interesting for a stock Nintendo 64.

Wii and GameCube sit right between two generations, so things get a little more complicated.

Wii came out halfway between the CRT world and the flat-panel era. That's why Nintendo lets you configure the console for 480i or progressive 480p, with a better image, if you use the component cable.

Titles such as Super Mario Kart or Super Mario Galaxy, with their widescreen format, benefit from this.

Cost

It will depend on what you already own:

• Original console: they're not expensive, except for Neo Geo, which on top of that is launching its AES+ version in September for €200.
• Connection cables: they're not expensive, but you'll need to find the one that gives the best image (avoid RF and, as far as possible, RCA composite).
• TV: they come at every price and in every colour, but you can already get one for €30 on second-hand platforms. Obviously, a Sony Black Trinitron will cost much more and may not be worth it for you.

Option 2: original console + scaler + modern display

The second main possibility is to keep the original hardware but replace the CRT with a video processor.

The chain becomes:

Console > scaler > HDMI > modern display.

Here it's important to distinguish a genuine scaler from a cheap HDMI adapter.

A cheap adapter simply converts an analogue signal to digital, leaving much of the image processing to the television. A good retro processor, by contrast, can correctly identify 240p, handle 480i, control aspect ratio, reduce latency and decide exactly how to scale the image.

Scalers

What options do you have?

GBS-C is one of the most interesting budget alternatives because it handles 480i very well and accepts RGB and component. Its main limitation in a setup such as N64 + PS2 + Wii is that typical implementations do not directly accept S-Video or composite video.

OSSC is outstanding with RGB and component signals, especially on 240p systems, but it isn't the most universal solution either when we have consoles that rely on composite or S-Video.

RetroTINK is designed precisely to fill that gap.

For example, the current RetroTINK 6X CE directly accepts composite, S-Video, RGB, component and VGA, allowing it to process practically all the usual signals from classic consoles and output up to 1440p, as well as offering high-refresh-rate 1080p modes. The drawback is the price.

An excellent scaler can recreate scanlines, masks, aspect ratios and nearly perfect scaling, but if we then connect the result to a conventional 60 Hz LCD, the sample-and-hold behaviour remains. It cannot change the temporal behaviour of the display that comes afterwards.

There is a variation on this setup: using a CRT PC monitor. Even though it is a CRT, for older consoles you'll need the scaler because of the difference between the 15 Hz they output and the 31 Hz expected by the monitor.

You can achieve very, very high graphics quality, in exchange for a higher cost as well (I'm assuming you already have an HD TV or monitor at home).

Cost

As before, it depends on what you already own, but I can tell you in advance that this option is more expensive, because you swap the cost of the CRT TV for the scaler:

• Original console: same as before.
• Connection cables: same as before.
• Scaler: there are several price points, but if you want something decent, they start at around €80.
• Current display: I'm assuming you already have an HD monitor or TV.

Option 3: PC emulator + current display

Here we have a third possibility.

Today's emulators for machines such as Mega Drive, SNES or Neo Geo have reached an extraordinarily high level of accuracy.

Genesis Plus GX, bsnes, Snes9x or FinalBurn Neo can reproduce these systems with such fidelity that, for most users, the important differences are no longer so much in the emulation as in how we display the image.

And a PC has another enormous advantage: we can completely control output resolution, scaling and filters.

Integer scaling: making every pixel fit again

Let's suppose a game is rendered at 320 × 240.

If we multiply every pixel exactly by four, we can get 1280 × 960.

Each original pixel becomes a perfect block of 4 × 4 physical pixels.

That's integer scaling.

When the target resolution does not allow an exact multiplier, we have to interpolate, crop or add borders.

We don't always need everything to fill 100% of the screen. In many cases it's preferable to accept small black borders and preserve clean geometry.

4K displays also have a huge advantage: they have so many pixels that they can reproduce with great precision structures that used to be physical.

Right, let's tie all this together.

CRT shaders are much more than just adding scanlines

For a long time, CRT filters had a fairly bad reputation because many of them did little more than darken alternating lines.

Today's shaders are a different matter. They can recreate different phosphor masks, aperture grille, shadow mask, bloom, halation, convergence, curvature, diffusion, scanlines and even characteristics of analogue signals such as composite.

On a 4K display there is enough physical resolution to draw these structures in considerable detail.

That's why a static RetroArch image with a good CRT shader at 4K can look extremely similar to a tube display. But the problem we mentioned earlier remains: motion.

120 Hz… or 240 Hz

Let's get a little technical.

There's a fairly common misconception. If a game generates 60 frames per second and a 120 Hz monitor simply displays each image twice.

That improves some aspects of synchronisation and latency, but does not halve visual persistence, which is the reason CRTs beat current panels in motion.

To reduce it, we also need to control how long each image remains visible.

This is where several techniques come in.

BFI, or Black Frame Insertion, introduces dark periods between images.

The MBR, MPRT or backlight strobing systems on some monitors act on the backlight: they turn it off during part of the refresh cycle to reduce the time for which we perceive each frame.

The goal is similar, but technically they are not exactly the same.

What does this achieve? Two things: the good part is that persistence is reduced, making it more like a CRT. The bad part is that inserting one black frame out of every two darkens the game's overall brightness. That's easy to fix by increasing the screen brightness.

The effect at 120 Hz is good, but not definitive. If you do the same on a 240 Hz monitor, however, you'll be much, much closer to the result of the original CRT.

So, if you combine shaders with this frame-darkening technique and do it on a 4K 240 Hz monitor, you'll be very, very close to the feel of the original CRTs. Of course, you'll have to pay for a monitor like that.

CRT Beam Simulator: using the extra hertz to simulate the scan as well

With any of the monitors above, you can try one of the most interesting solutions to appear recently: CRT Beam Simulator.

Instead of merely changing the appearance of each frame, it uses the additional refreshes of a high-Hz display to approximate the temporal behaviour of the beam and phosphor.

It is designed specifically for high-refresh-rate LCD and OLED sample-and-hold displays.  

Its own developers say it works from 120 Hz upwards, but that the more refreshes we have available for each refresh we want to simulate, the better the approximation: 240 Hz is better than 120 Hz, and 480 Hz can improve it even further.

For a game running at 60 frames per second, it's easy to explain:

• At 120 Hz we have two physical refreshes to represent each original frame.
• At 240 Hz we have four.

That makes it possible to distribute the illumination, scan and brightness decay much more precisely. It doesn't turn an LCD into a CRT, but it improves on traditional shaders.

4K 60 Hz or Full HD 240 Hz?

At first glance, the choice might seem difficult, but it isn't.

If you can't stretch to, or don't want to pay for, a 4K 240 Hz monitor, you can reduce either the resolution or the refresh rate.

A 4K 60 Hz monitor has a huge number of pixels for reproducing masks, scanlines and other visual details, but it has very little temporal headroom for simulating the behaviour of the tube.

A Full HD 240 Hz display has far less spatial resolution, but offers four refreshes for every frame of a 60 Hz game.

Which is better?

It depends on what we value. For screenshots, perfectly defined pixel art and visually complex shaders, 4K has the advantage. For fast games, 240 Hz can be much better because of the motion clarity.

In my opinion, motion matters more when trying to achieve a CRT effect, since Full HD already has far more resolution than these retro consoles did.

You can also do this: pick up a monitor like this AOC or this Lenovo, which support 4K at 60 Hz or Full HD at 240 Hz, and compare which mode you like better.  

They cost a third of what a 4K 240 Hz monitor costs and, on top of that, you can use 4K as your working resolution on the PC. Also, they're not CRTs, but they come close and take up less room because they don't have the huge back of a tube TV.

For all these reasons, of all the options, this would be my recommendation.

Cost

As always, it depends on what you already own, but it may be the cheapest option of all:

• PC: I'm assuming you have one. To emulate anything below PS2 and Wii, almost anything less than 15 years old will do.
• Connection cables: you already have them, unless it's a laptop and you want to connect it to an external display. In any case, an ordinary HDMI cable will do.
• Current display: I'm assuming you already have an HD monitor or TV, but if you want to buy one with more resolution or a higher refresh rate to get closer to the original, options range from very cheap Full HD 120 Hz models (€69 for this Xiaomi and €80 for this, better, LG), all the way up to more than €500 for a 4K 240 Hz one, with €240 options such as this AOC or this Lenovo.

Option 4: emulating with other devices, such as Wii

Although we could recommend a Raspberry Pi for this, its price increase due to the RAM crisis makes me lean towards Nintendo's machine.

The thing is, a Wii modified to run homebrew is a very interesting machine for emulating 8- and 16-bit systems. And it costs next to nothing on Wallapop.

Its main advantage is that when we connect it to a CRT, we can use low-resolution modes that output a 240p image, giving us the original resolution, physical scanlines, motion, phosphor and geometry.

For Mega Drive and SNES it's an extremely attractive solution. Neo Geo is somewhat more problematic because of the Wii's memory limitations and the enormous size (in MB) of certain games.

Connected to a modern display, however, Wii loses part of that advantage and we're back to relying on 480p and subsequent scaling.

Cost

Again, it depends on what you already own, but it may be the cheapest option of all:

• Wii: if you have one, great. If not, you can get one for €30.
• Connection cables: it depends on whether it comes with a component cable or not. Either way, not much.
• Display: if you're following this route I assume it's to connect a CRT, so they start at €30 on second-hand platforms.

Modern "pixel art" games are a different matter

If, like me, you enjoy good 2D graphics, current releases that will catch your eye include Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound.

How does this game work, and how can you see it in all its glory?

The game works at a very low internal resolution of 480 × 270 pixels, but it was designed from the outset to run on modern platforms, so it takes today's 4K displays into account:

• 480 × 8 = 3840
• 270 × 8 = 2160

In other words, 480 × 270 px can be converted exactly to 3840 × 2160 using integer scaling by a factor of eight (four in the case of Full HD).

In this case, a 4K monitor can be the perfect device for displaying the pixel art exactly as the artists created it; in fact, they have added a "CRT filter" in the game's options.

However, it isn't the same. A CRT has the advantage in motion, and it looks really good, as this user shows on Reddit.

Which solution actually offers the best quality?

There is no universal winner.

What we're looking for	Setup I would choose
Maximum historical fidelity	Original console + CRT
Original hardware on a modern TV	Console + good scaler
Emulation with maximum flexibility	PC + RetroArch
Best CRT look on a modern display	4K + CRT shader
Best motion on LCD	120/240 Hz + temporal simulation
Image/motion balance	High-refresh-rate 4K
Limited space	PC + fast modern monitor
16-bit systems on CRT	Modified Wii + CRT

And that's without adding a "convenience" variant, because CRTs were never exactly convenient.

In any case, remember that:

• A CRT can be less sharply defined and still reproduce the intended visual look and motion better.
• A 4K monitor can display every pixel with extraordinary precision and enable shaders that would be impossible to reproduce at lower resolutions.
• A 240 Hz display can trade resolution for recovering some of the CRT's motion clarity.
• And a good scaler can allow the original console to survive in a modern environment.

The setup I would choose today

Look, this is completely subjective, but if I had the space and wanted to combine fidelity, convenience and price, I wouldn't try to find a single display capable of doing everything.

I would use two:

• A relatively small 4:3 CRT, around 14 to 21 inches, for original hardware that really benefits from it: N64, PS2, Neo Geo, 16-bit consoles and occasionally Wii. Ideally, in my case, with a flat screen.
• A modern high-refresh-rate display for PC emulation.

If I could only have one, I've already said it above: a monitor with 4K 120 Hz and Full HD 240 Hz modes. For anyone who doesn't want a CRT at home, it's probably one of the most interesting approaches today.

Other, more complicated alternatives

Before wrapping up, here are a couple of different and more complicated alternatives that may work in some cases.

The first is to use a projector with a fast response and support for low-resolution signals such as 240p or 480p. These machines have lots of connections and good image converters, so if you have one at home, you can give it a try. I wouldn't buy one specifically for this, though.

The second is to build an FPGA system such as MiSTer, which lets you configure logic circuits to reproduce the behaviour of the original hardware in parallel.

They can combine very accurate hardware reproduction with suitable outputs for both CRTs and modern digital displays without needing dozens of consoles.

As I said, two very, very specific cases.

Conclusions: is a CRT still worth it?

Yes, but it's no longer the only way to play old games faithfully.

A CRT naturally provides something we're still trying to reconstruct on modern displays: flexible resolution, analogue signals, scanlines, phosphor and extraordinary motion clarity.

But the gap has narrowed enormously.

Accurate emulation, a good shader, correct scaling and a high-refresh-rate display can offer an experience much closer to the original. That's why perhaps the question should no longer be whether a CRT is better than a modern display.

The question we really need to ask is which part of the original experience we want to preserve.

If we're after authentic hardware, signal and motion, a CRT is unavoidable.

If we're after convenience, a small footprint and the ability to reproduce dozens of different systems, a PC and a good modern display may be the best overall solution.

And if we can have both, even with a small 21-inch CRT and a modern monitor on the desk, we probably get the best of both worlds.

Before wrapping up, two notes.

First, to emulate properly, you'll need a good controller to match. In this article I explain the best controllers for games according to how you use them.

Second, if you're looking for the best graphics quality in retro games, you should try these:

• The 10 Super Nintendo games with the best graphics.
• The 10 Mega Drive games with the best graphics.
• The 10 Neo Geo games with the best graphics.