Abstract:
Nostalgia changes the way we think about old devices. The heavy, loud, flickering picture tube monitors of those days took up half the table. Twenty years later, some people say it is the best configuration for playing games. Interestingly, there is some truth to this statement.
What made me think about this was a photo on Reddit. Someone was playing "The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind" on an old CRT monitor with convex glass. The screen shows Balmorra, the first large city that players reach after landing in Sedar Nien. Judging from the size of the game interface, the screen resolution should be 800×600 or 1024×768. This was also the common resolution on PC when the game was released in 2002.
Many people recognized the monitor they used when they were children in the photo. Someone else said: "I know this sounds weird but I can smell this picture."
Everyone likes this photo not just because of nostalgia. The picture tube relies on electron beams to scan the phosphor layer line by line to display the picture. It doesn't have a fixed pixel grid, so the image looks like it fits the screen at different resolutions. Adjacent light spots will also blur slightly and blend together. Artists in the early 2000s did consider this effect: models' edges and low-resolution textures would appear softer. Switch to a 2K or 4K display and every pixel will be clearly exposed.
This look and feel can now be simulated. There are kinescope filters for the open source engine OpenMW on Nexus Mods, and the pixel density of the 4K display is enough to make the scan lines and light spots look very similar. However, some retro console enthusiasts believe that shaders can only produce a similar feeling and cannot truly reproduce the display effect of a picture tube because the two methods of forming images are different. Some people are already planning to buy an old monitor and switch with a VGA interface just to play this one game. Another person is playing Morrowind for the first time on an original Xbox and a CRT TV. He said that after playing it, his feelings about watching Skyrim changed.
Some people don’t understand it at all. One player joked that if he wanted to fully restore the experience of the year, he still needed a GeForce 2 MX that couldn't run the game. Another person said that he later had to wear thick-lens glasses because of the screen. The third person put it more directly: "You are all crazy. I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, and I have long been looking forward to the elimination of picture tubes."
Picture tube monitors have long been eliminated. But in my opinion, Vvardenfell still looks best on this kind of screen.
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