Here’s an entertaining video showing the difference in retro games on crt and lcd screens. It’s pretty incredible if you aren’t aware. Games back then were designed on CRTs and can look awful on LCDs in comparison.

https://youtu.be/bC-8y2R6IxI?t=166&si=D6K2v28RIR4bACQ3

>But a CRT isn’t a camera filming the world. Its a physical device that generates an image as an output of physical process. [...] That’s not a post-process overlay or filter effect, its an entirely different mental model of what it means to draw or render an image. I think this is why I struggled when trying to bolt this onto a modern engine. The foundations between the two models is just so fundamentally different. At this point, I was already beginning to consider my options. I was half inclined to give up.

An LCD or an OLED are also not cameras. I honestly don't understand what insight this person believes they've stumbled upon.

This is also very mystifying:

>The frame is never a single instant, its a culmination of integrations over time.

Strictly speaking, a CRT doesn't understand frames. It just fires whatever intensity of electrons is indicated by an analog signal at any given time as the magnets steer the beam across the screen in whatever pattern has been designed into them. If the tube is controlled by a digital source, there will likely be some kind of framebuffer of some size somewhere on the pipeline that stores at least a full scanline, and nowadays invariably a complete frame, so a DAC can convert the values in it to the analog signal expected by the gun.

The entire article supposedly addresses the "why", but after getting to the end, I still don't understand the why. What's wrong with Unity or Unreal architecturally that this guy's engine addresses?

We did lose quite a lot when we trasitioned to lcd screens.

"Retro Game Engine owns the full frame lifecycle." - This is completely meaningless. Your engine controls whatever data is in the buffer that's sent to scanout, but the operating system and the GPU drivers and the scanout hardware in the GPU and the input processing and row/column drivers in the display control everything else.

The only actual screenshots this guy has are some "multiply the image with the subpixel mask" demos that.... don't look anything like a real CRT, and certainly nowhere near modern CRT shaders like CRT Royale.

The rest of the posts in the substack page are similarly devoid of actual content, but very heavy on the AI woo-woo this-is-important-and-deep stylings that I've come to find nauseating.

Hey Author, if you can see this - You're clearly a smart guy, but you need a basic grounding in 3D rendering if you're gonna do weird stuff - more than an AI can give you. In particular, the phrase "Light is linear" will be useful to you. Good luck.