Games and CRTs

Does anyone here like to game on a CRT? If you do, what do you like to play on it? If you don't have a CRT are you interested in getting one? Maybe you use an upscaler or line doubler instead? Kinda curious what other peeps think.

I have a CRT in my room specifically for consoles made before 2008. An old Sylvania 27" set with a late era Panasonic 27" in reserve. There is just something about playing a console the way it was designed to be played that feels right. While there are other ways to play, it doesn't feel the same. Plus it just looks cool sitting in the room.

That’s cool. Never owned a Sylvania. I do agree with you, it does feel right. Funny enough I also have a 27in Panasonic, though mine isn’t later era, I think the one I have is from 99. Do you like to hook up your consoles with stock composite or maybe S video or component? I know some people can be a bit particular about that sort of thing

Sylvania kind of sucks. It does have advantages where it never has any geometry issues, nor does it have any syncing issues. However it fails in the color and electron gun accuracy categories compared to the higher end stuff. So I like to hook up the 2D stuff with RF as strange as it sounds. However a lot of games used graphical tricks with RF in mind. If a game uses dithering, the RF will blend the dithered colors into a completely new color. S-Video for anything capable of 3D though. Any console that is capable of producing 3D graphics really benefits from S-Video. There is one CRT set I have been after for over a decade though. The Sony FW900 monitor. That thing had an insane resolution of 2304x1440 and an 80hz refresh rate. Also less reasonable would be having a Hantarex video wall. If I ever won the lottery, that would be sitting in my living room and proudly.

Well the lack of geometry issues at a minimum seems good at least. I know I've beaten my head against a wall over geometry issues on my tubs. There is only so much I can do to fix them up. But since you said color and electron gun accuracy are not the best... I can see why it doesn't have a good reputation then. Wow RF! No no, I don't think that is strange at all. When you think about it, when a good chunk of these consoles came out, that is the kind of TVs a lot of people had in their homes, just RF only with no composite inputs. I personally have used composite to achieve this effect but I will admit I did hook up my genesis just now and yeah I do see a difference and I must say I do like the look of RF a bit better since the colors really pop out a whole lot better than what I am used to seeing in composite. You may have just converted me. I like seeing the games as close to as the developers intended for us to see and even hunted down a similar sony consumer set that I saw was in a sega office during the mid 90s. I figured if some of the devs used this kind of tube in their office I can't really go wrong right? I've tried all kinds of signals including component and RGB and I really feel like so much is lost in only seeing the raw signals. It's like eating cookie dough, sure it can be tasty but can you say you actually ate a cookie? You can see in footage online in both Sega and Nintendo offices they had two screens on their desks, one being a computer monitor and other usually being a consumer tv. They had to see how games looked on the consumer sets since that is what people were using. Yeah I can agree with that, I do think some 3D games still benefit more from composite or rf for certain effects. There is this fog effect in wind waker that is fairly early on in the game and it doesn't blend well unless in composite or rf. Might have been an oversight on the devs part since in the hd remaster they removed that effect completely and replaced it with a different one. It really goes on a game by game basis I feel. But overall I do agree S Video is really good for most 3D games. However I aside from my Panasonic I do have a smaller 20in Philips that goes up to component and for whatever reason it blends a lot of these effects for 3D games even in component whereas my 27in Panasonic does not. The tube isn't worn out at all and things still look very sharp on it and I haven't figured out why only my Philips does that. Oh I know what you are talking about. I wanted to get one of those too, one time I actually found a listing for it locally and it even came with a spare tube! But it ended up being too much for wallet. Otherwise for PC I just stick with a small viewsonic on my desk, pretty handy for watching older anime honestly and playing older computer games. With a visual like that I would be amazed to also have a very unreasonable wall of CRTs. Thank you for answering my post, I don't really know anyone else who games on a CRT and it is nice to see a different opinion than all the other ones I see online where they push nothing but RGB and professional monitors.