Something to keep in mind here is that you weren't looking at a consumer display running 240p content on a display capable of showing 480 lines. The reason we talk about "scanlines" as alternating black lines is because that's exactly how older consoles worked. Additionally, most older gaming consoles were run via composite or even RF on those TVs, creating a lot of artifacting, noise, and blur. You wouldn't have seen that sharp LCD-like grid if you played Wrecking Crew on your NES in 1987. And you wouldn't have seen alternating solid black bars either, scanlines were much more subtle.AtomicShroom wrote: ↑Tue Mar 22, 2022 5:53 pm This makes me wonder if the way we think CRTs work, especially in relations to "scanlines", is even close to being right. What I observed looked more like a LCD grid, where black lines exist both horizontally AND vertically.
I don't know the display specs for a VS cabinet, but I suspect it's got a pretty high TVL CRT, running on clean RGB video. The higher quality the CRT and the better quality the video, the sharper dots you'll get, with the vertical "pixels" being caused by the screen's mask and the horizontal "pixels" being caused by scanlines.
In reality, there are thousands of different expectations of what a CRT looks like, and they're all correct. Some are sharp, some are soft, some have thick scanlines, some have none that are visible at all, some have very pronounced shadow masks/grilles, some are more subtle. Plug the same console into five different CRTs, and it'll look five different ways. Connect the same console with RF, composite, and RGB to the same TV, and it'll look significantly different as well. Ultimately, these scanline and shadowmask filters are just a tool to help you get your LCD looking as close to your own idealized/nostalgic CRT look as you can.
For me, relatively thin adaptive scanlines with a PVM mask looks great from across the room--subtle enough as to not be distracting, but with enough presence to break up the pixels and soften everything nicely.
