I am really enjoying the MiSTer Multisystem 2. Having one single device connected to my CRT that can play games and software from myriad different wonderful machines is an absolute delight — and I have been confirming for myself with every play session something that I have suspected for quite some time. While playing emulated versions of these games on modern televisions with big, spiky pixels is definitely an enjoyable and valid way to play classic games, there is still something absolutely magical about playing them on a CRT.
Most CRT snobs would, at this point, go on about smeary pixels and something about Dracula's eye in Symphony of the Night only having a single pixel of red actually being a deliberate effect that took CRTs into account to make it look like the eyes were glowing. (To that I say no, pixel artists designed stuff on graph paper or computer monitors and thus were very much not baking smeary pixels into their designs; effects like Dracula's eye just happened to be a nice side effect of the technology of the time. Look at that scene on a good CRT with a nice RGB cable and you can see that it is, indeed, one pixel.)
I'm also not into the thing where people press their camera right up against a CRT and show pixel art being mangled by scanlines. I vividly remember visiting my brother and playing some PS1 games on his big CRT TV, and actually finding that the games looked better when you sat back from a bit, the scanlines were so prominent and ugly when you sat up close. Part of this was probably down to me being used to PAL, which doesn't have as prominent scanlines as NTSC does (and a slightly higher resolution image as a result) but still, I don't get this obsession. We didn't play games with our noses pressed up against the TV glass in the '80s and '90s.
One thing I will absolutely go to bat for in terms of CRT snobbery, though, is smoothness of movement and animation. I am yet to see a modern-day display that can truly do justice to two very specific things: smooth, flawless scrolling, and that "fake transparency" effect a bunch of 16-bit console and arcade games did where they just flicker something opaque on and off roughly 60 times a second and it kind of sort of looks like you can "see through" it.
Of these two things, scrolling is probably the most obvious. Emulation running on modern displays, more often than not, introduces a slight judder to smooth scrolling, particularly horizontally. This is, in most cases, down to a mismatch between the refresh rates of today's TVs and the signals these older systems were pushing out. I don't know the technicalities of it, but CRTs seem better able to handle some "variance" without introducing judder, while modern TVs show it in a more or less pronounced manner depending on the degree of mismatch between the signal and the screen.
The fake transparency thing is less noticeable unless you're specifically looking for it, and I bet there are a bunch of people out there who have never been bothered by it. (If my telling you about it in this post has somehow introduced you to this and you are now bothered by it, I can only apologise.) But next time you're playing an emulated version of, say, a Capcom game (they loved doing this with window backgrounds) or any fighting game that uses this technique to display "transparent" shadows, take a closer look. You'll notice that the flickering isn't even; sometimes you'll see the opaque image more prominently, sometimes it will disappear altogether. This doesn't happen on a CRT; the effect appears as it was intended.
Now, it may well be that because I've just been slumming it with 60Hz modern displays rather than fancy-pants 120Hz or variable refresh rate screens, I've noticed this. I don't actually know if either of those techs improve what I'm describing here. But I will say this: there is a definite, clear difference when you play these games on a CRT. So if you have the opportunity to hook up classic systems to classic TVs — or, indeed, like I am doing, hook up a MiSTer to an analogue display — then I strongly suggest you do it. You won't want to go back!
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