Retro / Community

Can we talk about how bad retro games look on modern TVs? CRT or bust.

RetroRaider64

2 posts · Joined Dec 2025

Feb 1, 2026 589 views

Right. I need to rant.

I was at a friend's place last week and they had Sonic 2 running on a 65 inch 4K OLED through a Mega Drive Mini. Pixel-perfect upscaling, HDR, the works. It looked absolutely horrible. Jagged pixels the size of my thumbnail. No scanlines. No phosphor glow. No bloom on the whites. Just cold, clinical, brutally exposed sprites that were never meant to be seen that way.

These games were designed on and for CRT televisions. The scanline gaps are not a flaw — they are part of the visual language. Streets of Rage 2's colours bleed into each other in a way that looks painterly on a CRT and looks like a spreadsheet on a modern display.

I have a Sony PVM in my setup and I refuse to apologise for it. Yes it weighs 40kg. Yes my wife has commented on it several times. The point stands.

For those of you playing retro games on modern TVs — have you tried a CRT? And for those of you who have made peace with modern displays, what upscaling solution are you using? I know the MiSTer FPGA crowd swears by scanline shaders but I remain unconvinced.

4 Replies

PCMasterRace Feb 2, 2026

MiSTer FPGA user here. The scanline shaders on MiSTer are genuinely excellent and I say that as someone who has used real CRTs. The CRT-Royale shader in particular gets startlingly close to the real thing for 240p content. Obviously it's not identical and purists will tell you the latency is different and they're technically right but for 99% of use cases the difference is imperceptible.

That said I understand the argument for real hardware. There is something about the ritual of setting up original equipment that adds to the experience in a way that is hard to quantify.

CasualGamerKat Feb 3, 2026

I played Sonic on my friend's CRT once and genuinely could not go back to my modern TV for that game afterwards. The colours are just different. Warmer. There's a reason the cover art for those games looks the way it does — it was designed to be seen through that phosphor glow.

Genuine question though: how do you deal with the space? I live in a flat and there is absolutely no room for a Sony PVM. Are there smaller CRTs that still do the job or is size kind of the point?

RetroRaider64 ↩ CasualGamerKat Feb 4, 2026

Smaller CRTs absolutely still do the job — a 14 inch Sony Trinitron is honestly the sweet spot for most setups. They're heavy for their size but manageable and they're still fairly findable on eBay and at car boot sales. You want to look for one with RGB SCART input if you're in the UK or component input if you're in the US.

The PVM is the enthusiast option. The Trinitron is the practical option. Both are infinitely better than playing Sonic on a 65 inch 4K TV I promise you.

XboxChief Feb 5, 2026

I respect the commitment but I am not moving a 40kg television into my living room, I don't care how good Sonic looks on it. Some of us have partners with opinions about interior design.

That said the MiSTer argument is interesting. Does it handle SNES and Mega Drive both well or is it better for one than the other? I have been curious about it for a while.