Hi all, article author here.

My background is I wrote emulators for 24 systems and counting (higan and bsnes), and I want to try my hand at technical writing, in hopes of encouraging more people to get involved with emulation. I'll hopefully get better over time and with more feedback.

I'll be writing more about video emulation in the near future. I would like to cover techniques for interframe blending (the flickering shadow), composite artifacts (the waterfalls in Sonic the Hedgehog), color bleed (translucency in Kirby's Dream Land 3), screen curvature, scanlines, color subcarriers (and how shifting it causes shakiness you see in composite video), interlacing, phosphor decay, phosphor glow, aperture grilles, non-1:1 RGB pixel layouts (Game Gear LCD), etc.

I'm intending to write about all things emulation there, in fact. I want to cover input latency reduction/mitigation, removing audio aliasing above the Nyquist limit using FIR and IIR low-pass filters, designing thread schedulers and priority queues, provide mirroring and organizing of PDF datasheets for all the ICs used in retro gaming systems, etc.

Basically, I want to cover all the stuff you don't usually find in "how to write an emulator" tutorials. All the polishing stuff that takes a new emulator to a well-polished emulator.

It's not ready yet (the site is brand new), but I'll have an RSS feed at byuu.net/feed in a couple of days if anyone's interested in this sort of content.

Thanks for reading ^-^

I grew up coding demo effects on the C64 and the Amiga.

I always loved how the vblank synced ultra-smooth graphics slide over the screen while the CRT had a sort of magical "glow" to the picture.

I sit here by a nice iMac but often feel like that magical glow just isn't there even though the picture is 1000 times better than my old television I used.

Is there some kind of effect that can be applied to achieve this glow on a good LCD screen?

Or maybe it's just the lying of the nostalgia of childhood memories?

Phosphor glow is one of my favorite effects. One of these days I'd really love to have a software-mode C++ filter for that.

It can be done through filtering, but it's really hard to make it look good. A person named Psiga made this mock-up for Secret of Mana in Photoshop that has always astounded me: https://sites.google.com/site/psigamp3/PhosphorSimTest1.jpg

Unfortunately, no one's been able to figure out exactly how it was made to replicate it in software. But something like it would really add a lot.

There are however really good CRT simulation pixel shaders, such as CRT-Royale: http://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/CRT-Royale

> Unfortunately, no one's been able to figure out exactly how it was made to replicate it in software.

Could that be due to something like the phosphor glow having non-linear properties or something?

Look at CRT draw in slow motion. You have an ultra bright flash, then an alarmingly quick phosphor glow falloff.

You'd need, basically, a high hz HDR monitor with an actual sub-ms response time... so you can superbright blink the character, essentially black framing it.

The rest of the actual softness of the glow can be emulated conventionally with shaders (there are some super swanky terminals and emulators that have that part already done).