People go so overboard on this stuff, the amount of ghosting on the DOS example is insane. I don’t want to spoils anyone’s fun but that’s not really what most screens looked like back then.
There were plenty of junk CRTs out there used for text only display with insane levels of persistence and other issues that lead to a very unique appearance. It's also sort of moot at this point. The existing CRTs out there that have this behavior have degraded over the years. No one makes new high persistence CRTs that I am aware of. So it's mostly down to our memory of them.
I actually have a flat panel that has over 2 decades degraded and now has some weird persistence going on.
I've got one that is inside an Apple II monitor. Can confirm, the image looks very flicker-free, but has pretty bad ghosting if you're looking at anything that scrolls. It looks cool but is pretty rough to do any work on. The other green CRTs I have are barely more persistent than a regular black and white TV, and I've never heard of a long persistence color monitor.
I don't really see the problem with what's written on the tin here; it's called retro-term and not vintage- or classic-term, after all (I didn't read the project's webpage). In other words: It's correctly advertised as something new that's just fashioned on something from yesteryear. So you can really go overboard with technically inaccurate, kitschy glitchshit that's so popular with crowd. Of course, historically challenged people will fall into the trappings of a romantically distorted past they never were a part of. As they always did and always will. But that's just life.
Amusing that it can lead to a romantically distorted future for those terminal users.
As someone who came up in that era, I would never want to regain those barrel distortions or incoherent pixels I saw in some of the heavy-handed retro terminals. I paid good money for flatter CRTs and also jumped to LCD with a digital input (DVI) as soon as it was a general option I could justify on a work computer order.
I'm also happy not to be hearing the constant whine of CRT coils, HDD drive motors, or even so many cooling fans these days.
It's more like your grumpy livestock grunting once before it leans into a hard day of work in the tech field.
But I'm not surprised they don't go overboard with that in the emulators. They'd probably have to add PSE warnings if they did.
Agreed. It’s sad but I think that unless you were born in the 70s, you may not be old enough to have seen enough CRT terminals to know the difference.
We need at least one CRT terminal in each city so that kids have a chance to experience a real one.
I had a lot of fun with Tektronix 4010 series storage-tube CRT terminals.
In real life they had crisp lines and rarely any perceivable flicker (depended how far you pushed the ray trace line length)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tektronix_4010
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SbCIP1m6hs
You could drive them (in my experience at least) with a PDP-11, an Apple ][, a BBC micro, or a transputer breadboard.
I think what bothers me most is the horizontal line that slowly moves across the screen every few seconds. It's an artifact of recording a CRT on film and doesn't occur when you look at a real monitor...
The bloom is also too blobby, because it's a gaussian blur. I ran into the same issue trying to implement a similar effect. The bloom shape needs to sharper to look realistic -- which also means unfortunately a non-separable blur.