NaturalViolence Wrote:You just answered your own question.
Yo, I didn't answer my own question, I purposefully anticipated an argument from the other side and subsequently gave my rebuttal. Simply because poor CRT filters are an option doesn't make them viable options if the quality is too far from the intended results. Of course you could always deal with the lackluster quality, but there's a threshold where the CRT filters actually become a detriment to the experience. It's then the opposite case: it's not better than nothing, nothing literally is better. Again, if you're going to end up with something so subpar, what's the point in using it at all? Wouldn't it be better to be disappointed with current filters, quietly shuffle them away, and carry on with your emulation as opposed to forcing yourself to deal with something you might only half-wise think looks okay?
NaturalViolence Wrote:Also you don't always know if something better is eventually going to come around.
And you don't always know that something better won't eventually come around. This type of argument gets nowhere unless you enter in some likelihoods (how likely people wanted improved CRT filters, how likely people were working on what and when).
NaturalViolence Wrote:Just because they didn't start calling themselves retro gamers yet doesn't mean there weren't any. They had all of the same traits, they just didn't have a universal word for it yet.
But we're not talking about "retro gamers", people who like to play older games because they genuinely enjoy them; we're talking about hipsters who claim to be into retro gaming. These are the people who latch onto 8-bit gaming because it's counter to what people deem "mainstream gaming". For most of these hipsters, retro gaming is something they can flaunt; it's chic, it's fashionable, it's independent. Classic, retro, and 8/16-bit gaming and other bits of "authentic" old-school gaming feed into their sense of superiority from knowing (and supposedly liking) a lesser known aspect about a culture (gaming in this case). This type of behavior is different from people I consider retro gamers, enthusiasts who just happen to really like old games and are avid about them.
I also believe this type of behavior is a more recent phenomenon at least as it pertains to the gaming community and hipsters. The modern idea of hipsterism came about sometime in the 90s (so says Wikipedia, at least). Emulation was pretty much a sub-culture of gaming in the late 90s, and in some respects it still is, but before the turn of the century, it was relatively new and niche. This really changed due to expanding internet access (probably helped in some regard for those who got into emulation via less than savory means, i.e. piracy) as it allowed new communities to grow quickly. Emulation was also accelerated by a growing number of emulators appearing and the proliferation of better and better computing hardware.
It seems to me that hipsters as we know them became involved with the gaming scene sometime around the 6th generation. Most of the hipsters who focus their attention on "retro gaming" interests never seem to do anything older than the NES, which leads me to believe that they're generally around my age, give or take a handful of years. The 5th generation seems too soon to date the appearance of "retro" hipsters, if only for the fact that the NES and SNES weren't particularly old enough (at least until the very last years of that generation); they were still fairly well-known and in the public's memory (e.g. NES didn't stop U.S. production until 1995), and the presence of 8-bit games on the GB and GBC meant "old-school" games were still the norm (that is to say, mainstream) on some platforms.
So yes, I think retro gamers have been here quite a while, but "gaming hipsters" are a bit newer. SNES9x had a crappy scanline filter as early as 2001, and I'm sure it wasn't the first to do so either. I stand by my statement. Crappy CRT filters predate "retro gaming hipsters".
NaturalViolence Wrote:Well how am I supposed to know? It was written in what seems like a very serious manner.
Wasn't the overly sardonic hipster characterization enough of a tell? At the very least, look back to where I said "maybe I'll sell them to all those hipsters" (PG 660 if you're curious), and try and prove there's not a smiley face at the end of that statement. What have I repeatedly told you about myself and emoticons? If you see one, I ain't being serious. Last time I'm telling you
NaturalViolence Wrote:1. It's far more important for 2D console emulators than 3D console emulators
2. There are a million different features/filters/enhancements that users want. Emulator devs often don't care enough to implement all of them no matter how easy they may be individually.
1. Not completely true. There are plenty of people who want decent filters for systems like the PS1 or the DS. One of the reasons I avoided Desmume on Linux for the longest time was due to the fact that the Windows version had numerous scaling filters, while Linux only had Nearest Neighbor or Bilinear filtering (blocky or blurry, you had to pick your poison). Apparently it was enough of a sticking point for users that it was finally added recently, ahead of a lot of other Windows-only features. For PSX emulation having custom shaders with Pete's OpenGL2 plugin was (and for the most part still is) a pretty big deal in various emulation communities. It's less important for emulators like PPSSPP, PCSX2, and Dolphin, but even Dolphin has a handful of custom shaders. To be fair, I only remember two other members in recent history that were excited about Dolphin's shaders (one was banned :/).
2. When you're talking about filters, there's hardly an expansive number of them out there. The list on wikipedia basically touches on them all. Nearest Neighbor, Scale2x, Eagle, Super Eagle, 2x SaI, and Super 2x SaI, the HQx family and some sort of scanline filter are the main ones you'll see across many emulators. The scanline filter, as I've said, is usually the kind that has a black line every other scanline. I can't speak for all those people trying to inject shaders like SweetFX into every game they play, but there's really only a limited number of scaling filters you'll find. It's evolved into a sort of psuedo-standard over the years from what I've seen, and it's somewhat expected in emulators that garner enough attention.
They aren't even terribly hard to implement. Not only do you have projects like 2dimagefilter but you can literally copy and paste a .cpp and .h file into your project, throw in some code, and get scaling implemented if you take the code directly from projects like Desmume. Half of the filters from Desmume, when I compared the code, seemed to be lifted from VBAM with marginal modifications. All it takes is a little time to grab Blargg's NTSC filter, and cheap scanline filters could have been dead by now, just my two cents.