Why hasn't anyone invented/kickstarted a large 240p LCD?

[ChrisK1977]

Sorry this is sort of a long post!

There might be something I'm missing here, but I've been wondering this for a long time, and I'd appreciate the input of people who are smarter than me (which is everyone here).

I've been playing some SNES games on my N3ds XL and on my Anbernic RG350p and I am just absolutely floored with how incredible NES, SNES, Genesis etc. looks on it. Nintendo rightfully calls it "pixel perfect" mode and the reason it looks so good is because the image fills the screen, yet isn't being scaled in order to do so.

To me it looks better than any PVM. These low-res LCD screens have all of the benefits of a CRT, and none of the negatives (bulk, power usage, weight, cost, scanlines, geometry issues, availability, etc.). The only negative is if you have a non-IPS N3DS XL, there can be slight image blurring in certain games, but again this is completely gone if you have the IPS model (or an Anbernic RG350p which all come with IPS screens).

In fact, when buying a new handheld emulation device, I specifically look for ones with a 240p screen. I don't want those 640x480 or higher screens because it makes all games for the NES, SNES, Genesis, etc look pixelated. Naturally because the image has to be stretched to fill the screen.

So this got me thinking: why hasn't anyone made a large (25" or so) 4:3 240p LCD screen? IPS or OLED would be bonuses, of course.

I feel like there has to be a market for this. PVMs are $500+ if you're lucky, and they are only getting more and more rare. People are building their own MAME cabinets and end up having to spend $300+ just for a standard res Wells Gardner CRT. Some give up and use 1080P LCDs which look terrible. Then there's people who seek out those early EDTV Plasma screens that ran at 480p because Wii and Gamecube look better on them than any current 1080p screen.

You can find all sorts of oddball LCD screen sizes on hobbyist sites for various projects. Hell, they even make super-wide LCDs that are the size of arcade marquees so you can have a changeable marquee!

So how or why has no one ever thought of releasing something like this? Imagine a nice 25" flat screen that runs 99% of your NES, SNES, Genesis, etc library at its native resolution with zero scaling. Anybody who has ever played an SNES game on the 3DS knows exactly what I am talking about. Just that, but on a bigger scale. Make believe the 3DS came with a 25" screen if it helps it make more sense.

Is there something I'm missing? Is there any reason it wouldn't work or it's a stupid idea?

The only argument I could see is that it wouldn't be good for stuff like the Gamecube and higher but those systems can be emulated to give off higher res 3-d textures. You can't do that to 16 bit and 8 bit systems. The only other argument I could think of is some might say that a few SNES games are higher res than 240p. However, the only one worth a damn is Secret of Mana and that's only for a small portion of the game (the stats menu that nobody goes into anyway). And even then, those scenes are still viewable on a 240p screen. They just look a little funky is all.

From what I understand, the resolution of the LCD panel is determined by the chips, aand not the actual physical screen itself (which is how people upgrade their laptop screens by simply replacing a board). This makes it even more feasible as there probably are a bunch of 4:3 25" screens floating around somewhere already.

I would absolutely kill for something like this but I am wondering if I am just missing something obvious and would like to know other's opinions on it.

(by the way, I simply picked out 25" as the size because it's the most common size for arcade cabinets and it's the biggest PVM size ever released. It could be bigger or smaller, I just love the concept of a large 240P flat screen, but I think 25" would be the best compromise/sweet spot).

I would appreciate anyone's thoughts on this. Thanks so much for reading!

[matt]

The main reason flat panels look terrible with 240p is because their upscalers are designed for TV or video content. We can get around that by using a dedicated scaling device like the OSSC, which is a more versatile and cost effective solution than designing a whole new panel.

[Kez]

There are quite a few broader issues with this...

First of all, this statement:

These low-res LCD screens have all of the benefits of a CRT, and none of the negatives (bulk, power usage, weight, cost, scanlines, geometry issues, availability, etc.)

Is really not true at all. CRTs have extremely low latency and incredible motion clarity, not to mention compatibility with 480i signals which, although rare, are present on many systems that mostly use 240p. Analogue video signals also do not really have a horizontal resolution. A "240p" LCD is only half of the puzzle. 256x240? Great for most, but not all SNES games, then what about the genesis that runs many games at 320x240? Too wide for the screen, so you'd have to scale it.. except the scaling would be terrible because there are so few pixels to work with. So you could make a 320x240 LCD, which would be fine for most 240p cases, but then your aspect ratio would be incorrect for many games.

I am also not really sure how well LCD technology would scale up to having a bunch of huge pixels. The main issue here though is that there is close to no demand at all for this, so even if it could be done.. only a handful of people would buy it, so it would be ludicrously expensive to produce.

Rather, increasing the resolution is probably better for most retro gaming scenarios. Moving up to 4K and eventually 8K actually gives you way more freedom for improved scaling and picture quality, additional filters, etc.

I think this looks good to you mostly because it is on a small screen. Low res images look great on small screens, that's just how it is! I am not sure a 25" 240p IPS panel would really deliver the experience you are looking for! There would be no real benefits over a 4K IPS with a high quality line doubler like the OSSC, and a bunch of drawbacks.

[nmalinoski]

I've been playing some SNES games on my N3ds XL and on my Anbernic RG350p and I am just absolutely floored with how incredible NES, SNES, Genesis etc. looks on it. Nintendo rightfully calls it "pixel perfect" mode and the reason it looks so good is because the image fills the screen, yet isn't being scaled in order to do so.

"Pixel-perfect" is, well, not, in a sense, because games from 6th gen and earlier, for the most part, were expected to be used on a CRT, which does not have a fixed horizontal width, so however many horizontal "pixels" there were in a given image were to be drawn (or stretched, in a sense) across the entire width of the screen, which is 4:3.

I think, notably, the NES and SNES, if you were to arrange their output (at least for some games) in a fixed grid, it would be slightly narrower than a 4:3 CRT, at 8:7; so, the "pixel perfect" mode you might find in emulators on various platforms that align the output to this grid is, arguably, wrong.

From what I understand, the resolution of the LCD panel is determined by the chips, aand not the actual physical screen itself (which is how people upgrade their laptop screens by simply replacing a board). This makes it even more feasible as there probably are a bunch of 4:3 25" screens floating around somewhere already.

What you're missing is that the resolution of an LCD panel is determined by its construction. LCDs are fixed-pixel displays, meaning they have a set number of pixels--no more, no less--which is what's referred to as the panel's native resolution. Anything images that don't match the native resolution need to be scaled to the native resolution by the panel's supporting circuitry (in some cases, you can get windowboxing, but it's rare in my experience). This is in contrast to CRTs, which don't have a fixed horizontal resolution--they just draw whatever they're fed across the screen.

You might have been conflating the panel resolution with the video modes that are supported by the panel's scaling circuitry.

The main problem with analogue video on fixed-pixel displays is that, while you do have a particular number of lines ("fixed" vertical resolution), the horizontal resolution is variable; meaning that a game could have, for example, a 512-pixel-wide title screen, 480-pixel-wide menus, and 384-pixel-wide gameplay, and none of that mattered, because it would all be drawn cleanly to the same 4:3 screen.

If you were to apply a "pixel perfect" approach to each of these resolutions on a flat panel, the menus might look ok, but the gameplay would be narrow, and the title screen would be very wide and might even clip off the sides of the display.

I'm not sure there's a good compromise that will allow current fixed-pixel displays to properly display variable-width content without interpolation (which can add a slight blur). We may reach a point where we have displays with large-enough resolutions that could accommodate all of the different permutations of pixel multiplication that would be required for clean, sharp output.

[ChrisK1977]

I think this looks good to you mostly because it is on a small screen.

This is not true at all. I hate the way SNES looks on the PSP, Vita, etc. My friend has the 640x480 Anbernic and I hate the way SNES games look on that too. It's 100% because the screen is low res, not because it's small.

When I built my MAME cabinet, my #1 requirement was a 25" standard-res Wells Gardner monitor. I actually owned a medium res Wells Gardner that was the same exact size (I got it from NFL Blitz) but while hi-res games looked good on it, 95% of the games I was playing (games released from 1979-1998) ended up looking worse.

Now with the low/standard-res monitor and GroovyMAME, my cabinet's image quality is indistinguishable from actual arcade boards.

Hell, one of my favorite ways to play GBA games is on a modded DSi XL. The screen is HUGE compared to the GBA and I absolutely love it! Because it's running the GBA game at its native resolution so it looks incredible.

I actually stopped using my Benn-Venn Game Boy Color LCD screen kit because it wasn't running at the native GBC resolution, so every game was blockier, despite the screen actually being smaller than the retail GBC screen. Judging by some Youtube videos I've seen about this and the FunnyPlaying GBA screen, I am not the only one who doesn't like this. To me it's like putting an image in Photoshop and pressing the "sharpen" filter 20 times.

Is really not true at all. CRTs have extremely low latency and incredible motion clarity, not to mention compatibility with 480i signals which, although rare, are present on many systems that mostly use 240p. Analogue video signals also do not really have a horizontal resolution. A "240p" LCD is only half of the puzzle. 256x240? Great for most, but not all SNES games, then what about the genesis that runs many games at 320x240? Too wide for the screen, so you'd have to scale it.. except the scaling would be terrible because there are so few pixels to work with. So you could make a 320x240 LCD, which would be fine for most 240p cases, but then your aspect ratio would be incorrect for many games.

"Pixel-perfect" is, well, not, in a sense, because games from 6th gen and earlier, for the most part, were expected to be used on a CRT, which does not have a fixed horizontal width, so however many horizontal "pixels" there were in a given image were to be drawn (or stretched, in a sense) across the entire width of the screen, which is 4:3.

I think, notably, the NES and SNES, if you were to arrange their output (at least for some games) in a fixed grid, it would be slightly narrower than a 4:3 CRT, at 8:7; so, the "pixel perfect" mode you might find in emulators on various platforms that align the output to this grid is, arguably, wrong.

If you were to apply a "pixel perfect" approach to each of these resolutions on a flat panel, the menus might look ok, but the gameplay would be narrow, and the title screen would be very wide and might even clip off the sides of the display.

Yeah I don't mind SNES games looking slightly "narrow" when they are set to their native mode (I believe 8:7). I will always prefer no-scaling pixel perfect images, even if the moon in Chrono Trigger appears slightly oval.

I am confused as to why the varying resolutions would matter. The Genesis would take up pretty much the whole screen, and the SNES would take up slightly less than the whole screen. Just like it does on my Anbernic RG350p. Is there some sort of difference because it's a handheld hooked up to a Linux OS, compared to a screen being fed an actual game console or something?

The main reason flat panels look terrible with 240p is because their upscalers are designed for TV or video content. We can get around that by using a dedicated scaling device like the OSSC, which is a more versatile and cost effective solution than designing a whole new panel.

I already have an XRGB Framemeister and while it does great work, the pixels are blown way up. It's like taking a tiny photo on your computer and zooming in on it. It's larger, but it looks like a blocky mess. Even with the Framemeister, I'm pretty unhappy.

It's livable for games like Super Mario Bros 1 which looks jagged and pixelated even on a CRT but it really bugs me when it comes to nicer looking games like NES Batman, or Super Mario RPG. I mean Super Mario RPG looks absolutely fantastic on the N3DS XL/Anbernic, but it is absolutely dreadful looking on a 1080p display, Framemeister or not.

This is something that has bugged me ever since I first tried an SNES emulator in 1996. I didn't understand the concept of computer monitors being higher resolution than my CRT TV, and I wondered why the games looked so "blocky". Here I am 25 years later, still chasing that dragon haha

[bigbadboaz]

This is not true at all. I hate the way SNES looks on the PSP, Vita, etc.

I think you may have misconstrued this comment. We get that it's a 240p thing. But it likely only looks good because it's 240p/fixed pixel on a very small screen.

As others have already touched on, the HUGE pixels without scanlines you would get by blowing this up to living-room size would probably not present well at all. You touch on this yourself wr/t the Framemeister: believe me, the blockiness on a pure 240p panel would be even worse. Blow up that grid to the size you want in your mind. Now imagine how freakin' chunky each individual square is going to be.

[ChrisK1977]

I'm not so sure about that. I can tell the pixels get bigger playing GBA games on a DSi XL, but I like that. I also have the smaller N3DS and I never play it. SNES games look better on the N3DSXL to me (though both are magnificent).

I get you are referring to DPI but I think low DPI looks fantastic for low res stuff. It's also why I suggested a 25" screen and not say, a more traditional size like 40 or 50 inch.

edit: I completely forgot something. My friend used to have a 480p movie projector. It was a 200" screen and the Wii looked absolutely INCREDIBLE on it. Conversely, the Wii looks like absolute crap on my 1080p projector at only 150". If DPI was an issue, the Wii would have looked terrible at that size on his setup. We even sat less than 15 feet from his screen.

[Josh128]

A "true" 240p LCD panel could look very much like a 240p CRT with native content. It would of course have to be designed with black spaces between the vertical pixels.

Ive recently used some of the latest 4 pixels in one IPS screens available for GBA and GBC and they look phenomenal. Definitely better than even the native res AGS-101 screens that came on the later models GBA SPs. Some may not agree with me, but I played some GBA Ghouls n Ghosts on one and I thought it looked very much like native even though its apparently not.

With the technology we have today, Im sure producing a near zero lag 240p LCD that could handle 480i should be possible. Like most everything else here though, it would be a very niche product and very expensive to sell so the maker could recoup costs and make a little profit.

[Sumez]

Yeah I don't mind SNES games looking slightly "narrow" when they are set to their native mode (I believe 8:7). I will always prefer no-scaling pixel perfect images, even if the moon in Chrono Trigger appears slightly oval.

I am confused as to why the varying resolutions would matter. The Genesis would take up pretty much the whole screen, and the SNES would take up slightly less than the whole screen. Just like it does on my Anbernic RG350p. Is there some sort of difference because it's a handheld hooked up to a Linux OS, compared to a screen being fed an actual game console or something?

It's not so much the "varying resolution" as the fact that the video standard doesn't have a horizontal resolution.
Neither the SNES not Genesis output one pixel at a time, they deliver a continuous stream of color information that changes over time. The individual "pixels" only exist in the logic inside the console hardware and software, and is not transferred to the TV screen.

This is also why pixel perfect sampling takes a lot of manual setup on something like an OSSC.

[orange808]

You would have better luck kickstarting an OSSC Pro board to mod an existing display. Using the OSSC Pro to directly drive the display would drive latency extremely low. For sample and hold with fast response, a full frame buffer becomes essentially free. Suddenly, tate is essentially free.

[ChrisK1977]

Yeah I don't mind SNES games looking slightly "narrow" when they are set to their native mode (I believe 8:7). I will always prefer no-scaling pixel perfect images, even if the moon in Chrono Trigger appears slightly oval.

I am confused as to why the varying resolutions would matter. The Genesis would take up pretty much the whole screen, and the SNES would take up slightly less than the whole screen. Just like it does on my Anbernic RG350p. Is there some sort of difference because it's a handheld hooked up to a Linux OS, compared to a screen being fed an actual game console or something?

It's not so much the "varying resolution" as the fact that the video standard doesn't have a horizontal resolution.
Neither the SNES not Genesis output one pixel at a time, they deliver a continuous stream of color information that changes over time. The individual "pixels" only exist in the logic inside the console hardware and software, and is not transferred to the TV screen.

This is also why pixel perfect sampling takes a lot of manual setup on something like an OSSC.

Ah so it looks like for my idea to work the display would basically have to be hooked up to an emulator running over an HDMI port?

[Sumez]

You'd definitely need hardware able to support this custom brand of LCD monitor, yes.

[orange808]

You also have the option to assemble a video wall. You'll need a processor to drive it. Don't buy panels without inspecting them first. Corio2 machines used to be the cheapest machine to drive up to four panels with a single processor--but you can also chain them. Another option: chain four Dido Jr machines, if you can find that many at a good price. Dido Jr's software makes it easy. I found a few Dido Jrs for $20usd (each). Panels aren't cheap.

Is it worth it? No.

[fernan1234]

There are too many problems to talk about when it comes to this idea, but I'd start by pointing out that you really don't want to make conclusions about LCD potential from how these "240p" games look and feel like on a tiny, low-res/low-pixel density display like those on a 3DS XL. The good things about it don't necessarily translate into a larger LCD.

[Unseen]

This is not true at all. I hate the way SNES looks on the PSP, Vita, etc. My friend has the 640x480 Anbernic and I hate the way SNES games look on that too. It's 100% because the screen is low res, not because it's small.

A PSP uses a 480x272 display, Vita uses exactly four times that while many SNES games output just 224 active lines. This basically guarantees scaling artifacts if the emulator stretches the image to the full height of the screen.

[Lawfer]

A PSP uses a 480x272 display, Vita uses exactly four times that while many SNES games output just 224 active lines. This basically guarantees scaling artifacts if the emulator stretches the image to the full height of the screen.

Yes, playing PSP games on a Vita screen will result in blurrier picture than playing PSP games on a PSP go screen, because the native resolution of the PS Vita is 960x544, while PSP games are 480x272. There is a similar problem that happens when playing DS games on a 3DS, blurrier picture than you would get if you played it on a DSi screen.

[Konsolkongen]

The Vita screen is a perfect 4x integer of the PSP screen. IIRC you can disable bilinear filtering and get a perfectly sharp image.

[orange808]

It depends on the situation and the user. I thought PSP 3d looked rough. It can use a little softening. I also *hated* the motion blur!

[fernan1234]

Personally I think using the pixel grid filter for PSP on an OLED Vita via Adrenaline looks amazing, like an ideal of what the original PSP could have been.

[headlesshobbs]

The thing I just never understood with tv manufacturers is they are quick at being willing to cut out supportive resolutions that were standardized prior to all this HD nonsense and they never took into account "double strike" into the equation. I always hear that the excuse was to make lower res content (for film) look better, but honestly I've seen it as quite the opposite when they continue using such fake and unrealistic looking method for smoothing, sharpening, etc. One such test I did awhile ago was to see how good I can get DVD's to look via the OSSC with x2 mode progressive and it amazes me that hardly any of the filtering is needed, nor does it need any of this re-scaling to get a pristine image.

With 4k, they should have taken all resolutions and khz settings into account by now as flat panels don't have to worry about the burn or break limitations that crts had beyond their display range. Even where if double strike could be programmed to be read in the tv's own os, programmers could have enough sense that the video was meant with scanlines and the right amount of fade, dithering to keep the video quality as it was originally intended.

None of it matters to them because nobody's developing content towards their goals anymore. I wish something could be federally mandated to make sure these methods are followed or fines will be brought up for non-compatibility, but I guess I'm just dreaming up things.



Now I do want to say something about the smaller screens on the psp, 3ds, etc. Considering that the games were specifically made for the system, they have their own standardized resolution. The problem is when you look at porting other games cross platform, you run into the same issue of mismatching screen pixels vs game pixels and some compromises have to be made. I noticed nintendo does it with earlier titles via a hold button trick at startup, but is this solution applied to other handhelds and how badly is the aspect ratio going to be impacted?

[ChrisK1977]

Personally I think using the pixel grid filter for PSP on an OLED Vita via Adrenaline looks amazing, like an ideal of what the original PSP could have been.

Those look pretty good to me but darken the picture way too much for my tastes.

The Vita screen is a perfect 4x integer of the PSP screen. IIRC you can disable bilinear filtering and get a perfectly sharp image.

Right, but the super-sharp image is what bothers me. Don't get me wrong, I prefer it to using any filters. But I way prefer the screen displaying its proper resolution. I hate how everything is jaggy and zoomed-in looking! But I realize my only options are the n3ds xl and Anbernic RG350.

[fernan1234]

Those look pretty good to me but darken the picture way too much for my tastes.

Yes brightness drops a bit since there's more black on the screen. I set brightness to max on my OLED Vita and it feels good enough to me. I wonder if any of the overclocking homebrew apps could be used to boost the brightness a bit to compensate.

[Guspaz]

It's a moot point because nobody makes modern LCD panels with subpixels large enough to be natively 240p at any significant size, and nobody ever will. The cost of spinning up a new custom LCD panel manufacturing line is orders of magnitude beyond anything a Kickstarter ever could. Like, there would be a lot of R&D required to try to make the subpixels that large, and the minimum quantity you'd have to make would be huge.

Literally the only possible approach is a custom display controller/scaler. It could optionally apply filters to simulate whatever lager subpixel structure that you want. It would also need an ADC onboard (rare on modern monitors), and sample the horizontal information at a rather high rate. Only, by this point you've basically recreated the OSSC and built it in to the monitor. So you might as well just plug an OSSC into a modern monitor.

[emphatic]

I would be more interested in if somone would kickstart a 29" 4:3 flat 4K (?) screen with as little lag as possible that will fit any candy cabinet. With a (optional) built-in OSCC or similar hardware. The form factor is key to success here.

[Guspaz]

4:3 LCDs appear to top out around 21". Some cabinets, it could be possible to modify it to install a 16:9 screen vertically and mask it to 4:3. Another option is square LCDs, as they're available in many sizes (26.5", 33.2", 42.1") and are far more likely to fit and be masked. In fact, it should be possible to fit such a thing in a candy cab, because those are meant to be rotated, so they need enough space inside for the square defined by the largest dimension of the CRT anyhow. And the diagonal measurement of the square defined by a 29" CRT is 32.81", very close to 33.2", which is available. Something like these: https://crystal-display.com/products/cd ... -displays/

[gravitone]

Best viable option is using a 20" 640x480 S-IPS panel found in a number of philips EDTV's tbh.

modelnr: LC201V02 SD B1

You can do 2x integer scaling with scanlines for 240p content, and it looks great. You also have the added benefit of having a display that can do 1:1 pixel mapping for 480p content.
I have a philips 20PF4121. The 5121 model has the same features just different form factor. They have a DVI input that also supports VGA and component signals. You can harvest a LCD driver board from either of these. Or see if you can get one of those generic china boards do the job.

Here's a sample shot featuring metal slug.
https://imgur.com/a/64z9nww

[Fudoh]

You can do 2x integer scaling with scanlines for 240p content,

but you're running into the same problems with 256x224px games as described above. The 640px width are hardly enough to run a proper interpolation algorithm and rendering only 512px results in an awfully narrow picture.

[Guspaz]

Those 1:1 screens that would fit in an arcade cab are 1920x1920, or 1920x1440 for 4:3, which is pretty decent for various types of scaling.

[Fudoh]

that 33" square one sounds extremely tempting. I hardly dare to ask for the price though. Eizo has the 27" version available as a consumer grade monitor at $950.

[strayan]

You can do 2x integer scaling with scanlines for 240p content, and it looks great. You also have the added benefit of having a display that can do 1:1 pixel mapping for 480p content.

This is certainly an option with plasma as well https://imgur.com/a/AdZIgtu

Personally I prefer 720p TVs for 240p content https://imgur.com/a/iFF8iiA