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▲ Retr0id 4 hours ago

Well, there is a little advantage. Most recordings are not at the native framerate, and have compression artefacts (which impacts some effects more than others)

▲mrob an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Lack of CRT flicker is the biggest problem. Demo text scrolls are far more readable when you don't have sample-and-hold blur. There are gaming monitors with strobed backlights but I don't know of any that allow you to enable the strobing at 70Hz.

A workaround for modern hardware is frame doubling then blanking every other frame (software black frame insertion). It halves the brightness, but modern monitors generally support higher brightness than CRTs so this just brings it back to the authentic level. It's possible with FFMPEG filters, although I don't remember how I accomplished it when I tried it years ago.

The importance of CRT flicker is one reason I greatly prefer DOS demos to C64 and Amiga demos. Those were mostly designed for 50Hz PAL CRTs, so the flicker is far more annoying than 70Hz VGA.

▲bananaboy 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean even these browser ports aren't at the native framerate. The native framerate for these demos was 70hz as they were all designed for VGA video modes.

▲Retr0id 3 hours ago | parent [-]

A browser can run at whatever framerate you set your monitor to. Mine supports 70Hz.

▲Sharlin 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

But most people’s monitors don’t, or people just never set them outside the standard rate.

▲ahartmetz 2 hours ago | parent [-]

My monitor's standard and actual rate is 165 Hz, which is probably not terrible at approximating 70 Hz (very few fps from a small multiple of 70 would be worst).

High fps is probably a little more rare than HiDPI, but also becoming more common. It's already common in phones.

▲bananaboy 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure. I don't think I've ever had an LCD monitor that supports 70hz at a useful resolution though. My current monitors (native resolution 2560x1440) only seem to support it at 1024x768!

▲mrob an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Pretty much every modern fast gaming LCD will support 70Hz.

▲Retr0id 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Well, the demo runs at a lower res than 1024x768 so you're all set ;)

▲bananaboy an hour ago | parent [-]

I would just run it on my 386 with real CRT anyway haha