Why Retro Games Look Better on a CRT: Scanlines, 240p and Duck Hunt

Play the first level of Sonic the Hedgehog on a flat screen and look at the waterfall. It's a set of vertical stripes. Play it on an old tube TV through a cheap cable and the stripes melt into see-through falling water. Same game, same pixels. The TV and the cheap cable were doing half the art.

The short version: the screen and the cable were part of the art. The longer version involves an electron beam, a trick consoles used to skip half the picture, and a plastic gun that only works because old TVs had almost no delay. We go through all three, then cover how to get the look today.

How a tube TV draws a picture

A cathode ray tube is a big glass bottle with almost all the air pumped out. At the back, a heated cathode throws off electrons. They're focused into a beam and fired at the inside of the screen, which is coated in phosphor that glows wherever the beam hits. A magnetic coil steers the beam across the screen line by line, top to bottom, again and again.

A color set uses three beams, one each for red, green and blue. To keep each beam on its own color, most tubes had a shadow mask: a metal sheet full of tiny holes sitting just behind the glass. Sony's Trinitron, launched in 1968, swapped the holes for a grille of fine vertical wires and a single gun with three cathodes. It was brighter, and Sony won an Emmy for it in 1973. A couple of thin horizontal wires run across the grille to hold it steady.

Most of the weight is the front glass, about 65 percent of it. That's why a 36-inch Sony set from around 2000 weighs over 230 pounds and needs two friends and a pizza to move.

The 240p trick, and where scanlines come from

Regular US television was 480i: 480 visible lines, drawn in two passes. One pass draws the odd lines, the next draws the even ones, 60 passes a second. Your eye blends them into one picture.

Older consoles cheated. They sent the same pass every time instead of alternating, so the TV only ever drew one set of lines. That's 240p. The upside: no flicker, and every frame lands on the exact same lines. The side effect: dark gaps between the lit lines, all the time. Those gaps are the scanlines people now add to emulators on purpose.

The SNES developer manual called this non-interlace mode. Nintendo's own development kit called it "double-strike." The Genesis and SNES could output a true interlaced picture, but developers rarely bothered, and 240p stayed the norm all the way through the PlayStation and N64. Many modern TVs don't know what to do with a 240p signal, which is part of why old consoles look so rough on them.

Did artists design for the blur?

Sometimes, clearly yes. The Genesis had no real way to make things see-through, so artists faked it. Sonic's waterfall alternates one-pixel columns: one set fully clear, so the background shows through, the other shaded in shifting colors. Over a composite cable the columns smear together into transparent water. Over a sharp RGB cable you see stripes. Other Genesis games used similar pixel patterns, called dithering, for effects like drifting fog.

But it's not as simple as "CRTs blur everything." Hackaday makes a fair counterpoint: a lot of the blending came from the cable, not the tube. RF and composite blur the most. S-Video and component are sharper. European SCART with RGB is the sharpest. So the "CRT look" you remember is really a mix of the tube, the scanlines and whatever cheap cable came in the box.

Composite also explains the shimmer. It carries brightness and color on one wire, and the TV has to separate them again. When it can't quite manage, you get dot crawl, a little checkerboard that seems to creep along colored edges.

Why Duck Hunt won't work on your TV

The Famicom light gun came out in Japan in February 1984, and the NES Zapper arrived in North America on October 18, 1985, alongside Duck Hunt. The gun doesn't shoot anything. It has a light sensor in the barrel.

When you pull the trigger, the screen goes black for one frame. Then each target is drawn as a white box, one target per frame. The gun checks whether it sees darkness, then light, at exactly the right moments. The black frame is also an anti-cheat: point the gun at a light bulb and it fails, because it never saw the dark first.

This only works because a CRT draws the signal the instant it arrives, within nanoseconds. A flat panel stores the frame, scales it and processes it first, which adds anywhere from about 10 to 68 milliseconds. One frame at 60 Hz is about 16.7 milliseconds. By the time a modern TV shows the white box, the Zapper has already decided you missed. As How-To Geek put it: "It isn't about resolution, it's about how the display is rendered."

Small extra fact for the next trivia night: the original US Zapper was dark gray. An orange one followed in 1989, after a 1988 US law said toy guns had to look different from real ones.

The biggest tube ever made

Practical CRT TVs topped out around 40 to 45 inches. Sony went further. The PVM-4300 from 1989 had a 43-inch picture on a 45-inch tube, weighed 440 pounds and listed for $40,000. A consumer sister model, the KX-45ED1, sold in Japan.

One survived in a soba restaurant in Sakai, Osaka, until the YouTuber Shank Mods rescued it and showed it off in December 2024 in his Texas garage. His verdict: "there is very little lag."

The end of the tube, and the collector comeback

CRT TV sales peaked in 2005 at about 130 million sets worldwide, then collapsed. Sony stopped making Trinitrons in Japan in 2004 and closed its last line, in Singapore, in 2008. Samsung SDI stopped in 2012, and the last large-scale maker quit in 2015.

Now Sony's old PVM and BVM monitors, the grey metal boxes TV studios used, are collector items for retro gaming. Listings run from a few hundred dollars to well over $1,000. Asking prices and selling prices are not the same thing, though: one 23-inch PVM sold on eBay in September 2025 for $202.50 plus shipping. Check sold listings before you pay.

Getting the CRT look today

Use a shader. Emulators and MiSTer FPGA setups have CRT filters with scanlines and masks, plus "dedither" filters that bring back the Sonic waterfall.

Use a line doubler. The OSSC works line by line instead of frame by frame, so it adds essentially no lag, and it originally cost under about $150. The RetroTINK 4K launched at $750 and does CRT mask simulation, with a cheaper CE version at $475.

Turn on Game Mode. It cuts some of a flat TV's lag. It won't save Duck Hunt.

Buy a real tube. Look for RGB, component or S-Video inputs, test it in person, and plan for the weight. Don't open one up. The inside holds a dangerous charge.

If you want the look without the 230 pounds, our Stand By Tee 1983 ($34.99) carries the old color bar test pattern, the Insert Coin Tee 1982 ($34.99) is for arcade people, and the BIOS T-Shirt ($39.99) covers the beige PC side of the family. More on the games themselves: how video games evolved in the 80s and 80s computers and their software.

Questions we get

Why do retro games look better on a CRT? Old consoles sent a 240p signal that a CRT draws with visible scanlines and soft edges, and some games used pixel patterns that only blend into the intended effect over a CRT and a composite cable.

What is 240p? A trick older consoles used: sending only one half of the interlaced TV picture, every frame, so the image never flickered. It leaves dark lines between the lit ones.

Why doesn't Duck Hunt work on a modern TV? The Zapper expects the screen to show a white target at an exact moment. Flat screens add display lag, so the target appears too late.

Do CRTs have input lag? Almost none. A CRT draws the incoming signal within nanoseconds, while flat panels add roughly 10 to 68 milliseconds.

Is a Sony PVM worth buying? Collectors buy them for low lag and sharp inputs. Compare sold listings, not asking prices, because the two can be far apart.

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