Emulators that run games from old videogame hardware are wonderful things, but playing an Atari 2600 game on a brand-new LCD monitor doesn’t really replicate the visual experience of playing the games on a CRT.
Ian Bogost, the Georgia Tech professor who recently co-authored a fantastic book on the Atari 2600 called* Racing the Beam*, set a group of four computer science majors at the university to work modifying the Atari 2600 emulator Stella to display the games as they would have looked on a television. Their results, an example of which shown above, should be publicly released in the open-source emulator soon.
It’s not just about fuzzing out the graphics — although that does, for example, make the car in Activision’s Enduro above look more like a car and less like some kind of crazy racing spider. Note how the colors fade into each other in the sunset. The crew’s modifications also emulate the “ghosting” effect in which images linger on a CRT, important for rendering Pac-Man‘s ghosts, to name a prominent example.
Image courtesy Ian Bogost
A Television Simulator [Bogost.com]