If you're keen on retro emulation, then you'll almost certainly have come across screen filters which add things like scanlines, bloom and screen distortion to ensure your classic games look every how you remember them, back when you played on a tiny portable CRT TV set in your bedroom.
There are countless filters to choose from now, allowing gamers to get exactly the right look – but what about audio? It goes without saying that the television sets in the '80s and '90s didn't offer the best aural experience; you'd often be saddled with low-quality mono sound.
We now have a new audio filter which allows you to return to those good old days. Developed by Retro Crisis, RF Mono can be applied to games played via RetroArch, and is "designed to ruin your audio and make it sound like a crappy '80s mono speaker."
You can hear the filter in action below.
[source readwrite.com]
Comments 20
I love my filters, but this, especially when playing the lovely synths and twangs of the Mega Drive... n'ah.
I will develop something myself:
A whole box of nothing, faithfully recreating the awesomely nostalgic feeling of not being able to afford buying your favorite Videogame, just like back in the day!
Peak Retroism! Haha.
hahaha this rules. definitely on the extreme side if you grew up with composite, but having raw soundchip audio, emulated otherwise, zapped straight into our ears over the last two decades has definitely warped our perception of how these games "really" sounded. even on something like the game gear with a headphone jack, you still had all sorts of hum and distortion caused by the other electronics on the board and probably a crude low-pass filter, too
plogue is a company that makes virtual instruments for writing chiptune, and their bitcrusher plugin has some extra features like adding the misc audio imperfections of the circuitry between the soundchip and your ear kind of like this. ironically, modders go to great lengths to remove these sounds and isolate them in post, but sometimes you just wanna play in the mud!
Well, here's a question I have, how many people were listening to their games in mono vs stereo back then?
I know the SNES had stereo output as standard, as it was literally a choice in pretty much every single game and there were official first party cables that supported it (it even supported Dolby Surround sound too, although not quite sure what connectors you needed to get that), but I don't know how it was with other consoles.
Which of these systems came with the connection points and standard first party cables that let you plug them directly into and then output your games to a typical CRT in stereo:
Famicom/NES
Master System
PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 (standard version)
Genesis/Mega Drive
Neo Geo
Etc
Can anyone answer for those systems, including the various models (as I know there were at least a couple of different main official models for most of those systems). That would be interesting to know.
" It goes without saying that the television sets in the '80s and '90s didn't offer the best aural experience; you'd often be saddled with low-quality mono sound."
Also, I just want to mention that my TV was outputting Dolby Pro-Logic surround sound back in the '90s and came with the five speaker setup in the box that was vastly superior to any TV or audio setup I've ever had since. My 50" 4K TV now is just boring ass stereo with crappy voice separation and is utterly underwhelming. So you could definitely get brilliant audio experiences in the '90s if you wanted to. And similarly, it's not like all modern TV are just amazing in that department out the box.
I use a similar but opposite audio filter on my RGB30, that tunes RetroArch audio output for the profile of the built-in speakers. Sounds wonderful! Night and day when it's switched off/on.
Hey, I found out about this a few days ago, a pleasure to use
I switched to Retroarch a few weeks ago and all of the community has made it feel so nice
Maybe a crappy 80’s TV, but the crappy 13” 1990’s TV’s I had (and still have in use) aren’t nearly that bad
But does it also random screw up the imagine into random colored blobs? Maybe some screen jitter too?
@RetroGames Most of my childhood SNES gaming was on crappy TVs that sure didn't have composite cable support (enough that I eventually lost my original SNES AV cable, luckily they are so abundant these days I have several).
First was, I want to say my mom's old TV that was probably from like the '70s but I think it died a year or two after getting the SNES.
Then we got some hotel liquidation TV that ran for a few years before dying as well. I want to estimate late '70s/early '80s was the vintage of that one. It had wood grain but also a channel number LED, though no on-screen adjustment menu.
@KingMike So, were you playing all your old consoles in crappy mono, such that this mod would be quite representative of the audio quality you were getting at the time from your games.
Lol I played on some pretty low end consumer TV sets in the ‘80s through the late ‘90s until my family bought a Sony Trinitron. We only had RF and coaxial inputs on those. Good times!
the difference is that high quality hi fidelity audio was available and fairly common back in the day. I was playing SNES and especially PSX on a 21" CRT, but the audio was going through my AIWA mini system and it was GLORIOUS! ☺️👍 To this day, sound is far more important to me than graphics in movies and videogames.
I understand everyone's nostalgia is different, but to me this is the reason for the relative lack of audio filtering and options.
(ps - crappy 80s/90s PC speakers are available at the thrift store RIGHT NOW and nothing could be more authentic 😂)
@RetroGames I know a few of these, so I'll start it off:
Personally, I used to run my consoles through a VCR to my TV, which was mono. At some point later on, when I had a stereo TV, I realized that this setup was still crunching everything down to mono, so I rewired it to skip the VCR and its cable, and things sounded so much fuller. It was just typical, muddy TV audio, but it still seemed so cool to finally have stereo, as I hadn't been spoiled by actual high-quality sound!
@smoreon I had gotten my SNES the first Christmas it was available. I know it came with both the stereo AV cable and RF modulator. I know because I remember seeing the AV cable just lying around the house randomly, unused, until it just disappeared entirely.
We had one TV with composite inputs, but it was the living room TV that I had never had any consoles connected to until the 2000s because my parents were nearly always using that TV so it didn't make much sense to me to make that effort to unplug the console from the other TV.
@smoreon Yeah, that sounds about right. No pun intended.
I remember my as I recall launch SNES had a cable with the stereo capable red/yellow/white connectors on the end. And, after the first basic TV I owned for a little while where I think I just had it plugged in directly like that, I had it plugged into a 21-pin EuroSCART connector and port on my TV for the rest of the time I owned it. I always thought it both looked and sounded great. Don't know if I ever upgraded to a proper RGB SCART at some point, but it's possible.
So, out of those systems, it seems like the SNES was the most practically stereo ready and most likely to actually be used as such at that time then. And that would be for all models of the system I presume.
I expect the PC Engine was possibly somewhere in between the NES/Master System and Genesis when it came to audio connections and stereo output as standard. And I'd have to imagine the Neo Geo was proper stereo with appropriate cables in the box given how expensive and cutting-edge it was for the time.
@-wc- This!
@smoreon
solid facts! I also like thinking about this stuff 👍
as did basically every console from then up to- and including- the PS3!
in the name of historical fullness, did Wii U not come with composite cables?
Ergo, was Wii U the very first purpose built for HD console shipping only with HDMI? 🤔
@Scollurio
Cheers. ✌️
@-wc- Nope. I have the Wind Waker bundle- got it used, but it has an exhaustive list of contents on the box- there's only HDMI, though the console works with a Wii composite cable if you have one.
So you're right. It's apparently the first console to only ship with an HDMI cable!
Key word is "only", though, as the Elite Xbox 360 (2007) not only supported HDMI, but also came with a cable.
I like the wording you used: that Wii U was the first console "purpose built for HD". Those fake HD 7th gen systems can go jump in a beautifully-rendered lake!
@RetroGames @KingMike I might've been thinking of the NES 2 (aka NES-101, aka the top-loader), which dropped composite support despite being so much newer than the old front-loader NES- or the SNES, for that matter!
@smoreon Yeah, Nintendo had very different motives for creating the AV Famicom and the NES top-loader.
The AV FC was made to update support to newer TVs while the newer NES was made to be sold cheaply (funny that it ended up being more desirable due to that cost-cutting meant also cutting out the lockout chip, which had the effect of removing the reset from a bad cart connection as well as allowing PAL carts to play).
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