March 26, 2026
Phosphor drama, pixel karma
Light on Glass: Why do you start making a game engine?
Old TV glow vs modern screens: Dev builds a tiny engine, comments split 'buy a CRT' vs 'filters lie'
TLDR: A developer built a focused retro game engine after rediscovering how old tube TVs make games look and move. The comments erupted into “just use a shader” vs “you need real hardware,” with many saying filters miss how older screens shaped the art—making this more than nostalgia: it’s about authenticity
A solo dev says he built a single-purpose “retro” engine after plugging a $35 late‑90s TV into an old console and realizing modern filters couldn’t fake the glow, motion, and vibe of those chunky glass screens. He argues today’s big engines treat games like a camera filming a world, but old TVs actually create the image in a very physical way—so the solution isn’t a quick overlay, it’s a whole different approach.
Cue the comments: chaos. The top vibe is a three‑way brawl. Team Pragmatic roars, “Can’t you just slap a shader on it?”—aka a fancy visual effect and call it a day. Team Purist blasts back: “Nope, buy a cheap old TV and your eyes will understand”, claiming modern flat screens smear motion and kill the magic. Meanwhile, Team Skeptic drops a bemused “...What?”, puzzling over why this needs an entire engine. One fan cheers for the project and dunks on “blocky filters,” even linking a jaw‑drop video comparing old vs new screens.
Memes flew: “Philips screwdriver vs Swiss Army knife” got turned into “CRTea vs LEDheads,” and folks joked about tweaking scanline sliders at 2am. Nostalgia? Maybe. But the loudest chorus says limitations made the art, and no filter can cosplay that for real
Key Points
- •Retro Game Engine began as a small D3D12 + Win32 prototype and evolved into a full pipeline.
- •The author’s motivation arose from using a 1998 Sharp CRT with an SNES, revealing visuals modern filters and displays don’t replicate.
- •Modern engines like Unreal and Unity are powerful but oriented around a camera/post-processing pipeline.
- •CRT behavior is fundamentally different from a post-process overlay; it’s a different image-generation model.
- •Because of this conceptual gap, the author built a specialized engine aimed at faithfully reproducing CRT-era visuals.