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Retro games and CRT TVs are an inseparable pair. Old-school games are intertwined with old-school display technology, to the point where, if you're not actually playing on cathode ray tube, you're probably investing in some kind of upscaler to play on modern television. But CRTs are slowly failing, with no new replacements in production, and that's just one part of the tech apocalypse that video game preservationists and historians are having to work through.
That's one of the topics that came up at the Establishing the Standards and Practices of Game Preservation Roundtable during the Game Developers Conference 2026, attended by GamesRadar+.
"Who's making cathode ray tube TVs?" one audience member asks. "A lot of video games for, like, the SNES and so on, were built with the explicit intention of using the cathode ray tube TV's blurring effect to blur together the pixels and create a more 3D image. When you upscale that to 1080p, it doesn't look the same – or right."
You'll see this argument come up quite a bit from CRT enthusiasts, and if you look at examples of classic pixel art, there's no doubt that it often looks better with the imperfections introduced by display on a CRT TV. There are many ways to replicate the CRT look on modern TVs, but even official emulators for classic games can struggle to present old games correctly.
Chrono Trigger (1995, Squaresoft) - SNES PC Emulator vs. SNES Composite via Sony KV-14M10 Recycling this comparison I did last year for Toriyama’s passing in celebration of Chrono Trigger’s anniversary!
— @crtpixels.bsky.social (@crtpixels.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-03-12T11:10:50.649Z
"I feel like maybe we should not be ceasing the production of critical infrastructure, even if it's not very useful," the audience member concludes.
"Unfortunately, I don't have the solution of the TV apocalypse that's happening, beyond repairing things," the Strong Museum's director of digital preservation, Andrew Borman, explains. "I think there's a lot of work that can be done documenting how the heck you repair a CRT properly, and I think there's been a few people I've seen around here that do a great job."
But the issue of CRT TVs is simply a microcosmic glimpse at the issues facing game historians and preservationists as old hardware of every type starts to fail. The Strong, for example, keeps a collection of materials from Atari's home and arcade divisions, including chip schematics. "There are chip plots, there are schematics of the hardware, schematics of the case work," Borman explains. "That's something that I think is really powerful and something that we can do to some extent, and that's been used to improve emulation, which is a great thing as well."
Many gamers see preservation as simply the means by which games remain available to modern audiences, but that's just a small piece of the puzzle. Organizations like the Strong and the Video Game History Foundation focus much of their efforts on preserving materials about game development – things like design documents and the types of schematics Borman is talking about.
The reality is that no hardware can last forever. But by preserving all the information they can about how it's built and how it works, preservationists can arm modern developers with the tools they need to keep improving how these games are presented in the modern day. That applies to old-fashioned software emulation, and Borman cites FPGA-based hardware emulation as a new technology that benefits from all the documentation work that's already been done.
It's not just historical organizations doing this work, either: Borman says "the community" is probably an even bigger hero. "They are the experts in this sort of thing," Borman explains. "They know what this chip is doing before I do."
The best PS1 games will still be great even if you have to settle for a CRT filter instead of the real thing, and the best retro consoles today can hook up to screens new and old.
