The Beauty of Shadow of the Beast on a CRT

[primitivefunction]

Back in 2019 I started writing an article on the legacy of Shadow of the Beast for the game's 30th anniversary. Never got around to finishing it, but I did take a bunch of photos etc to illustrate the piece. And I was looking at these again this week, and darn is this not a beautiful looking game on a 1084 monitor. There's just so much depth and texture here that is lacking when viewing on modern displays or Youtube clips (which is sadly how most people are seeing these games now).

Shadow of the Beast by Reflections/Psygnosis, 1989

Shadow of the Beast by Reflections/Psygnosis, 1989

So I thought I'd share these since on another thread there was talk about viewing Amiga artwork on CRTs. These were taken with a digital SLR, and probably a 60mm macro lens if memory serves. The monitor is a Commodore 1084s connected via RGB to an A500. A bit of colour correction was done because I was trying to match the way the screenshots looked on the box art. Psygnosis knew how to do great boxes - and their screenshots (which were photographs of CRTs) always looked super enticing. I feel sorry for some of the C64 or Spectrum owners who were sold on the spectacular Amiga screenshots, only to load up their ported versions and feel a wave of disappointment! Poor bastards.

Shadow of the Beast by Reflections/Psygnosis, 1989

[intric8]

Gorgeous photos, @primitivefunction, and well said. It's all about that CRT with the Amiga for me most of the time.

What's interesting is the pre-OSX Mac looks amaze-balls on an LCD. It looks *new* and modern in many respects, and oftentimes looks better than on a CRT. It's so crisp, the text so jarringly perfect. But on the Amiga? A lot of the art just looks mind-bogglingly gorgeous on the original output.

CRT FTW.

[primitivefunction]

What's interesting is the pre-OSX Mac looks amaze-balls on an LCD. It looks *new* and modern in many respects, and oftentimes looks better than on a CRT. It's so crisp, the text so jarringly perfect. But on the Amiga? A lot of the art just looks mind-bogglingly gorgeous on the original output.

Out of the gate the Mac always put resolution over colour, so I suppose that makes sense. And Jobs was obsessed with fonts so the Mac was always at the top of the heap when it came to type. Some of those original Mac fonts are works of art for sure.

Yeah, I love that there are so many 'flavours' of CRT. I currently have four CRT monitors for my Amigas, which is way too many, but they're all quite unique in the way they render an image (I'm trying to resist adding any more to the collection - although I wouldn't knock back a nice 'baby' PVM for doing genlock stuff).

Probably the most interesting one I have is this Sony KX-14CP1. It was ex- TV studio, the picture is amazing and all of it's inputs, including RGB SCART, are on the side which makes life so much easier. It pairs beautifully with the Amiga and even has a built in speaker along the bottom.

[bnilsson]

Wow that CRT monitor looks amazing

[LocalH]

Trinitrons were among some of the best, if not the best CRTs ever made. I regularly watch content on a 27" SD Trinitron that I rescued from the curb.

[fxgogo]

I remember using that exact monitor for video previews when I worked as a staging technician. Nice monitor. More lightweight and user friendly than a PVM.