Nintendo Switch Online has been up for less than 48 hours and already it’s been hit with a few scandals. First, it was the NES emulator being hacked, and now, a large number of players are reporting that they’ve been getting screen “burn-in” after playing NES titles with the CRT Filter option on.
A Reddit thread on the Nintendo Switch subreddit is gaining massive upvotes for bringing to light this pretty serious issue. Redditor u/PCgaming4ever details how the burn-in effect occurs after playing NES games from the Switch Online library with the CRT Filter on. Here’s a picture he shared where you can clearly see the problem.
Several other netizens have also shared images of this bizarre bug occurring. Twitter user ShugoWah’s pic is another obvious example of the burn-in problem. As you can see below, there is a distinct outline of the status bar from Super Mario Bros. 3 in the bottom of the screen.
hey I'm back for a sec to say be careful of using the #nintendoswitch # NES
CRT filter because I'm pretty sure it just straight-up broke my desktop monitorAdvertisementThis is after switching it back to my PC. that's SMB3's status bar at the bottom. screen just a bit more than a year old pic.twitter.com/XYHtZ259jW
— paw beans & coffee beans ?☕ (@ShugoWah) September 19, 2018
After a bit of testing and research, PCgaming4ever noted that the most probable explanation for this issue is this theory posted on Resetera by Robin64.
“It’s because Nintendo’s CRT has the same “wobble” the NES Mini had, rather than being just scanlines. On the NES Mini, we could hack it to turn the wobble part of the filter off.
Basically, the edge of the NES pixels are being shimmered back and forth super rapidly to create the RF cable style effect. The pixels are being changed between two identical unrelaxed states over and over (on static parts) and eventually that that remains and they can’t relax. This is the retention you see and it’s why it’s not a copy of the UI (as ghosting would be) but rather a map of the pixel shimmering.”
This being the case, the conclusion is that the burn-in issue is most likely caused by a rendering problem with the NES CRT filter. While the images seem to fade away after some period of time, this is definitely something that isn’t unintended and needs to be fixed in the next patch.
Kotaku reached out to Nintendo for feedback on the issue, but they have yet to hear back from them. Nintendo is usually pretty responsive, so we’ll likely get some form of communication soon. Once that happens, we’ll be sure to provide you guys with an update. Until then, if the burn-in irritates you, stay clear of the CRT filter option while Nintendo works on a fix.
Featured Image Source: NintendoSoup
