AnalogTV recreates the complete analogue television chain — broadcast camera tube, composite signal encoding, RF transmission, and CRT phosphor display — simulated from physical first principles. Not a vintage filter. Not a post-process effect. A working simulation of every stage of broadcast television, from the camera neck to the phosphor screen.
THE COMPLETE BROADCAST CHAIN. Not AI, Not a Filter, the Real Thing.
Every frame passes through the same stages as a real television signal. A camera tube model — Image Orthicon, Plumbicon, Vidicon, or CCD — captures the scene with its characteristic lag, halation, and MTF response. The signal is composite-encoded to NTSC, PAL, or SECAM standards, then decoded through the same mathematics a real television receiver performs. A Metal GPU fragment shader renders each frame onto a simulated CRT phosphor display at 60 fps.
EIGHT PHOSPHOR TYPES
P22 colour television. P31 oscilloscope green. P45 white sub-millisecond. P4 B&W television. P3 amber radar. P7 dual-persistence radar — white flash fading to yellow-green afterglow. P11 deep blue photographic. P24 cyan-green flying-spot. Each calibrated from manufacturer datasheets and IEEE literature. Each shifts the IIR decay constants, rendered colour, and shutdown spot tint independently.
SERVICE MENU
Access the hidden service menu to make adjustments a television engineer would use: RGB drive and cutoff, convergence, focus voltage, G2 screen voltage, purity, HV regulation, and degauss. Every control operates at the physics level — changing focus changes the modelled electron beam diameter, not a software blur.
MAGNET
Press a virtual permanent magnet against the faceplate and watch the shadow mask magnetise. Drag to paint a continuous smear of purity damage across the screen. The magnetisation field persists across restarts. Degauss triggers the PTC thermistor coil sequence and clears it over 1.8 seconds.
TUBE AGEING AND SHUTDOWN
Cathode emission falls with use. The screen accumulates burn-in at sustained high-brightness areas. Shut the set down and watch the EHT bleed, beam defocus, and phosphor decay to darkness — with optional HV arc sounds.
14 TEST PATTERNS
SMPTE and EIA colour bars, pluge, crosshatch, multiburst, zone plate, flat fields, and more. Every pattern is generated mathematically in real time.
TECHNICAL SUMMARY
- Metal GPU rendering at 60 fps
- NTSC, PAL, and SECAM composite encoding and decoding
- Eight phosphor types from primary source measurements
- Four camera tube models with authentic lag and MTF physics
- 14 test patterns generated in real time
- Shadow mask magnetisation with 128×128 persistence texture
- IIR phosphor decay with per-channel time constants
- Aperture grille, shadow mask, and slot mask geometries
The app is amazing, the best VHS sim out there. Back in the day everyone had a different VCR. So no simple filter can replicate your own experience, but this app can! There’s so many settings to dial in, you can achieve exactly the type of image you want (and there’s also presets). Plus, the Dev is super committed to his project.
What's new in 2.50
NASA Apollo television (new)
Television as it actually came back from space in 1968–72 — a complete, self-contained Apollo mode reconstructed entirely in the signal domain from the primary engineering record (NASA TN D-7476, NASA TN D-6723, and the RCA Ground-Commanded Television Assembly manual).
• Lunar SSTV - the lunar-surface monochrome camera: 320 lines, 10 fps progressive, ~500 kHz, with the real 409.6 kHz burst sync and a properly lockable serrated field-sync.
• Field-sequential colour - the command-module/Lunar Rover colour camera: colour from a 6-segment RGB wheel spinning at 9.99 rev/s in front of a single tube (no subcarrier), recombined on the ground, with the colour band-limited to the real ~2 MHz.
• Two real camera tubes - the Westinghouse SEC vidicon (sensitive, blooms, burns, with the fixed fiber-optic faceplate specks documented in TN D-7476) and the RCA SIT vidicon from the Rover (intensifier, burn-immune, cleaner, 600-line, 32 dB).
• RCA ground scan converter - the optical 10->30 fps re-scan that made the slow-scan picture broadcastable, with its contrast/brightness/resolution loss and the famous white spots - plus a raw/converted toggle.
• Earth–Moon distance - a distance slider that delays the live picture by the real one-way light-time (~1.28 s at the Moon) and, near lunar range, breaks into the impulsive FM-threshold "clicks" the 85-ft dishes produced below threshold (only Goldstone's 210-ft stayed above it). A "Send to the Moon" button jumps to mean distance.
Black-and-white standards fixed
• 405-line (System A) and 819-line now finally emit the correct broad field-sync pulse (CCIR Report 624-2, 1982).
• The 819-line standard is now correctly named "System E"
• 819-line horizontal sync width corrected to 2.5 µs.
D2-MAC is sharp again
D2-MAC now renders at full resolution, picture-identical to D-MAC. It had been sampled at half the picture rate by mistake; in reality only its sound/data is half-rate, not its picture (ETSI ETS 300 250).
MUSE / Hi-Vision
Static Hi-Vision scenes now reconstruct through NHK's reference-decoder filter (ITU-R BO.786) using true 4-field quincunx interleave, so still detail "focus-pumps" crisper (genuine super-resolution rather than a frame average) - while a motion detector keeps moving areas authentically soft.
Pay-TV & copy protection - broader and more accurate
• New: Discret 11 (Canal+) - the French terrestrial system's per-line horizontal delay, snapping to the real Canal+ sequence; sync untouched, so the picture stays locked and keeps its colour while tearing horizontally.
• New: Eurocrypt / D2-MAC - component cut-and-rotate on the MAC time slots (the first non-composite scrambler in the set).
• Nagravision (Syster) uses the real 32-line sliding-window shuffle (locally shredded, globally ordered) instead of a full-field scramble.
• Videocrypt cut-and-rotate snaps to the real 256-step grid.
• Macrovision pulse cycling is encoded into the signal with patent-verified geometry.
• Video inversion now decides per-field, as the real systems did.
Signal-derived audio
Intercarrier "buzz" now tracks picture brightness and sync energy - bright scenes buzz louder, just like a real set.
VCR
Dropouts are modelled as FM carrier loss with an authentic dropout compensator (previous-line substitution), toggleable.
More physics, fewer fudges
• Co-channel beat and fine-tuning derive from real frequency offsets.
• MAC/MUSE lines carry true duobinary/data-burst waveforms with the correct frame-sync words and clock run-in.
• Colour is band-limited before time-compression, cutting false-colour shimmer on fine detail.
• Portrait (rotated) camera input now band-limits along the scan line, matching landscape sharpness.
Bug fixes
• iOS clips no longer record silently — audio is taken from the app's output, not the microphone.
• iOS auto-hides the video transport overlay during playback, matching macOS.
• Many other little minor fixes
Find a bug? Use in-app feedback form.
Version 2.5
The developer, Alastair Bor, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Linked to You
The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:
Contact Info
User Content
Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
Seller
Ambor
Size
27.4 MB
Category
Photo & Video
Compatibility
Requires iOS 16.6 or later.
iPhone Requires iOS 16.6 or later.
iPad Requires iPadOS 16.6 or later.
Mac Requires macOS 13.5 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later.
Infrequent Mature or Suggestive Themes Horror/ Fear Themes Medical/Treatment Information Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References Guns or Other Weapons
