Hi guys

Looking for resources on emulating the illumination and after glow of CRT oscilloscope displays, like on these old radar scopes. So far my google searches aren't returning anything useful. Any suggestions?

I've heard that when the manufacturer in the 80ties switched to digital video memory (DRAM) and bright 80 frames/seconds CRTs they had to emulate the after glow in order not annoy the operators.

Look up some old demo effects about glow. For example fire simulation on DOS PCs.

The bleeps, the sweeps and the creeps ?

Found quite a few suggestions with a search spell of how to accomplish this, old discussions in here, on stack exchange, on the Khronos forum, even papers (though somewhat historic). Shouldn't be too hard to find a fitful solution ...

Thanks but not quite what I am looking for . I already have my radar itself nailed down, but what I am looking for specifically is emulating the effects of an electron beam on a fluorescent surface. Specifically the fading afterglow that follows an electron beam's sweep.

How about blending out the alpha channel over the course of one sweep of the bleep ?

Still not quite what I am looking for. If you look at those pictures I posted, you will notice that the sweep is pretty much white at its brightest, but fades off to green/yellow/chartreuse as it gets dimmer. I am looking for the actual physics involved in such CRT phosphor behaviour so I can create the gradient curve for the RGB values.

On the danger of being dismissed again, i suggest searching "color grading" and "crt shading".

Some atoms or molecules have long living excited states. A single atom has lots of states with different lifetimes. But I think, most of them live quite short. I used ps light pulses to pump/probe them . A crystal can be doped. At such an atom long living states may occure. But then phosphore, I mean it looks so low tech. I think that maybe electrons and hulls in a semiconductor are involved. They need some time to find each other. This gives a 1/t dimming over time ( as opposed to exp(-t) for single atoms). We could measure this with simple and cheap electronics in the future school teachers labs.  .. I think I have tried to google this phosphor stuff, but was not satisfied. Also strange that these CRTs hold stuff for seconds while computer crts flicker at 60 Hz...

One could calculate or estimate the gradient of the phosphorus fluorescence/luminescence from white over several intermediate steps, convert to rgb values and store them in a ramp texture. Or get the curve empirically if circumstances permit.

The lookup in the texture would be time dependent, over one revolution of the sweep, maybe a little less or more.

There are papers on all kinds of -escences. The spectroscopy guys seem to be interested in such stuff, apart from oscilloscopy and such.