Cool Retro Term - A terminal emulator with retro CRT look for macOS and Linux

Ever wanted to experience what is was like playing the Zork text adventure back in the day? Modern computers just don't give you that experience that an old CRT monitor gave you, old games looked a lot better than Emulators today might make you think. A terminal emulator called cool-retro-term tries to mimic exactly that experience of an old school CRT monitor with bright and vivid colors, scanlines and a bezel display that distorts the picture a bit.

Zork running in cool-retro-term using the Frotz interpretrer

cool-retro-term is Open Source, licensed as GPL and can be installed on macOS and Linux.

I stumbled on it while watching an old YouTube video where someone used it to play Zork and just had to try it out myself :) It's not just for playing text adventures though, it works like any other Terminal so you could use it as a replacement for your current terminal. It has a wide range of settings and different themes.

If you activate "frame reflections" in the "Performance" tab of the settings, it even simulates the light of the text shining onto the border of the monitor. It's disabled by default because it's quite costly in terms of performance, but it adds this nice little extra touch :)

macOS

You can download cool-retro-term here

Linux

Fedora

cool-retro-term is part of the distribution's packages, so you can install it with:

sudo dnf install cool-retro-term

Ubuntu 17.10 & 18.04

cool-retro-term can be installed using this PPA.

Everyone else

You can read the instructions for building cool-retro-term yourself in its Readme on Github