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2 Sep 20 10:35 PM · 3d ago · 1 post · 1 source · development 2 of 2
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datagubbe Technical analyst and authormylifeisanrpg TikTok content creatorKaelanRamos Twitter user
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> Modern flatscreens all have fixed resolutionsTrue by design.> and purely digital interfaces,True but not relevant. Even if you connected an LCD monitor over an analog interface like VGA or composite video, it would have to re-digitize the signal. The fact that a screen uses a digital interface can be designed independently of whether a screen…
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CRTs are to video games what vinyl is to music and celluloid is to cinema. The flaws associated with the physical medium have become the defining aesthetic, such that a new medium which removes those flaws feels "sterile" and "hollow", like a concrete-slab brutalist building. There's also the sense of nostalgia. Rock music was less commercialized…
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> I don't know if the CRT version is taken from an actual CRT, but I doubt it - I actually think it looks too fuzzy. I may be wrong - it could be an effect of a close-up photo scaled up - but it's more likely a CRT approximation generated by a software filter on a modern machine.On both the NES and SNES, the pixels were so large that you could…
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It's not that CRTs were "forgiving", it's that designers leaned into what they'd do to pixels. A classic example is the tanks in Atari 2600 Combat - they look ridiculous on a hi-res screen. On a CRT they sort of look like tanks.I have a JAMMA cabinet at home. It has a CRT in it. I usually play on x-in-1 pirate emulator board. So I don't mind that…
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I like to think of modern pixel art as its own aesthetic and art form. It's designed to be viewed on high DPI LED screens, and that's fine. I don't think it should be judged by how it looks on a CRT.There's an undeniable charm to the older era of pixel art, and surely part of that is nostalgia, but I also think a lot of it comes from the fact that…
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Not so clear in the article is that also with consoles the game pixel grid didn't match the CRT grid (even in "pixel count") so just by geometry you have blending of one pixel data into several CRT "pixels" (plus varying intensity even in a single phosphor patch as the analog RGB signals rise and fall in intensity).As for CRT filters one can argue…
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As a retro gamer I think the people worrying about pixel blurring is overblown. I think a lot fewer artists actually intentionally used it than these articles make outThere's a reason it always comes back to the same few examples, peach hanging from a rope, dracula's eyes, sonic behind the waterfall. If it were used as widely as some people make…
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I thought the Macbook Pro LCDs were bright enough, high-res-enough, and fast enough to make a very accurate CRT simulation. Here it is: https://github.com/baragona/crt-xdrIt looks so much like a CRT to me. It looks like pressing your face up to a TV to see the individual phosphors. Try setting "signal" to dropped image and viewing some images. It…
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The two articles by the author are focused on the sharpness aspect. What's missing are the dilation/contraction due to beam intensity and resultant gamma. You can take away the scanlines and phosphor filter and still get a more "classic" image with just a modified bilinear filter.A particularly good example of this are the whites of Mario's and…
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I appreciate the author calling out the point that dithering etc. was definitely visible on better-quality CRT monitors via RGB/VGA signals.So many people these days mistake the blurring from composite signals as being due to the CRT. A CRT doesn't magically blend pixels together. And there are certainly many tradeoffs to using composite so that…
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Pixelation is clear on a CRT. The blocky aesthetic was obvious to everyone as the “video game look”. The earliest Flash movies on sites like Newgrounds, around the turn of the millennium, used the blocky pixel art style (and we were all still using CRT TVs at that point). I just don’t see the argument about the pixel aesthetic being nostalgia at…
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I wish museums having old video game exhibits would respect the medium and display them on CRTs and that if they used LCD screens they would be as shamed as if they showed prints of paintings instead of the actual paintings
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The 12” TV that I played SNES on had convenient brightness/tint/sharpness dials. Depending on my mood I’d turn sharpness all the way up for hard pixels or all the way down for a free Gaussian sampling filter ;)
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> I also agree that modern, blocky pixel art often is a kind of misdirected, anachronistic nostalgia.Pixel art, for me, is the Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advanced which I never played on a CRDT.
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Related, I usually hate CRT filters in game, the scan lines usually look too strong (and often the image is darkened inappropriately), but I really liked the one in Cyber Shadow. It just felt right.
All 2 developments of CRT Effects on Pixel Art Examined: Fuzziness Overstated in… →
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