Would it maybe be related to how pixel art looked on CRTs? We're used to pixel art now I think in part because of an era of future game devs playing roms on better screens, but the devs of the time (I think) wouldn't have considered a CRT filter to maintain the image on a shiny new flatscreen - ThreadSky

dannysleeves.bsky.social • 34 days ago

Would it maybe be related to how pixel art looked on CRTs? We're used to pixel art now I think in part because of an era of future game devs playing roms on better screens, but the devs of the time (I think) wouldn't have considered a CRT filter to maintain the image on a shiny new flatscreen

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worm-girl.bsky.social•33 days ago

This is sort of a myth. If you get a decent CRT TV, it looks much closer to #1 than the other 3. People got obsessed with this idea that scanlines were doing some sort of magic and really overdid the artificial scanlines in SNES emulators, and now everyone acts like it's this cool lore.

dominictarason.com•33 days ago

Yeah, the only time I ever had a CRT TV that made everything blur together like that was an ancient hand-me-down I had as a kid with RF inputs and an overly sensitive tuner dial.

People forget that the sharp pixels themselves were drawn on CRT monitors because that's literally all that existed.

urxflow.bsky.social•33 days ago

The artwork for games were usually done on high end CRT monitors but testing was going to be done on consumer oriented hardware. So games were designed in mind with where it was going to be played.

It's the same reason why GBA games look blown out, because it was to account for lack of backlight.

dominictarason.com•33 days ago

Even then, most TVs still looked better and clearer than the blurry messes that we're calling 'CRT filters' today. This idea that all pixel art was designed around a specific blending effect you got from the hardware just isn't true. There was no set universal reference standard.

worm-girl.bsky.social•33 days ago

And people at the time certainly weren't aware of any such effect. If they were they might have said something when modern displays became available.

urxflow.bsky.social•33 days ago

The heavy usage of dithering during that era of gaming was done under the understanding that it would be smoothed out by the majority of consumer TVs.

The universal standard was the outputs that the consoles supported, which low quality signal + CRT blending created a smoothing effect.

worm-girl.bsky.social•33 days ago

I don't think that it was, as the dithering dates back to two and four color displays which were always high contrast and in huge resolutions. You can't smooth those. The technique was used for texture, blending, and to get more "colors" out of limited palettes, and it works just as well in HD.

dominictarason.com•33 days ago

Funny. I specifically remember a lot of Sega Saturn games of the time looking really rough at the time specifically because the dithering effect looked like a sharp checkerboard of pixels.

And I loved my Saturn. Still the most underrated of the CD-era consoles.

urxflow.bsky.social•33 days ago

People focus way too much on just the hardware and not the fact that most people were using Composite and S-Video. And games are always made in mind with what displays are capable of, much like how HDR support works.

mas0menos.bsky.social•33 days ago

In some cases. But then you have other examples like Harvest Moon 64, which had filtering because god forbids pixel art on Nintendo's first 3D system!

dominictarason.com•33 days ago

It's because the on top of the N64's questionable texture filtering, the console itself did an 'anti-aliasing' pass on the output signal and slightly smeared the entire image. It's why nothing ever looked sharp on real hardware.

A lot of modern modded N64 bypass that final phase to look clearer.

eggcarton.zone•33 days ago

as a child of the CRT era, aside from early PC games using them to save space, I first *saw* a scanline from something trying to emulate CRTs. there was some pixel bleed on CRTs, but unless it was a pure red pixel it was nowhere near as smeary as people try to claim

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