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I draw, I paint (more than draw), I animate. Daily. So, I have a bit of a different perspective on this. Pixel art is one of the hardest disciplines I've tried. It's ridiculous. I wouldn't do it again. I only spent with it a bit to see what it takes, and it takes A LOT. If it's not outstanding, it won't get noticed as well. So, it's really tough on psyche. Somewhat like animation.

There's another thing I want to mention. I have a broadcast-quality CRT with consoles of ye olde hooked up, and pixels you see on sprites, especially on the edges, aren't there on CRTs. Magical scanline blends them together and looking at the pixel art on CRT is different than on anything else. Almost like they are anti-aliased, but they're not (smudged). I think that's a key component today we are missing from enjoying pixel art. When it was dominant in game industry, you couldn't see actual pixels. Today, they are fetishised.

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> When it was dominant in game industry, you couldn't see actual pixels.

Exactly! I didn't like the author's dig at rescaling algorithms, but he seems to be forgetting that pixels never looked like that! The pixel art he likes so much was never like what he does today. This article has good screenshots, although I think they're emulated:

http://www.tested.com/tech/gaming/2982-a-link-to-the-past-ho...

If you like pixel art, go ahead and make pixel art. Some of the artwork in the article is stunning, and I like the aesthetic a lot. However, don't romanticize it and claim that old games looked like that, because they just didn't.

I think better scalers and shaders that can reproduce the look of CRTs are a nice effort, since I want to play old games the way I actually remember them, not with visible pixels that were completely alien the first time I played Zelda on an emulator.

This is the best article I've seen on CRT emulation: http://www.piratehearts.com/blog/2014/03/28/crt-simulation/

That article was so good, I promptly bought (and beat) the game. I wish someone would take these techniques and bring them to an NES or SNES emulator.

They have - Retroarch has CRT shaders that emulate many of these effects (and I believe other emulators can also load the same shaders).

Huh, I hadn't seen Retroarch before. Interesting.

I don't know, I don't buy into this. The pixels weren't as crisp as they are when you're emulating these games, but I certainly remember them existing. Looking at those screenshots, you absolutely can tell that those images are built out of pixels. Also, like someone else mentioned, what about handheld consoles that very clearly displayed pixels? It wasn't like everyone thought that was some crazy new idea.

They aren't wrong. Regarding the comments and images in the linked article, there's a key point made there that's fundamentally wrong. Let me pick out a quote:

"We all get how pixels basically work. A computer divides a display into squares, and each square can be assigned one RGB value at a time. The total squares supported by the hardware is the device’s “resolution.” This square grid is the smallest possible subdivision of detail available to an artist."

This is the bit that's fundamentally wrong. Pixels are not squares. And never have been. They are "point samples". The fact that "magnified" pixel art displayed here compounds the error by displaying big squares rather than using an appropriate reconstruction filter doesn't help correct the misconception.

Here's a link to a classic paper on the topic: http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf

In the case of pixel art, they are not point samples. The signal is not band-limited and the "aliasing" is deliberate and controlled. It's the same technique as font hinting.

This is a totally valid artistic choice, and they are welcome to do that. I certainly enjoy it myself when it's well done.

But... it's not pixel art anymore, it's square art. And if people want to create neo-pointilist/neo-divisionist artwork based upon a grid of coloured squares that's fine. But it's not pixels.

I can understand it being annoying, especially if you have a DSP background, but the name is well established. Language changes over time and "pixel" has gained another meaning. I don't think you're going to convince anybody to switch to "neo-pointilist".

Nope, it's exactly pixel art, because in the real world pixels were never simply point samples - indeed, few things are because they're not physically possible. (It's a reasonably approximation for audio, mostly because there's a truly massive amount of oversampling happening behind the scenes to make it work.) Pixel art takes advantage of the fact that pixels are not point samples and never were.

I'm not a fan of the simulated CRT filters that try to make a game look like it did on an old television. Instead, I prefer the filters that intelligently scale pixel art as though rendered at a higher resolution, such as hq4x.

I think it depends on the context. Sometimes when I'm emulating my bro mario I do enjoy the CRT filters.

They looked like that on the Gameboy.

They didn't. The Gameboy screen had it's own idiosyncrasies and games looked like this: https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/gameboy-inl...

Reminds me of how recent scholarship shows that Greek statues weren't the blank-eyed white marble figures that influenced Western Art but were often brightly painted with additional features added.

yeah I always find that to be interesting - they look more like curios from mexico at that point than those dignified, time weathered monuments we're accustomed to.

It is worth mentioning that there was a clear visible difference between NTSC and PAL, so even on the same screen, playing the same game, things would look different in Europe and America (and I believe also in Japan)

Not just look different, but sometimes play differently too. Game mechanics were often tied into framerate, so 60Hz vs 50Hz could make a difference.

To be fair, pc games running at 320*200 most certainly did look like that - big pixels with hard edges. But very few games ape the EGA palette, all the NES-looking pixel games look like tech thst never existed. EGA was a pretty short period between cga and VGA, much of PC gaming was blocky, but high color... and had a bigger focus on strategy and puzzle games because of the keyboard/mouse input, which isn't really reflected in the indie world's love for pixelly platformers.

Pc had much better crt tech than TVs for consoles. So you cant really generalize.

Some of the big early 90s PC hits were games like Cmdr Keen and other Apogee platformers. They were hugely popular at the time.

I think you mean the CGA palette, the one used in the CGA text mode and as the default palette in some of the EGA and VGA graphics modes. EGA could pick from a palette of 64 colors.

I strongly disagree (and have so in the past here on HN). Pixel art really did look like that back then. High quality, top of the line RGB monitors you'd find in arcade games looked like that. The Amiga, IBM PC and Macintosh looked like that. The Neo Geo Pocket Color, Wonderswan and Gameboy Advance looked like that.

Here are some high quality CRT examples: http://imgur.com/a/Ad0pe

Images you've linked to exhibit 'blended' pixel edges I am talking about. Also, top of the line monitors were not those Wells Gardner and similar monitors in arcade cabinets. Top of the line CRTs were/are broadcast reference monitors by SONY and to a lesser extent JVC and others. I have a BVM-20F1E. It looks better, sharper, than regular CRTs (mostly due to high line number) but it exhibits same 'effect'.

I have a theory what contributes to that 'blended' effect. Well, at least for the most part. It's the masking in-front of the beam. If you look at the sister comment here I made with portable AGS-101 screen from Gameboy SP, it's the same effect. Most prominent while moving. That (resolution) masking grid (with squares on LCD or oblongs on CRTs) somehow interacts with neighbouring pixels and blends all together. It's not from the composite signal, that's for sure. I know, because I run my consoles with RGB output and I still don't see that sharp look that doesn't look right.

> have a broadcast-quality CRT with consoles of ye olde hooked up, and pixels you see on sprites, especially on the edges, aren't there on CRTs

What about the thousands of games for hand-held consoles, which have always used LCDs, and were using pixel art for much longer than their counterparts elsewhere out of sheer necessity?

Smaller screens though.

You could (and can) still clearly identify individual pixels on them.

(Especially when you're a kid and keep your nose mere inches off the screen.)

Maybe, but you have to lean in very close: http://imgur.com/a/ovuhZ This is on AGS-101, probably the best screen (backlit) of old handhelds. Whole screen is a fine grid of pixel units which are visible and negate (interlace with) pixels in pixel art. Also, when things start moving, it becomes a blur - due to both laggy screen and small size of it. I've seen some graphics demos (and games) overlaying grid mesh over art and it looks better, more like original seen here.

Your point stands in theory, but in practice it also doesn't look anything like pixel art on modern screens.

edit: to be clear, I'm mostly talking about the edges on the sprites. That's where it's most visible. It's not as clinical or smudged as on modern monitors / upscales.

> Maybe, but you have to lean in very close: http://imgur.com/a/ovuhZ

Curse you, nostalgia. I definitely remember it being… pixel-y-ier. I stand corrected.

> I have a broadcast-quality CRT with consoles of ye olde hooked up, and pixels you see on sprites, especially on the edges, aren't there on CRTs.

I think this is very insightful. I learned about this when setting up a home MAME arcade. The vector-graphic games looked perfect, but Space Harrier and other pixel-based games looked wrong to me, less impressive than I remembered as a kid. The forums told me I could try running a pixel-smudging mask to make the games look right, but it would be graphics-card-intensive. Instead, I went out and found an old used CRT monitor and everything looks great.

Oh, I envy you! As soon as I get more (living) space, that's what I want to do. ASAP. I just have to figure out how to make an elegant mechanism to run both horizontal and vertical monitor alignment (tate or whatever the name is). Few of my favorite games run like that and I want then to have fullscreen glory.

Gamasutra published an in-depth article last year on how the developer of Super Win the Game implemented a shader to emulate the scanline (and phosphor decay) of CRTs. It's eyeopening, and was the first time I realized why my emulated NES classics looked so different from what I remembered from my youth.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/KylePittman/20150420/241442/C...

Thanks! In short, this image summarizes:

http://i.imgur.com/Pq2Yra4.png

And if you ask how, the answer is: analog. Every transition was driven by the analog circuits, the phosphor response was analog. Analog all around, but especially to form the pixels one after another: all the transitions, response curves, persitences, dispersions working their own magic.

You definitely could see pixels. They just weren't simple flat-colour squares with sharp edges. The appearance of a pixel was influenced by its neighbours, the viewing angle, and what that pixel was doing previously.

Great artists that worked in the medium knew how to make art within the restrictions of the medium that didn't look like it had been restricted by the medium; as great artists do in any medium.

They were 'blended', yes. Even squareness wasn't the case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_aspect_ratio

Well, it really depends on the scale. If you do small sprites then it can be really satisfying.

Pixel art is a niche but it is still alive and I have been considering to investigate up-scaling methods that are more suitable for it.

For example there is a game OpenTTD (https://www.openttd.org) that is based on the pixel art and while attempts have been made to great higher resolution graphics based on the renders then most of these attempts, with some exceptions, have fallen flat. So people play with mixed graphics and such methods could make it more enjoyable if the up scaling of the lower resolution sprites would work better.

You can check out the forum https://www.tt-forums.net/viewforum.php?f=26 and mostly inactive http://www.simuscape.net/simutalk/index.php for examples of custom graphics made for this game (and older hack, TTDPatch).

That's a thing more relevant on PC: this video has some more information on the phenomenon (I think) you're talking about:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=niKblgZupOc

I already knew about this, but it always blows my mind when I see it. Composite was magic. Dark magic, but still magic. Life is a lot easier today for us in film and video though, I would not like to go back except for nostalgia.

Yeah, it's pretty crazy.

I enjoy it as a hobby. It feels kind of like doing mosiacs, you're forced to go slow so it's kind of relaxing.

But doing it on a rushed schedule is stressful and can suck.

You've described it perfectly. Like piecing together a delicate mosaic.

Can you please PLEASE do a write up more on this!?

I would love to see some more concrete examples of what you're stating as I an ignorant of that which you speak but super curious....

Can you please explain in pics what youre talking about?

Related how pixel art on a CRT is different from anything else: Darren Walls Kickstarter-funded book 'The Bitmap Brothers' will use a special form of pixel art printing! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/darrenwall/the-bitmap-b...

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