$60 chip fixes a longstanding Super Nintendo flaw

theverge.com

14 points·mikhael··6 comments

The halo/"soft" edges are part of the charm of older crt consoles, which is why I play mine on an old tv. Personally, sharp edges are something I don't want when playing SNES often because the artists of that era designed for those properties. However, the color and luminance improvements are nice.

Example of how the art of the time designed for soft edges and blur. Notice the single pixel eyes in the sharp version, and how the bleeding of the original display works to the arts advantage.

https://x.com/CRTpixels/status/1408451743214616587?t=QCeGpBV...

Another example of this, is the waterfalls in Sonic the Hedgehog.

No, it’s not meant to look like alternating blue lines on the remasters (even though that looks decent enough). In a CRT TV, that alternating pattern would have created a translucency effect after the smearing.

Here’s a shader comparison which tries to properly recreate this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s4QOHe4bOZc

This doesn't remove that effect, since the video signal is still going through the CRT and will become naturally blurred/distorted by it. The problem is that the video signal was already blurry/smudgy coming out of the SNES, in a sense, doubling up the effect.

Sorta. Depends on the vintage of the crt, for example late model Sony Trinitrons or PVMs have fairly crisp pixel edges and you lose some of the intentional aliasing effects assumed by the original art.

It's a really cool achievement, but 1CHIP consoles are still readily available for around $100; just search for "snes jr" or SNS-101. The downside is that those models don't have RGB output, so that requires a small mod.

Although, s-video on a 1CHIP still looks great. It's just as sharp, only the colors are slightly off.

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