The effect of CRTs on pixel art
datagubbe.se
datagubbe.se
There are several instances where you can clearly see the artists not merely "living with" the CRT rendering but actually using it to their advantage: the eyes resulting from a single red pixel in the Castlevania picture, the smooth gradients in the Streets of Rage picture arising out of just 3 or 4 colors...
Specifically this example which I've since seen copypasted in many places talking about the same point: https://vgdensetsu.tumblr.com/post/179656817318/designing-2d...
Especially transparency at 0:39 https://youtu.be/nw2QfPREu-Q?t=39 and 9:46 https://youtu.be/nw2QfPREu-Q?t=9m46s
Also the fan animation at 2:15 : https://youtu.be/nw2QfPREu-Q?t=2m15s
Right now is a great time to appreciate the exquisiteness involved in pixel art, its perfect pixels and perfect colors, scaled to high resolution with sharpness. I agree some of the genius of working with CRT limitations is lost, but the overall majority of it became a pleasure to see.
Now, vector arcade games, those really are a sin to play on anything but a vector CRT :P
This is why I find many "scanline filters" so jarring. My CRT experiences may have come from the last decade of CRTs, but I've never actually seen the dark, black grid hovering above the PS2 graphics from my youth. Yet, when I enable CRT emulation in many emulators, it looks like someone put a plastic grate in front of my screen.
The scanlines were there, but they didn't have the contrast a black overlay has on a modern flat screen.
I have seen some (GPU intensive) filters that do mimick CRTs more accurately, but to display them well, you need a 4K monitor or better, simply because the effects applied to the individual pixels involves multiple pixels of blend/distortion, often in a non-linear fashion to mimick the bulging screen. ShaderGlass was the first tool that actually allowed me to see some old games as I remembered them (after a bit of tweaking).
I think most people agree that the clarity of modern displays are a huge benefit, but when playing older games, a lot of nuance is lost. When (much younger) developers start emulating older pixel art styles without having ever seen the blurry, distorted CRT graphics, you get this weird anachronistic super-crisp pixel art that's supposed to be retro. Still looks good, but they're graphically off even if they copy directly off of old sprite sheets.
But even high-quality CRT's had gaussian blur. In no case when using CRT's would a pixel be represented as a tiny square, which is what you see in a lot of modern "retro" art. The "pixel" of native CRT displays is always a smoothly blurred point sample.
And that's why CRTs were capable of displaying different resolutions in a way that was appealing.
When I bought my first LCD monitor for my computer I was hit with instant regret. The early LCDs were :
Horrible at anything other than native resolution. If your computer hardware wasn't good enough to run a new game at the highest resolution of your monitor, the game would look terrible. The scaling used to bring lower resolution pixels to fit the screen's native pixels was just terrible, terrible and terrible. I have no words that can describe just how bad the experience of playing games at a lower resolution than native was in that era.
CRT bluriness smoothed things around in a way that didn't actually look excessively blurry. LCDs running lower resolution games looked like you threw vaseline on them.
And they were also terrible in motion. Ghosting! Ghosting! Ghosting! Playing games like Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament didn't feel good on that stuff..
Trust me, they didn't look like the emulators show them.
TVs though, especially on RF, were pretty darn blurry.
Yes, I do remember the colourful, blinky, not to say glamorous, 'white' of a VIC-20 or C64 connected via HF modulator to a TV. Still, coming from 'no computer, never encountered one' to such a device then it's difficult not to romanticize that time now. We were also at an very impressible age.
How do I know? Because just yesterday I was playing with a Megadrive connected to a Trinitron PC monitor through a line doubler. It looks gorgeous, but there were no transparencies.
If you play those games today on switch and the like, the experience just isn't quite the same.
> When it comes to computer screens, there are always two resolutions involved: the one produced by the computer, such as 320x200, and the dot pitch, or "dots per inch", of the screen proper.
The fun thing about CRTs is that there's always more things affecting resolution, like spot size (PVMs/BVMs and their narrow spots made interlacing more obvious) and amplifier bandwidth (if you run at a high enough hsync rate, you can get horizontal blur because the electron gun changes brightness slower than once per phosphor).
As I understand, 320x200/240 on a VGA monitor is actually line-doubled because VGA cards and displays can't take hsync rates below 30 kHz. This can be seen in your Duke Nukem 3D screenshot if you watch the source video, switch to 4K resolution, and zoom into the HUD or main screen. Line-doubling affects the appearance of pixel art in complex ways (taking it partway to how a LCD would look with blocky pixels, you've said later in the article it looks "basically as crisp and blocky").
Even among VGA monitors, the same resolution can look different; my newer VX720 has sharper focus (a smaller spot size) with visible gaps at 640x480 (and even faint gaps up to 1024x768), while I didn't see any scanline gaps in the Scandisk section of the video, even when I could make out phosphors.
Articles like this (and /r/CRTgaming over on reddit) always seem to forget that devices like the Game Boy existed. I put hundreds of hours into Pokemon Sapphire, so I can pretty safely say that my nostalgia for crisp pixel art isn't "misdirected".
The fact that some old games were designed with CRTs in mind doesn't mean that others weren't, or that one rendering is inherently better than the other.
I like the article's illustration of the variable CRT aspect ratios, though. It's easy to forget that "pixels" weren't always perfect squares like they more or less are today.
This doesn’t square with the idea that they optimized for cheap TVs, with rectangular pixels.
The first games might have been checked paper sketches and might not have been so CRT optimized.
Even in the eighties, nothing prevented a Nintendo game developing team from using Amiga (or PC) Deluxe Paint for drawing the graphics. (They had also other specialized systems in Japan for pixeling graphics.)
No one designed differently for monochrome monitors with higher resolutions, or for the nascent LCD technologies of the day either. Every single article that says what this article says is literally just inventing a story.
> we know that many developers, graphic designers as well as programmers, used that technique, from Kazuko Shibuya (Square) and Akira Yasuda (Capcom) to the developers behind Thunder Force IV (1992) who used many CRTs to take into account the specifities of each kind of screen.
> “It’s a technique where by slightly changing the color of surrounding pixels, to the human eye it looks like the pixels move by around 0.5 pixels.” explains Kazuhiro Tanaka, graphic designer on Metal Slug (1996). His colleague Yasuyuki Oda adds that "Back in the old days, we'd say [to our artists] "add 0.5 of a pixel", and have them draw in the pixels by taking scanlines into account. But with the modern Full HD monitor, the pixels comes out too clearly and too perfectly that you can't have that same taste."
Even if they didn't explicitly take the tv properties into account, they drew the graphics on CRTs and saw it running on the target machine. And then adjusted it so it looked "better". Even intuitively.
They did that because it was quicker and easier, not out of a specific intention to make better-fitting art, but it had that effect anyway. The pics of Dracula and FF6 Siren from the post--there's no way someone plotted those on graph paper before importing them with no changes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niKblgZupOc
Developers did definitly took advantages of everything they could to show more colors on the screen, remember all those demos?
Just because someone drafted some pixel art on paper doesn't mean that this must be the final form, and that no revision may ever be done.
And with recorded music in particular: Yeah, a good studio usually has a variety of monitors. Some might be exquisitely flat and unnvervingly detailed, some might be capable of effortlessly reaching big-stage PA levels, and some might resemble common consumer gear more than anything else.
If it works well with all of these, then: It might be considered a good mix.
The Yamaha NS-10 is/was a popular speaker in studios not because it was good, but because it represented a common medium-size bookshelf-ish speaker that people might actually use at home where they listened to music, and it was consistent betwixt different studio spaces.
To make drawing on actual hardware work, you either used battery-backed memory, or you used a connection to a PC.
and the counterexample is easy: the gameboy launched with LCD screens and games definitely where meant to look blocky. The pokemon games are perhaps the most influential nowadays in terms of pixelart style and show all examples of it: the very blocky styles of the overhead view and the more detailed pictures of the pokemon. They also cover the 8-bit and 16-bit era with the gameboy advance.
Devs design games to look good on the target platform. Obviously you can achieve gradient effects with a CRT and 16-bit color that are very different from a four-tone LCD. Both things can be true.
Edit: And some of them did that very deliberately and documented it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41134689
> blocky pixel art often is a kind of misdirected, anachronistic nostalgia.
and my point was that blocky pixel art is a faithful representation of an important percentage of games of the era, even though some other games of the era were not meant to be "blocky" many indeed where as the gameboy proves.
Nope.
And your gameboy examples are not counter points to the fact that games were designed around a target screen limitation. They weren't designed around a CRT quirk, but they were designed around their own LCD quirk instead.
The first gameboy's screen was painfully bad, with a lot of ghosting during movement.
It was exploited in various way in games :
https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2018/03/compatibility-i...
https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2019/05/screen-persiste...
There was even a game that exploited the screen of the original gameboy to achieve a transparency effect in a spirit (but not implementation) similar to how Sonic devs created transparency on CRTs on the genesis.
https://youtu.be/MytSySMUwv8?t=2892
In this case, artificial flickering doesn't look like flicker on the original gameboy screen because it had a lot of ghosting. But it looks terrible on an emulator. You don't get those effects playing the same games on a modern computer monitor.
The various gameboys, and even the advance, were not as crips as you remember them to be, their LCDs weren't particularly high quality stuff. None of the original pixel art of those times were meant to look the way they look on a modern high contrast, high luminance, high resolution LCD or OLED screens of today. It's particularly true as soon as movement is involved as the ghosting was intense and it was one of the weakness of early LCDs as a whole as even the best computer monitors that came out when LCDs started to show up on the market looked horrible in motion compared to a CRT or a Plasma. So, the pixel art era was never about looking at a crisp image.
And many gameboy games look very, very wrong when run crisply on an emulator. They absolutely weren't meant to look like this. That batman game showing massive flickering around water looked fine on the original gameboy hardware.
> blocky pixel art often is a kind of misdirected, anachronistic nostalgia.
And no, blocky pixel art is a faithful representation of an important percentage of games from the 8bit to 16bit generations.
Including the entire Pokémon series until its move to 3D, as well as many ports and continuations of older “pixel art” series originating on the NES/SNES.
The blockiness wasn’t exaggerated, of course, but there wasn’t any CRT magic obfuscating it either, so that would change later generations’ experience of the medium.
https://youtu.be/MytSySMUwv8?t=2892
It looks absolutely godawful on an emulator since without the ghosting what remains is a high amount of flickering.
People taking the gameboy as an example of crisp pixels have either
1/ never had a real gameboy in their hands
2/ putting on nostalgia goggles, hard
The original gameboy LCDs were nothing like what people have today. They had so many limitations and quirks and they were all used in game development, or at the very least, taken into account while designing the games so that things like animations would look decent. Pixels could never look crisp when in motion on an LCD of that era. Not even the early PC monitors.
When people are comparing CRTs vs LCDs, they're thinking of today's LCDs which show a very sharp, high resolution, high contrast image. That's definitely not what a GB had.
The NDS lite screen does have sharp crisp pixels.
> modern, blocky pixel art often is a kind of misdirected, anachronistic nostalgia.
All of _my_ pixel art nostalgia comes from the 240x160px LCD Game Boy Advance and crystal clear blocky 16x16 sprites.
I know that a real CRT would be the best for my nostalgia vibes, but honestly they take up so much space. This theoretical product doesn't need to be perfect, just give me a few knobs to turn to adjust whatever settings are available, and inject vertical bars to fix the aspect ratio. I'd pay good money for such a device.
It does all of what you ask, plus a lot more. CRT filters that emulate CRT shadow masks from different manufacturers, HDR to boost the max brightness to emulate the phosphor glow, VRR to allow for arbitrary refresh rates (useful for arcade superguns).
I own OSSC and have enjoyed its flexibility, and the improvements it got over time and does continue to get.
Getting a OSSC Pro is in my TODO.
I'm more annoyed by games where the developer ignores constraints of pixelated graphics.
When objects are restricted to be placed on the same pixel grid, or when they don't have a uniform pixel size.
The worst is when objects are being rotated by rotating the sprite directly. Meaning you get rotated pixels.
My favourite consoles were always the different Game Boys, which used LCDs, not CRTs¹. Furthermore, I enjoy modern pixel art² more than I ever liked it in old games (that were new when I played them). Even comparing the examples of old games I still prefer the non-CRT look because I enjoy the clarity of how the sprite is made, it’s easy to learn from it.
So that’s your arguments out the window. Neither CRTs nor nostalgia shaped my appreciation for the medium, and I’m not alone. Pixel art is an interesting aesthetic, and it’s great to see games both adhering to its limitations and “cheating” to do effects that were impossible at the time.
¹ https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Support/Game-Boy-Pocket-Color...
The very first sentence in the article is:
> There's a recurring argument (…)
Which the author then explains and links to a TikTok video which expands on it. The article continues:
> This is correct. I also agree that modern, blocky pixel art often is a kind of misdirected, anachronistic nostalgia.
So yes, the article (and video) is arguing for the connection between pixel art and nostalgia, and that what we remember with fondness is something different that what was really there.
Especially with the human forms, the eye sees details that just aren’t possibly really there.
https://www.datagubbe.se/pix/pixman.png
Or lot of pixel art games come from people who are coders first and not artists. So they may not really know of or how to apply those techniques.
CRT's resolution was so blurred and totally dependent on the user, not the programmer. I started with a black-white TV out on my VC 20 and many of my friends had to use family's old b-w TVs for their computers.
Colors blended a lot and what really made an impression was color cycling.
Later on many graphical artists made use of the color blending or blurring effect by mixing colors (dithering so to say). Everything was multi-color, hardly anything low res/hi res.
Later on, when sharper monitors specialized for computers were available, a shift towards hi-res appeared, blending was abandoned just to be revived with the bulky 4*4 FLI modes etc.
Hardware and artistry went hand in hand just to impress the audience. That's why some demos from the 80th nowadays look awful to some, but were the latest and coolest thing around, in regards to color action on screen.
Remember, action movies were not really CGI, no fast paced stuff - that came with the computers.
Such visual sleigh of working "stegography" code whose name has eluded me to date.
Its code is quite easily recreateable today but the diminishing supply of RGB-based CRT monitors has rendered this mode of stealthy delivery of info rather obsolete.
This approach does not use least-bit of an element of RGB for hidden data stream but more about neighboring RGB pixels creating a separate color particularly on the CRT screen in which to "draw" a picture or set of words.
The higher resolution of today's LCD monitor has now eluded our eye's perceptual resolution (although I could imagine someone getting up super close to a LCD screen to get such color-infused "messages".
Would escape nearly all stego detectors today due to lack of deep matrix (RGB mixing), no?
To indicate remarkable cases of the latter, I suggest you consider (after the article wanted to oppose Maniac Mansion and Mayhem in Monsterland) Monstro Giganto (C64, year 2022, uses the original character set in the C64 ROM).
No, the US didn't have SCART (well, they did, it just wasn't common). Instead, they had VGA (by far superior to SCART for RGB signals) and component (better for native YPbPr/YCbCr, such as most consoles used).
This "SCART is superior" BS is just a weird anachronism from retroheads and europhiles. PS2, GameCube, Xbox, etc all benefit more from component due to 480p support, everything before that generation benefits equally from SCART or Component (it just comes down to what you can get out of your console, SCART tends to be easiest), and everything after benefits best from HDMI (or DisplayPort, if it's supported).
Couple of issue with your ranty statement from an European:
1) Vast majority of CRT TVs(not monitors) didn't have VGA input, neither component, the cheaper ones at least. The more premium and higher end CRT TVs did have component but almost nobody had them here where I grew up in the 90's and early 2000s.
2) Even in the EU SCART, while being present on most devices, was rarely used, and by far the most used video connector on TVs here and worldwide was the famous yellow RCA Composite video connector which was crap and SCART was definitely way better than that.
But Americans shouldn't feel bad they missed out on SCART since there they mostly used the S-Video alternative which was relatively similar to SCART in quality.
Funny, that's not what I remember at all. Anything I've ever seen plugged into a TV as a kid used a scart connector, in some cases through an RCA-to-scart converter (like video cameras and such). All VHS and DVD players I've seen hooked up definitely outputed over SCART, although they may very well have used the composite pins that were present within the SCART connector.
I've never seen a CRT with a VGA input, just monitors.
Correct, because most devices going into a television didn't operate on RGB (outside of game consoles). Thus the preference for Component. It was certainly available, but exceedingly rare. And the rare people who did have them and a Dreamcast got the absolute best quality.
> The more premium and higher end CRT TVs did have component but almost nobody had them here where I grew up in the 90's and early 2000s.
I'm assuming you grew up in Europe, which is kind of the whole point, isn't it? Component was widely available on non-budget television brands/lines in the US. You could grab a component cable for anything from PS2/GameCube/Xbox on, and S-Video for the majority before that (common with PSX and Saturn).
Obviously the majority of Americans ran it through RF or composite, since that was just simpler and cheaper. But if you wanted high quality configurations, the options were all there for you outside of "superior" SCART.
Technical merit aside, its sockets and cables absolutely defied any attempts to line up and insert by touch.
Want to plug in a new device? You'd damn well better move the tv out because otherwise you're going to spend at least ten minutes with your arm round the back of the tv, fruitlessly wiggling the plug around the general area of the socket, and then you're going to pull the tv out and look anyway. Even if you were exactly on target with the cable, you weren't getting it in without sub-millimetre precision and there was no real way to tell when to apply the force.
They were such a bad design.
But on the other hand it provided the best possible picture quality (on consumer TVs) until the arrival of HDMI. Compared to composite video, it was marvellous.
Consumer televisions had component for a decade+ before HDMI.
This isn't reddit, take your try-hard trolling elsewhere.
But in addition to that, there is no cross-talk, no dot crawl, and all the other weird artifacts of composite video. Also, no chroma modulation means that it was much easier for TVs to support both 50 and 60 Hz. I only ever had a GameCube, but being able to play in RGB at 60 Hz was amazing.
At least in Europe, many old consoles* provided native RGBS output, and with the proper SCART cable the video quality was awesome. Nowadays, people in the retro gaming community go crazy with PVM/BVM and other fancy professional monitors with RGB input, but the French already had it figured out in the '70s!
* anything from Sega, Nintendo SNES~WiiU, the NeoGeo, Sony PSX~PS3.
In other words: you can send me literal ASCII characters at 1ch/s. 60ch/s via telegraphy would still be superior despite the necessary conversion.
So, congrats on a hobbled standard that got ten extra years of non-use and that you had zero hand in developing.
Meanwhile in US video inputs were somehow used for market segmentation with consumers forced to use RF modulators :o and later CVBS with a very brief couple years of Component input availability on HDTVs around 2000.
In any case, this was only an issue in the 6th generation of consoles (Dreamcast, PS2, Gamecube, Xbox). Before that era, everything was 15 kHz, and after that, everything started to include HDMI. The 6th generation was caught in between.
Also the game famous for competitive CRT tournaments is Melee rather than Brawl.
I think everything here (the author and his sources) misses the point. Modern pixel art is not trying to create a faithful reproduction of how some arcade or home console might have looked.
Pixel art, certainly now, is just an art style like many others. If you need some demonstration look at actual pixel art games, they often freely use totally anachronistic methods, such as very complex shaders. Many don't even align different objects to the same pixel grid. Clearly the artists do not want their games to look like faithful recreations.
Criticizing modern pixel art not for its merits or lack thereof, but for not accomplishing a goal, it never set out to accomplish is ridiculous to be frank.
Here's a fascinating article about the history of x-ray perception in humans and animals: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9426237/
UV and EMF radiation are further causes of these "warmth" effects. UV in particular is pretty bad and yes, you could actually get a tan from sitting in front of a (cheap) colour CRT monitor all day :)