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.