Yesterday's Pixels, Today
nas.sr
nas.sr
That's not to say this aesthetic is "bad" (I'm actually quite fond of it and similar styles too) but just that it's absolutely nothing like the emulated Star Fox screenshots being used as the target suggest. If yesterday's pixels is the goal then this is missing the main part of what made those pixels look the way they did.
For those who haven't seen games like this on the typical technology of the era: this is a photo of LCD output using a similar path as taken here, a photo the same with a CRT emulation shader, and a photo of an actual CRT (don't take this one CRT to be gospel of what every CRT output from all of time looked like) https://i.imgur.com/lo8ytRq.jpeg
It's amazing because the joysticks are amazing. Standing is arguably cooler than sitting and then when things gets hectic, you'll physically "move" (or let say "shake") the cab by frantically going left/right/whatever.
In the case of Robotron 2084 it's amazing because nothing today offers the same gameplay: you need two 8-directions joystick, on to move in one of 8 directions and the other joystick to fire in one of 8 directions. They don't make it like that today, unless you play a Robotron clone using actual arcade joystick. And even then: you better have a full-sized cab if you want the experience to be even more fun.
Sure, we had scanlines and whatnots but it was still very close to blocky pixels shown today on a modern flat monitor without any shader (for example without artificially recreating the look of a CRT).
Also the "blockiness" of them pixels back in the days was highly dependent on how old your CRT was.
It's not as if there was "one correct bluriness" induced by CRT. Every CRT brand / age / model had different characteristics.
To me the "supsension of disbelief" was there. For example I remember playing Sundog: The Frozen Legacy on the Atari ST. One of the best game ever made (by FTL, who then created Dungeon Master, which is basically the ancestor of all FPS games). When I was playing Sundog, I was a rogue space trader buying low/selling high, gun fighting in cities, etc. And I remember it as... Very blocky [2].
And you're 100% right there is no "correct blurriness" for CRT. When I say "don't take this one CRT to be gospel of what every CRT output from all of time looked like" I mean it - some CRTs, particularly for computer style displays instead of TV style displays, were relatively sharp. And a high end barely used CRT from the late 90s is probably a lot less blurry than a low end and heavily used one from the early 80s, everything else equivalent about them. That said, Star Fox had expectations of both being output on consumer TVs as well as through the SNES video output which wasn't particularly sharp itself anyways.
Another classic example of this in home game consoles is the waterfalls in the Genesis era Sonic games. If you play them on a modern display it looks more like a sharp set of blue and white door bead curtains. If you play it on a typical CRT television it looks more like shimmering water falling (not perfectly but the bright single pixel whites are not so perfectly contrasted and there is some blur between the vertical lines with the background instead of a straight alternation).
This kind of gameplay is known as a "twin-stick shooter" and is a popular genre even today. Most of the biggest consoles have had two sticks on their controllers for decades that have enabled this style of gameplay
There are tons of articles on the difference. Here's the first one I found, googling. It gives a good example of the difference
https://wackoid.com/game/10-pictures-that-show-why-crt-tvs-a...
I went to a museum exhibit once where they were showing old consoles connected to LCD displays. It was infuriating to me how they where effectively disrespecting the art but not showing it the way it was at the time. It would be no different than if the Louvre replaced all their paintings with giant LCD displays of the same paintings.
One could argue they do, these types of games are referred to as twin stick shooters. You can play them on modern PCs with modern gamepad that have two directional joysticks.
Two of my favorites are Enter the Gungeon and Brigador.
Look at this for example (CRT left, “perfect” pixels right): https://cdn.xcancel.com/pic/orig/media%2FFQI0t9PacAALT14.jpg
Many more examples here: https://xcancel.com/CRTpixels
Long answer: Sorta, with a lot of overbearing caveats.
Normal HTML elements cannot be rendered this way, there's no way to disable AA when drawing and no way to disable bilinear (or similar) filtering when scaling. Things will lose resolution, but they'll blur rather than chunk.
Image elements and canvases CAN be scaled to preserve pixels. Anything you draw to a canvas can be kept chunky, but you'll be writing your own rendering routines because the browser does not know how to lay off the AA.
There's probably some treachery you can pull off through SVG.
Pretty impressive effect, seems tricky to tame though. Where's this gingham pattern bubble up from?
Typing this I remembered "A short Hike" similarly had the option to disable it and I also preferred it disabled. It wasn't as important as it is slower paced though.
The way smooth parallax and sometimes different pixel sizes (!) show up in “retro” games is a huge pet peeve of mine.
It's not the same look as modern games, because the screen resolution was much lower than what we have today, but to me, high resolution rendering of transformed low resolution sprites is a perfectly valid successor aesthetic. It's not the same as what a game would have looked like in the 90s, but as others have pointed out in this thread, neither are crisp full-color pixels rendered as perfect squares. It's all an interpretation.
On the other hand, what I cannot abide are "low poly" models that use polygons other than triangles and convex quads. I will die on this hill.
Some presumably nice and relevant images were lost.
(spotted this because the "unfinished Blender PR" mentioned was merged several years ago)
I did not find any videos.