The Effect of CRTs on Pixel Art (2024)
datagubbe.se
datagubbe.se
There's an undeniable charm to the older era of pixel art, and surely part of that is nostalgia, but I also think a lot of it comes from the fact that the economics and the hardware were a lot different. Up until the mid 1990s, the highest paid artists in the industry were working on pixel art games. The hardware was slow enough that there were real creative constraints, and we know that constraints often drive creativity.
Although I don't see AI in game art becoming accepted by the wider public any time soon, and definitely not by the indie crowd.
I've also been thinking about this for animation. I foresee cheap limited animation (sliding layers, only mouth moving, etc) being replaced by incoherent un-/barely edited AI output instead.
All of them will. It can save nearly 100% of costs for art production. Nobody can afford not to use it, unless they aren’t developing the game to make a profit.
> Although I don't see AI in game art becoming accepted by the wider public any time soon
It’s already being used everywhere without “the wider public” even noticing. Same in professional film and TV productions. It doesn’t look AI generated because they don’t just run Stable Diffusion and call it a day, but the reductions in labor costs are still immense even with the post-processing that’s currently still required to match AAA quality.
This is not correct. Your profit doesn't have to be relative to what another company makes. It would only be affected if games passed the savings on to the customers. You make more profit if you do use it potentially but it doesn't mean you don't make profit if you choose to go the traditional route.
Doesn't your lot ever get tired of the intellectually lazy, rubbish absolutisms you peddle? Same goes for the projections; just because you slop it, doesn't mean everyone will.
The games market has a massive oversupply. It's not enough to just "make a game", you have to make a good one. That is to say, better than all the other things your audience could be playing. Cheaping out is literally not an option. You can cheap out in one area to spend more effort in another area, but you can't just say "this is cheaper therefore it will be the default" because the default isn't good enough. Most games fail
Compared to modern HD graphics, pixel art is more affordable because you can hide a lot of details you would normally have to work on behind these fat pixels.
And the most interesting trick, to me, is that pixel art looks sharp! The non-CRT-like square pixels is a feature.
Blurry usually doesn't look good, it is as if your eyes can't focus, or that you are looking through a dirty window, it naturally registers as a problem. Real life has details and you are missing them. With sharp pixel boundaries, you are telling the brain "there is no problem with your eyes, everything is fine".
It is not the only way of introducing artificial details to make low detail pictures look fine: scanline effect, screen door effect, ostensible dithering, etc... But pixel art is a good compromise, in addition to being a recognizable somewhat nostalgic art style.
That's my theory at least.
All I know is that when CDs hit the market I savored the additional detail they provided. A good, non-loudness-crushed recording had so many sumptuous highs I used to reach my fingers out and try to "feel" the consonants and vowels of the vocals. And when LCD monitors began to supplant CRTs my eyes were relieved at the additional sharpness. I remember these transition points, so I can say definitively that there was a time when we thought the newer stuff was indeed an improvement.
Exactly. Around 1999, I switched from 17" CRT to 14" LCD, as the sharpness of the LCD was breathtaking and made up for the smaller screen size.
On both the NES and SNES, the pixels were so large that you could clearly see them even when using an RF adaptor. Each pixel was two scan lines, and wide enough that dithering was still very visible. The same goes for older games in the arcades up to (roughly) the early 1990s, (and I didn't spend much time in arcades after that.)
Not to say that artists didn't take advantage of CRT quirks, but you needed a really $h1tty TV, (much worse than the ones that I and my friends had) if they were going to fuzz away the edges.
Pixel art, for me, is the Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advanced which I never played on a CRDT.
The Game Boy was insanely popular, is part of many people’s introduction to and fondness for pixel art, and it had an LCD screen.
It still gives you, especially when factoring in the condition of the STN screen, a "fuzzy" picture and with its own lo-fi glow, analogous to a CRT setup. Which was the point. I owned a brick, from 1992 onwards.
> It looks nothing [...] like a zoetrope (which has sharp images and reasonably low sample-and-hold blur because of the strobing).
"Sharp images" is certainly not the experience I had when looking through 'em at country fairs back in East Germany in the mid-to-late 80s.
I was being facetious with that word, I don’t believe it literally.
> it's about historical accuracy.
Historical accuracy means recognising not everyone had the same experience. Yes, many remember pixel art from CRTs, but many also remember it from LCDs.
My criticism if of the idea that liking sharp pixels is “a kind of misdirected, anachronistic nostalgia”, a misremembering of the CRT days. Even before we consider LCDs, it is reductive to link this to nostalgia—pixel art is an art form that stands on its own.
My neighbor had one and we all agreed that the sharper picture looked better.
https://www.jamesfmackenzie.com/2026/09/06/plugging-a-snes-d...
While the Sonic waterfall is probably deliberate, I find it more likely that people have always preferred the highest resolution and the crispest graphics they can afford.
Those adapters have converter chips in them and are a very recent thing. One from your link was released in 2025, a full year after last gaming magazine stopped being printed, and 30 years since last magazine covering SNES shut down.
snes rgb cables on the other hand were always available, and even bundled with console in certain markets.
I have a JAMMA cabinet at home. It has a CRT in it. I usually play on x-in-1 pirate emulator board. So I don't mind that not all the hardware is authentic. But it's important to me that the screen is authentic, or it all just feels wrong. The curve must be there, the scanlines must be there.
I really get quite cross when you visit a museum and they've got retro games playing on flatscreen LCDs. Doubly so when it's meant to be a vector game.
I want to point out though that it's impossible for any CRT filter to have a peak brightness that's not significantly lower than without the filter, since it can darken pixels but not brighten them past what the maximum already is.
https://marcelwunderlich.com/using-phosphor-xscreensaver-for...
It looks so much like a CRT to me. It looks like pressing your face up to a TV to see the individual phosphors. Try setting "signal" to dropped image and viewing some images. It looks like an old TV.
Bottom line, whatever you think a CRT is doing, you can probably simulate it quite accurately.
Maybe you mean screen tearing, bad deinterlacing, etc. caused by software running on a PC?
I get that CRTs aren't perfect, but I'm not sure how else to reproduce what you're calling "flicker".
As for CRT filters one can argue how realistic they are but they show that scanline gaps and blending at least can produce amazing perceptual improvements as shown in this video: https://youtu.be/nw2QfPREu-Q
So many people these days mistake the blurring from composite signals as being due to the CRT. A CRT doesn't magically blend pixels together. And there are certainly many tradeoffs to using composite so that many people prefer the sharper pixels of RGB.
True by design.
> and purely digital interfaces,
True but not relevant. Even if you connected an LCD monitor over an analog interface like VGA or composite video, it would have to re-digitize the signal. The fact that a screen uses a digital interface can be designed independently of whether a screen has fixed pixels (LCD, OLED) or not (monochrome CRT with continuous phosphor, without shadow mask or aperture grille).
> ensuring a fixed aspect (width-to-height) ratio
True by definition because the pixels are pieces of physical hardware in the screens.
> and completely square pixels.
This is a design choice. Nothing prevents someone from designing an LCD or OLED matrix with non-square pixels. But there's also no good reason to do so. (Side note: Due to RGB striping, single-color subpixels have an aspect ratio of 1:3, so those are non-square.)
Potentially useful trivia: Some image/video formats support declaring the pixel aspect ratio. Examples include PNG ( https://w3c.github.io/png/#11pHYs ) and Matroska.
There’s some evidence that console games of the era were sometimes designed for the effect composite NTSC has on the overall picture: https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-case-for-co...
VGA MS-DOS games usually ran at 320x200, but VGA CRTs supported up to 640x480 resolution. There was hardware line doubling from 200 lines up to 400 lines so you actually got two scanlines per pixel. It wasn't LCD sharp but the individual pixels were easily distinguishable. And lots of people played these game on SVGA CRTs so the pixels would be even sharper.
But that does not cover all CRTs relevant to pixel art. If you display low resolution art on a CRT designed for high resolutions it makes a big difference in pixel sharpness.
> If you display low resolution art on a CRT designed for high resolutions it makes a big difference in pixel sharpness.
Basically, PC CRTs would always be quite sharp, due to VGA, no matter whether it (the CRT) had a low or high resolution.
Then again this is early 90s CRT most likely with design from 80s just upgraded to display VGA. Later and more expensive CRTs got much better.
VGA CRTs are always "high resolution" compared to the SD CRTs discussed in the article. If you display a mode 13h DOS game on SD CRT, which is possible with special hardware, it will not look as sharp as it would on the VGA CRT is was designed for.
This sharpness from using higher resolution CRTs is in addition to the sharpness from using RGB connections. And if you somehow manage to connect a VGA CRT over composite, it will be less sharp but still sharper than a SD CRT over composite.
The point is there are two factors here: the sharpness of the CRT itself and the sharpness of the connection method. The article only talks about SD CRTs, so the CRT's sharpness isn't going to make much difference there. But when you consider MS-DOS games, which used sharper CRTs, the CRT's sharpness becomes important.
Notably, the OG VGA card from IBM could already do 640×480 with 16 colors and 720x400 in text mode.
What I've found—based on limited experience with a "modern" arcade cabinet (Fix-it Felix Jr., a tie-in promotion to the 2012 film Wreck-it Ralph)—is that if you have an LCD or OLED that can do true enough blacks, the effect is very similar to having a brand spanking new CRT, even in arcade applications.
But that goes only for raster games. Nothing we currently have can replace the razor-sharp, completely unaliased lines of an original Asteroids and its vector display.
CRTs are inherently less blurry when your eyes follow moving objects on screen, which they do all the time ("smooth pursuit"). The reason is that LCDs and OLED displays show each frame for the entire frame time (like 1/60th of a second) during which your eyes, and the corresponding tracked object, move. This creates a blur. E.g. if an object moves on the screen 10 pixels horizontally per frame, on an LCD/OLED you would then see 10 pixels of horizontal blur. This doesn't happen on CRTs because they flash each frame only for an extremely short period of time and are relatively dark otherwise. At 60 Hz, they don't show the frame for 1/60th of a second, but about 1/1000th or something like that. This time is so short that during it, even fast moving objects and the eyes that track them hardly move at all, which results in basically zero blur. See https://testufo.com/ to see the blur. On a CRT, with matched FPS and Hz, the test would appear completely sharp.
It is true that LCDs and OLED screens are much brighter (especially LCD) and that OLED has better black levels, but CRT screens have much better motion clarity.
And unfortunately that motion clarity comes at a cost: flicker. Some people, like my sister, cannot bear that cost. She has photosensitive epilepsy, but even before that ripened into full-on seizures in her 20s she became profoundly uncomfortable playing video games, and never got truly into them until flat panels predominated. Even without photosensitive epilepsy, flicker can be annoyingly perceptible and cause eyestrain even if you don't consciously register it. Most of the motion blur mitigation strategies we see on panels, like black frame insertion, suffer from the same problems. The only way we'll come close to solving both problems at once is with very high speed panels, but until then I'll take a bit of blur, thank you.
On PCs with static content, flicker was a lot more noticable at 60 Hz, e.g. when staring at a white Word document. But increasing the Hz to something like 85 Hz made the flicker practically disappear. (Not sure whether that would sufficient for people with photosensitive epilepsy. And it wasn't a solution available for consoles anyway.)
What I did notice is that colours, even on cheap TVs, always looked relatively good on PAL. Its colour system was unequivocally better.
My old 19-inch CRT's are dead, but I'm so glad I saved save three 17-inchers - one shadow-mask, and two aperture-grill. But the older I get, the heavier they seem go be, oh well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_mask https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_grille
A particularly good example of this are the whites of Mario's and Yoshi's eyes in SMW. They look much better with dilation. (No pun intended)
The reality is most people had far less than ideal setups, yet most will try to hold CRTs to a standard near impossible to most of the era.
Similarly later GameCube models removed support for component cables.
There's a reason it always comes back to the same few examples, peach hanging from a rope, dracula's eyes, sonic behind the waterfall. If it were used as widely as some people make out then we wouldn't have to keep resorting to the same 3 examples.
That and CRTs stopped being so blurry over the years anyway (especially PC CRTs), so by the time you reached the 16 bit era you couldn't rely on a blurry TV to create your effect
Not saying you're wrong on the main message (and those examples are with filters rather than true CRT) but it's still impressive how it can make the pixel art better looking in those cases.
Let's say you manage to build a product you could sell as a niche expensive thing and not as a super duper expensive rich-people-only thing; you would still be competing against people buying an old CRT for 20 bucks or just using shaders for free (which gets you 99% there on an HDR 4k TV and takes 0% space in your house).
Another advantage of shaders is that you can make them look exactly how you want, down to particular CRT models, screen curvatures, analog signal aberrations, etc. And almost everything you could want comes already included on RetroArch by default, with lots of presents if you don't want to mess with that stuff yourself. Hard to compete with that. A CRT TV comes with only one look. But again, working with the TV you already own instead of occupying a cubic meter of your house is probably the biggest advantage.
I play retro games almost exclusively and I would never get a CRT myself, not even if it was free.
It gets you about 90% of the image quality and 0% of the motion quality. Simulating CRT motion quality on a sample-and-hold display requires around 1000Hz refresh rate.
There are still some types of CRT-related vacuum tubes in production for applications digital equivalents are objectively less performant in.
Like what? The only significant applications I'm aware of for vacuum tubes nowadays are high-power RF amplifiers (including household microwave magnetrons) and intentional X-ray emitters.
(Early black-and-white CRTs running at lower voltage did use leaded glass for the front too, but they aren't the CRTs people interested in old games care about.)
then there was Iiyama Vision Master Pro 514 with 140-ish kHz horisontal scan
IMO, the only factor that kills the crt vs a moderm monitor is the size and weight. I imagine resolution would be limited by how small the dot pitch can actually be made to be with modern processes but with the advances in magnets and power electronics devices I imagine going at MHz horizontal frequency would be not that hard.
A plasma TV in a pitch black room set to its maximum output power is still the most incredible experience I've ever had outside of a commercial venue.
Self emission is the real magic trick. Not the pattern with which we scan.
I think a lot of this is due to where the nostalgia is being aimed. The number of pixelly games trying to look like a c64 or Amiga is vanishingly small compared to the number trying to look like an NES, SNES, or Genesis. (Or a PSX or N64.) And they’re mostly trying to make things like early first-party hits, not later third-party games that do crazy techniques. How many 8-bit-looking games sound like a Tim Follin soundtrack?
And of course given that those machines are from a generation that stopped being the new hotness about 30y ago, we have pro pixel artists who have never seen a game through a shitty connection to a TV unless they deliberately sought one out or had obsessively retro gaming parents; they just like making these square mosaics look like things.
If I was today going to make a pixel art game grounded in nostalgia for these games, what style of screen should I be aiming for? Do I even want to do that, as opposed to making a pixel art game that looks good on a modern screen?
Probably you should screengrab some games from the first couple years of the SNES’ life and doodle things for your game that look like those screens. Possibly some later games that more directly inspired the game you’re making, too. Possibly you should read up on the precise technical limitations of its graphics and be precise about how many colors and moving objects you allow yourself. Possibly you might decide to break those limitations for the sake of making the game more fun, but it’s probably better to break them knowingly.
Then look at DOS games from that era. Same decisions and rabbit holes as above. Does it feel like there’s a harmony between them? Does one feel much better for the game you want to make? Play with shitty TV filters on the SNES and DOS shots.
Then doodle some things with fewer limitations. How do they feel? Does the lack of limitations make it easier or harder to animate an entire new game entity? And which one is more fun? Experiment, sketch, play, explore. It’s art. It’s also business. Maybe. Maybe you have a skazillion bucks to pay your bills and pay artists and musicians and whatnot while you develop it with no care for it selling even a single copy. Limited funds can stretch further with limited scope.
There is no single right answer to these questions. You need to find them yourself.
Personally, my favorite 2D video game aesthetic was the vibrant look of high-quality late-SNES games, particularly Chrono Trigger (which obviously had a whole lot of things going right for it besides the art design). I've played a number of modern pixel-art games made by people who were clearly inspired by Chrono Trigger and eager to make graphics that look like it but without any of the SNES's technological limitations, and I'm all for it - Crosscode and (especially) Chained Echoes are salient examples, and I think both those games look great.
what did you do by Noodle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-8y2R6IxI
Look at Kuru Kuru Kururin for example, a launch title where the GBA's fancy new sprite rotation effect is kinda the entire game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYvUZXT_43k
https://www.spriters-resource.com/game_boy_advance/kurukuruk...