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.