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The "not blocky CRT" argument doesn't really apply to personal computer CRT monitors, as even when they maxed out at 640x480 or 800x600 the display was still pr

by tomc1985 8y ago

The "not blocky CRT" argument doesn't really apply to personal computer CRT monitors, as even when they maxed out at 640x480 or 800x600 the display was still pretty crisp. I can kind of see this argument if you're talking about playing nintendo on mom's old dog-eared TV with the UHF adapter... but frankly I prefer to see pixel art in its original unmolested, pixellated form edit- on that note I remember very clearly that 320x240 games had a blocky appearance in the 640x480 era. That was one of the biggest reasons to get a 3D card!

ido 8y ago
I remember playing Master of Orion 2 on my computer at the time (mid 90s) and thinking: 1. it's amazing this game actually runs at 640x480 2. there's no point in having resolutions any higher than that, as you can't see the individual pixels at that size anyway (I had a 14" CRT, viewable area probably around 13"). At least in the early to mid 90s you definitely still had "CRT fuzz" on computer monitors.
- zozbot123 8y ago
  I think the typical CRT fuzz is actually quite close to the optimum smoothing that could be achieved with a simple, analog system, such as was common in the 1980s and early 1990s - in that it should closely approximate a Gaussian blur! But lanczos (or hq#x) is crisper than that, of course. (And yes, 320x240 did use 2x nearest neighbor interpolation on later video cards/monitors that could only display higher resolutions natively. But I assume that back in the early 1980s, you would actually get a "native" 320x240 screen, just like on a home computer or console.)
  - int_19h 8y ago
    On any CRT screen, you'd just get 320x240 as native resolution, the "interpolation" basically done by the phosphorus of the screen. This was the norm well into 90s, and not everybody was on an LCD monitor in 00s, either. I remember that many games (myself included) resisted LCDs for a long time even beyond that, precisely because they could only do one resolution well. If you played old games, this wasn't satisfactory because those were often hardcoded in the resolutions they support - typically 320x200 or 640x480. And if you played new games, you'd often have to dial the resolution down to get it running reasonably fast.
    - ido 8y ago
      I think the point was that it was the video card that didn't support 320x240 natively, so it NNed to 640x480.
      - int_19h 8y ago
        Any VGA card (which you needed to get 640x480) would also support 320x240.

ido 8y ago

I remember playing Master of Orion 2 on my computer at the time (mid 90s) and thinking: 1. it's amazing this game actually runs at 640x480 2. there's no point in having resolutions any higher than that, as you can't see the individual pixels at that size anyway (I had a 14" CRT, viewable area probably around 13"). At least in the early to mid 90s you definitely still had "CRT fuzz" on computer monitors.

zozbot123 8y ago
I think the typical CRT fuzz is actually quite close to the optimum smoothing that could be achieved with a simple, analog system, such as was common in the 1980s and early 1990s - in that it should closely approximate a Gaussian blur! But lanczos (or hq#x) is crisper than that, of course. (And yes, 320x240 did use 2x nearest neighbor interpolation on later video cards/monitors that could only display higher resolutions natively. But I assume that back in the early 1980s, you would actually get a "native" 320x240 screen, just like on a home computer or console.)
- int_19h 8y ago
  On any CRT screen, you'd just get 320x240 as native resolution, the "interpolation" basically done by the phosphorus of the screen. This was the norm well into 90s, and not everybody was on an LCD monitor in 00s, either. I remember that many games (myself included) resisted LCDs for a long time even beyond that, precisely because they could only do one resolution well. If you played old games, this wasn't satisfactory because those were often hardcoded in the resolutions they support - typically 320x200 or 640x480. And if you played new games, you'd often have to dial the resolution down to get it running reasonably fast.
  - ido 8y ago
    I think the point was that it was the video card that didn't support 320x240 natively, so it NNed to 640x480.
    - int_19h 8y ago
      Any VGA card (which you needed to get 640x480) would also support 320x240.