4 ms·

It's worth calling out here that for games that maintain a steady 30 Hz flicker (very common on NES, and even carried over to SNES in a few titles) played on an

It's worth calling out here that for games that maintain a steady 30 Hz flicker (very common on NES, and even carried over to SNES in a few titles) played on an original CRT, the effect really works quite well, in part due to the slow response time of the hardware, and also in part due to persistence of vision. On most real CRT monitors, a properly rendered 30 Hz flicker (ie, when the game isn't delaying frames due to lag) closely approximates a 50% alpha blend against the background. This was often confounded on NES due to the 8-sprites-per-scanline limit, so your memory of Super Dodgeball's "flickery nightmare" is accurate. A modern flat LCD panel has a much faster response time for the individual pixels, making the effect seem harsher even when the software works correctly. Complicating matters, many emulators of older game systems struggle to push out exactly 60 Hz (sometimes on purpose, to correctly simulate the original hardware's non-60 Hz timings) which can introduce additional artifacts and make the result look messy.

bitwize 6y ago
I'm not sure how you figure? Have you ever seen slo-mo of a CRT television set? The pixel would be lit by the beam instantly and fade back to black before the scan line is completed; the only reason we see a rectangular image on a CRT instead of a scanning dot is persistence of vision. Wikipedia[0] confirms that the response time for a CRT was 0.01ms on the top end and could be less than 1 µs; typical LCD panels have response times between 1-8ms. I could definitely perceive a 30-Hz flicker as such on an ordinary CRT television. You may be confusing that with the fact that thin 1-pixel lines of alternating colors tended to smear into blended colors on a CRT in games like Sonic the Hedgehog because the chroma channel of a composite signal was of lower resolution than the video hardware's output. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_CRT,_LCD,_Plasma,_and_OLED_displays https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_CRT,_LCD,_Plasma...

bitwize 6y ago

I'm not sure how you figure? Have you ever seen slo-mo of a CRT television set? The pixel would be lit by the beam instantly and fade back to black before the scan line is completed; the only reason we see a rectangular image on a CRT instead of a scanning dot is persistence of vision. Wikipedia[0] confirms that the response time for a CRT was 0.01ms on the top end and could be less than 1 µs; typical LCD panels have response times between 1-8ms. I could definitely perceive a 30-Hz flicker as such on an ordinary CRT television. You may be confusing that with the fact that thin 1-pixel lines of alternating colors tended to smear into blended colors on a CRT in games like Sonic the Hedgehog because the chroma channel of a composite signal was of lower resolution than the video hardware's output. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_CRT,_LCD,_Plasma,_and_OLED_displays https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_CRT,_LCD,_Plasma...