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As a pixel art artist, I certainly see pixels as little squares. As a 3D programmer working with 2D point-sample textures, I do not see pixels as little squares

As a pixel art artist, I certainly see pixels as little squares. As a 3D programmer working with 2D point-sample textures, I do not see pixels as little squares. So the answer to whether or not a pixel is a little square is, like so many of life's questions, not a simple yes or no, but rather, it depends.

astrange 6y ago
Pixel art is a kind of fake aesthetic based on what NES emulators show games as, though. In real life they were made to go through various filters that blurred the image until it didn't look as much like little squares.
- boomlinde 6y ago
  That's just one example, a game console where the video output was typically via composite video or even an RF modulator to a TV. Not so much with e.g. VGA mode 0x13 PC graphics on a relatively crisp computer display.
  - kragen 6y ago
    VGA mode 13h PC graphics on a relatively crisp computer CRT display still drew each of its 200 "scan lines" as a double fuzzy line, and a single pixel on it as a double fuzzy dot (more or less an isotropic Gaussian, despite what Smith says) or a double fuzzy dash. Superimposed on these fuzzy patterns you had the shadow-mask circular colored dots or the Trinitron colored rectangles. Sometimes you would also get echos or "ghosting", if there was an impedance mismatch or two in the analog signal path. Later graphics cards in the 01990s would sometimes emulate CGA 320×200 and mode 13h by using more scan lines, giving pixels that looked more like little squares. Or, well, rectangles.
    - boomlinde 6y ago
      > VGA mode 13h PC graphics on a relatively crisp computer CRT display still drew each of its 200 "scan lines" as a double fuzzy line, and a single pixel on it as a double fuzzy dot (more or less an isotropic Gaussian, despite what Smith says) or a double fuzzy dash. Superimposed on these fuzzy patterns you had the shadow-mask circular colored dots or the Trinitron colored rectangles. Now we're veering back into technical details of its implementation. The question is, is "squares" (well, yes, rectangles) a useful model of what is visible to the viewer? To that end, the fact that each line was traced as twice on the display is trivial. We have to concern ourselves with the visible result to answer that question I have a decent CRT VGA monitor here, connected to a VGA card in an old PC, and at lower resolutions the pixels are crisp and hard. The monitors are made for reading at a higher resolution after all. If I press my face at the screen I can see that yes, the pixels appear on a much more fine-grained grid of apertures, and yes, this and other factors somewhat fuzz their boundaries. But for normal use at an arm's length, rectangles are a very good approximate model for some display types that were in use while VGA was still a thing games used, one that a skilled artist can exploit in an entirely different way than they'd exploit the characteristics of NTSC/PAL displays or an RGB display with a coarser dot pitch.
      - kragen 6y ago
        A rectangle is a pretty reasonable approximation of a fuzzy point. It's an even more reasonable approximation of two fuzzy parallel dashes.
  - astrange 6y ago
    I agree Math Blasters looked pretty rectangular. Are modern pixel artists inspired by PC games, though? I think they mostly played Nintendo games in emulation.
ogurechny 6y ago
That's quite alarming. On many systems with TV output, including widely popular consoles, there were no pixels at all, just an analog line signal, most often modulated/composited/combined, and often low in quality because of cost-effective hardware and cables. Artists certainly looked at how images appeared on TV screens, and not at raw values of the bitmap samples presented as squares, and they compensated for unwanted effects. It is slightly maddening to know that the lack of analog output emulation in early console emulators and general lack of education resulted in the modern faux-retro aesthetic, some kind of new age belief that pixels should be big blocks. Mario sprite was never intended to be seen as made of blocks, no matter how many times people use that scaled abomination. You do have big flat pixels when you have high quality but low physical DPI output device. Say, black and white Macintosh, or late '90s computer monitors displaying '80s screen resolutions, or a panel of individual LEDs. On the other hand, halftones are also sharp and have low DPI, but have no square grid at all, nor they correspond to source data used in printing in any straightforward way. To conclude, big flat rectangles are just a specific artistic choice, they are not universal at all.
- jcelerier 6y ago
  > Mario sprite was never intended to be seen as made of blocks idk I still play on a 1990s CRT and it's pretty blocky
- mrob 6y ago
  >Mario sprite was never intended to be seen as made of blocks It was depicted as made of blocks on most versions of the cover art: https://www.mobygames.com/game/super-mario-bros/cover-art https://www.mobygames.com/game/super-mario-bros/cover-art And many Mario games were released for portable systems with sharp LCD screens, and they used the same pixel art techniques.
  - ogurechny 6y ago
    Oh god, they even turned it at arbitrary angle, like in some teenage Flash animation.
virtualritz 6y ago
> As a pixel art artist, I certainly see pixels as little squares. Then you are ignorant about the history of pixel art. Which I am not judging btw. Just saying. Pixel art from the golden years doesn't look right when displayed as little squares. It needs to be shown on a CRT or with an overlay emulating this look to do its creator's intentions justice. "The Bitmap Brothers: Universe" (fantastic book btw.) went to great lengths to replicate the original rendering of the depicted pixel art. See e.g. [0]. [0] https://twitter.com/romvg/status/776081029882937344 https://twitter.com/romvg/status/776081029882937344
- nearbuy 6y ago
  Funny to think we're nostalgic for something that didn't really exist.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  This is a bit of a misunderstood overreaction. It's true that if you were playing Super Mario on your TV, the normal experience was for it to be a bit blurry. On the other hand, if you were playing Lemmings on an Apple monitor with Sony Trinitron technology, the pixels were exceptionally clear. Here's what Trinitron looked like: https://ancientelectronics.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/svidsg.jpg https://ancientelectronics.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/svids... I'd argue that playing Lemmings in an emulator, you want the pixels to be clear, without a CRT overlay -- that this would be closer to the artists' intentions.
- pixlartthrowway 6y ago
  Some pixel artists indeed intended their creations to be seen as little squares, even if CRTs of the 1980s stretched the squares into rectangles and fuzzed and scan-lined them. Right now there is a story on HN about a $660,000 copy of Super Mario Brothers. Look closely at Nintendo's original 1980s box art. Mario is made up of crisp little "pixel perfect" squares: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros.#/media/File:Super_Mario_Bros._box.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros.#/media/File:... Look at other Nintendo pixel box art from the 1980s. Many of the earliest Nintendo games had this common box art style. It's all little squares: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metroid_(video_game)#/media/File:Metroid_boxart.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metroid_(video_game)#/media/Fi... https://www.oldschoolgamermagazine.com/early-nes-nintendo-box-art-pt-1-black-box-titles/ https://www.oldschoolgamermagazine.com/early-nes-nintendo-bo... I have an NES classic edition and it lets you select if you want the CRT effect applied or not. Sometimes I play with this effect applied (how I experienced it as a child) but other times I enjoy the "pixel perfect" mode. I designed pixel fonts back in the 1990s and I was always unhappy about how CRTs fuzzed them. I loved the sharp little squares of LCDs much better.

astrange 6y ago

Pixel art is a kind of fake aesthetic based on what NES emulators show games as, though. In real life they were made to go through various filters that blurred the image until it didn't look as much like little squares.

boomlinde 6y ago
That's just one example, a game console where the video output was typically via composite video or even an RF modulator to a TV. Not so much with e.g. VGA mode 0x13 PC graphics on a relatively crisp computer display.
- kragen 6y ago
  VGA mode 13h PC graphics on a relatively crisp computer CRT display still drew each of its 200 "scan lines" as a double fuzzy line, and a single pixel on it as a double fuzzy dot (more or less an isotropic Gaussian, despite what Smith says) or a double fuzzy dash. Superimposed on these fuzzy patterns you had the shadow-mask circular colored dots or the Trinitron colored rectangles. Sometimes you would also get echos or "ghosting", if there was an impedance mismatch or two in the analog signal path. Later graphics cards in the 01990s would sometimes emulate CGA 320×200 and mode 13h by using more scan lines, giving pixels that looked more like little squares. Or, well, rectangles.
  - boomlinde 6y ago
    > VGA mode 13h PC graphics on a relatively crisp computer CRT display still drew each of its 200 "scan lines" as a double fuzzy line, and a single pixel on it as a double fuzzy dot (more or less an isotropic Gaussian, despite what Smith says) or a double fuzzy dash. Superimposed on these fuzzy patterns you had the shadow-mask circular colored dots or the Trinitron colored rectangles. Now we're veering back into technical details of its implementation. The question is, is "squares" (well, yes, rectangles) a useful model of what is visible to the viewer? To that end, the fact that each line was traced as twice on the display is trivial. We have to concern ourselves with the visible result to answer that question I have a decent CRT VGA monitor here, connected to a VGA card in an old PC, and at lower resolutions the pixels are crisp and hard. The monitors are made for reading at a higher resolution after all. If I press my face at the screen I can see that yes, the pixels appear on a much more fine-grained grid of apertures, and yes, this and other factors somewhat fuzz their boundaries. But for normal use at an arm's length, rectangles are a very good approximate model for some display types that were in use while VGA was still a thing games used, one that a skilled artist can exploit in an entirely different way than they'd exploit the characteristics of NTSC/PAL displays or an RGB display with a coarser dot pitch.
    - kragen 6y ago
      A rectangle is a pretty reasonable approximation of a fuzzy point. It's an even more reasonable approximation of two fuzzy parallel dashes.
- astrange 6y ago
  I agree Math Blasters looked pretty rectangular. Are modern pixel artists inspired by PC games, though? I think they mostly played Nintendo games in emulation.

ogurechny 6y ago

That's quite alarming. On many systems with TV output, including widely popular consoles, there were no pixels at all, just an analog line signal, most often modulated/composited/combined, and often low in quality because of cost-effective hardware and cables. Artists certainly looked at how images appeared on TV screens, and not at raw values of the bitmap samples presented as squares, and they compensated for unwanted effects. It is slightly maddening to know that the lack of analog output emulation in early console emulators and general lack of education resulted in the modern faux-retro aesthetic, some kind of new age belief that pixels should be big blocks. Mario sprite was never intended to be seen as made of blocks, no matter how many times people use that scaled abomination. You do have big flat pixels when you have high quality but low physical DPI output device. Say, black and white Macintosh, or late '90s computer monitors displaying '80s screen resolutions, or a panel of individual LEDs. On the other hand, halftones are also sharp and have low DPI, but have no square grid at all, nor they correspond to source data used in printing in any straightforward way. To conclude, big flat rectangles are just a specific artistic choice, they are not universal at all.

jcelerier 6y ago
> Mario sprite was never intended to be seen as made of blocks idk I still play on a 1990s CRT and it's pretty blocky
mrob 6y ago
>Mario sprite was never intended to be seen as made of blocks It was depicted as made of blocks on most versions of the cover art: https://www.mobygames.com/game/super-mario-bros/cover-art https://www.mobygames.com/game/super-mario-bros/cover-art And many Mario games were released for portable systems with sharp LCD screens, and they used the same pixel art techniques.
- ogurechny 6y ago
  Oh god, they even turned it at arbitrary angle, like in some teenage Flash animation.

virtualritz 6y ago

> As a pixel art artist, I certainly see pixels as little squares. Then you are ignorant about the history of pixel art. Which I am not judging btw. Just saying. Pixel art from the golden years doesn't look right when displayed as little squares. It needs to be shown on a CRT or with an overlay emulating this look to do its creator's intentions justice. "The Bitmap Brothers: Universe" (fantastic book btw.) went to great lengths to replicate the original rendering of the depicted pixel art. See e.g. [0]. [0] https://twitter.com/romvg/status/776081029882937344 https://twitter.com/romvg/status/776081029882937344

nearbuy 6y ago
Funny to think we're nostalgic for something that didn't really exist.
crazygringo 6y ago
This is a bit of a misunderstood overreaction. It's true that if you were playing Super Mario on your TV, the normal experience was for it to be a bit blurry. On the other hand, if you were playing Lemmings on an Apple monitor with Sony Trinitron technology, the pixels were exceptionally clear. Here's what Trinitron looked like: https://ancientelectronics.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/svidsg.jpg https://ancientelectronics.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/svids... I'd argue that playing Lemmings in an emulator, you want the pixels to be clear, without a CRT overlay -- that this would be closer to the artists' intentions.
pixlartthrowway 6y ago
Some pixel artists indeed intended their creations to be seen as little squares, even if CRTs of the 1980s stretched the squares into rectangles and fuzzed and scan-lined them. Right now there is a story on HN about a $660,000 copy of Super Mario Brothers. Look closely at Nintendo's original 1980s box art. Mario is made up of crisp little "pixel perfect" squares: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros.#/media/File:Super_Mario_Bros._box.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros.#/media/File:... Look at other Nintendo pixel box art from the 1980s. Many of the earliest Nintendo games had this common box art style. It's all little squares: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metroid_(video_game)#/media/File:Metroid_boxart.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metroid_(video_game)#/media/Fi... https://www.oldschoolgamermagazine.com/early-nes-nintendo-box-art-pt-1-black-box-titles/ https://www.oldschoolgamermagazine.com/early-nes-nintendo-bo... I have an NES classic edition and it lets you select if you want the CRT effect applied or not. Sometimes I play with this effect applied (how I experienced it as a child) but other times I enjoy the "pixel perfect" mode. I designed pixel fonts back in the 1990s and I was always unhappy about how CRTs fuzzed them. I loved the sharp little squares of LCDs much better.