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I've heard the revelation "that art was specifically drawn knowing it would ultimately pipe through a CRT" quite a few times now. It's becoming a meme. It make

I've heard the revelation "that art was specifically drawn knowing it would ultimately pipe through a CRT" quite a few times now. It's becoming a meme. It makes it sound like artists sat down and specifically about colour bleed, and blurry edges, and designed the artwork while thinking about the mechanics of CRT monitors in an academic way. In reality, every monitor was a CRT. They just drew what looked good on their development devices.

hellotomyrars 5y ago
That doesn't really invalidate the point, and doesn't change the part where it looks different (and not necessarily as intended) on non-CRTs, or that they considered some of those aspects when they designed the art.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tshaddox 5y ago
They presumably developed on CRTs, of course, but I would also guess that they drew while zoomed in and thus were very aware of each pixel and of tricks to make things look good.
- jbverschoor 5y ago
  Drew while zoomed in? You mean using grid paper to create the sprites
  - gmueckl 5y ago
    DPaint was a thing, at least in the later years. That program supported zooming in.
vmception 5y ago
Many visual artists today also factor in the capture and display technology, specifically around color space which can have meaningful changes between mediums Nobody is suggesting pixel art was an advanced form of alchemy, they are saying many artists understood techniques or why their printed pixel art for a presentation would look one way while their digital version looked another way
pessimizer 5y ago
I don't understand the distinction you're making here. If every monitor was a CRT, the artists sat down at one of those monitors and thought about (while observing) color bleed and blurry edges, and drew what looked good on their development devices. Are you saying that people are saying that artists back then didn't use monitors, and had to imagine what their art would look like?
- tedunangst 5y ago
  The opposite, I believe. A lot of people do make it sound like art was mastered on pixel perfect displays, and the artist had to imagine how it would ultimately look on some far off CRT.
- taeric 5y ago
  This is a solid rebuttal to the idea that things were carefully crafted to the pixels. https://t.co/pGAxa87C1e https://t.co/pGAxa87C1e Odds are high that things were varied considerably. Such that it is tough to really claim too much. Edit: as the follow-up shows. Down res and cleanup probably works better than folks are allowing in the conversations. With the major caveat that the "and cleanup" is tough to automate.
  - lupire 5y ago
    One large, high resolution (relatively you the realm of pixel sprites) B&W image does not rebut anything.
    - taeric 5y ago
      It was the down res comparison of that specific image that was a stronger message.
- bluescrn 5y ago
  In the days of 8-bit and 16-bit home computing, monitors were an expensive luxury, and a lot of game developers will have used a TV connected by a composite or even RF connection. They didn't have to 'think about how it'd look on a consumer TV', as that's probably what they were developing on. During the era of 16-bit console development, the Amiga (with DPaint - which was never as good on PC) was still a popular pixel art tool. And even if you had a monitor, you could easily preview things on a TV too.
ASalazarMX 5y ago
> In reality, every monitor was a CRT. They just drew what looked good on their development devices. Vector games look atrocious in modern monitors, but beautiful in vector monitors. Developers couldn't know what monitors the future would have, but they certainly designed for the monitors of their time and counted with their quirks in their visual effects. IIRC, the developer of the 2600 VCS version of Pac-Man decided that the ghosts should display 1 of every 4 frames not because it looked well in his monitor, but because he was running out of time and relied on phosphor persistence to mask his sprite reuse hack. Edit: The correct VCS Pac-Man story of the flickery ghosts https://boards.fool.com/atari-2600-hardware-and-pac-man-25274055.aspx https://boards.fool.com/atari-2600-hardware-and-pac-man-2527...
- shard 5y ago
  TIL that Motley Fool has a community where people discuss video games.
qayxc 5y ago
> In reality, every monitor was a CRT. They just drew what looked good on their development devices. Oh you don't even know the half of it, believe me! That was not how it went back in the day. While every monitor was indeed a CRT, the difference between composite, EGA (later VGA), and RF cable, TV and computer monitors were in fact quite visible. You could draw perfectly good pixel art on a nice, well calibrated 14" computer monitor only to see the same graphics look like a blend of mouse excrements and frog barf on a PAL TV via RF cable. In fact, artists needed to make sure their palette and graphics worked reasonably well on both PAL and NTSC devices (different resolutions, slightly different colours, etc.). Some companies made good ports that worked- and looked well on both PAL and NTSC, while many games had terrible PAL versions.
- joshspankit 5y ago
  ^ Can confirm. The tech itself might have had less “complexity”, but devs had to practically (or actually) become engineers of every single piece of the pipeline. The different connectors, the different tubes, how colour works, how the memory functioned (not just how the docs said it functioned), the math that each chip did as the functions were run, everything. Lack of knowledge of any specific part could mean anything from muddy graphics to a bug in the retail version of the game in a time when there was literally no way to patch a game after release. Those bugs could ruin a company.
- tinus_hn 5y ago
  Also the other way around, using alternating patterns on analog tv standards you can confuse the comb filter and create extra colors.
gryson 5y ago
The focus here should really be on output signal, not CRT. Specifically, composite vs. RGB output. And yes, at least in some cases, designers very carefully took into consideration how the art would look on a CRT via composite, in contrast to how they saw it on the high end monitors they were designing on via RGB. Here are two of the designers of the original Sonic the Hedgehog games discussing the point: https://twitter.com/MegaDriveShock/status/1390466020419178498?s=20 https://twitter.com/MegaDriveShock/status/139046602041917849...
gfaure 5y ago
Even if they didn't draw specifically for CRT output, I imagine the process to have been iterative -- if something ended up looking bad on end-user output devices, they would make tweaks until the product looked good enough on CRTs. Or are you suggesting that artists of that era never looked at their art on CRTs at all?
crazygringo 5y ago
Seriously, and also pixel art is so constrained designing "for a CRT" doesn't really mean much of anything, especially when different CRT's had drastically different properties. At most, it might mean artists perhaps tried to increase color contrast between pixels a bit, to compensate for known blur. But on the other hand, they were usually working with a limited color palette so that kind of subtle adjustment often wouldn't even be possible -- the colors just are what they are. The preference to blur 8-bit video games on modern systems is totally valid, or to even try to emulate actual CRT characteristics, but so is the preference not to. It's an entirely aesthetic preference that doesn't really have anything to do with original "design intent". And then stuff like this (from the article) is just ridiculous: > Look at how much detail you're missing when youre only looking at the raw pixels. Richter's hair is barely visible! Look at how much clearer his boots read as leather on the right! Color contrast (the hair) has nothing to do with pixellation and everything to do with different overall gamma, contrast, and brightness of the display -- which you can customize on your modern display to your heart's content. I guarantee you "Richter's hair" was "barely visible" on plenty of CRT's as well. And I don't know about you, but his legs/boots read equally skin/leather to me in both images. But I guess you can see anything you want if you're motivated to...
simonw 5y ago
The example in this tweet is amazing: https://twitter.com/CRTpixels/status/1408451743214616587 https://twitter.com/CRTpixels/status/1408451743214616587 Single red pixels bleed into each other, creating eyes that span multiple pixels. It's an incredible effect.
RetroSpark 5y ago
> In reality, every monitor was a CRT. They just drew what looked good on their development devices. True, but there was a huge difference between a good-quality RGB monitor and a consumer TV connected via composite video or RF. Ideally designers would have been using development devices that took that difference into account. For example, I've heard of artists at Sega drawing on PCs and using custom hardware so they could simultaneously view their work on a real Genesis connected to a typical TV.
gdubs 5y ago
A watercolor artist doesn’t necessarily sit down and think about the Navier-Stokes equations, but they sure do take advantage of the fluidity of their medium.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

hellotomyrars 5y ago

That doesn't really invalidate the point, and doesn't change the part where it looks different (and not necessarily as intended) on non-CRTs, or that they considered some of those aspects when they designed the art.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tshaddox 5y ago

They presumably developed on CRTs, of course, but I would also guess that they drew while zoomed in and thus were very aware of each pixel and of tricks to make things look good.

jbverschoor 5y ago
Drew while zoomed in? You mean using grid paper to create the sprites
- gmueckl 5y ago
  DPaint was a thing, at least in the later years. That program supported zooming in.

vmception 5y ago

Many visual artists today also factor in the capture and display technology, specifically around color space which can have meaningful changes between mediums Nobody is suggesting pixel art was an advanced form of alchemy, they are saying many artists understood techniques or why their printed pixel art for a presentation would look one way while their digital version looked another way

pessimizer 5y ago

I don't understand the distinction you're making here. If every monitor was a CRT, the artists sat down at one of those monitors and thought about (while observing) color bleed and blurry edges, and drew what looked good on their development devices. Are you saying that people are saying that artists back then didn't use monitors, and had to imagine what their art would look like?

tedunangst 5y ago
The opposite, I believe. A lot of people do make it sound like art was mastered on pixel perfect displays, and the artist had to imagine how it would ultimately look on some far off CRT.
taeric 5y ago
This is a solid rebuttal to the idea that things were carefully crafted to the pixels. https://t.co/pGAxa87C1e https://t.co/pGAxa87C1e Odds are high that things were varied considerably. Such that it is tough to really claim too much. Edit: as the follow-up shows. Down res and cleanup probably works better than folks are allowing in the conversations. With the major caveat that the "and cleanup" is tough to automate.
- lupire 5y ago
  One large, high resolution (relatively you the realm of pixel sprites) B&W image does not rebut anything.
  - taeric 5y ago
    It was the down res comparison of that specific image that was a stronger message.
bluescrn 5y ago
In the days of 8-bit and 16-bit home computing, monitors were an expensive luxury, and a lot of game developers will have used a TV connected by a composite or even RF connection. They didn't have to 'think about how it'd look on a consumer TV', as that's probably what they were developing on. During the era of 16-bit console development, the Amiga (with DPaint - which was never as good on PC) was still a popular pixel art tool. And even if you had a monitor, you could easily preview things on a TV too.

ASalazarMX 5y ago

> In reality, every monitor was a CRT. They just drew what looked good on their development devices. Vector games look atrocious in modern monitors, but beautiful in vector monitors. Developers couldn't know what monitors the future would have, but they certainly designed for the monitors of their time and counted with their quirks in their visual effects. IIRC, the developer of the 2600 VCS version of Pac-Man decided that the ghosts should display 1 of every 4 frames not because it looked well in his monitor, but because he was running out of time and relied on phosphor persistence to mask his sprite reuse hack. Edit: The correct VCS Pac-Man story of the flickery ghosts https://boards.fool.com/atari-2600-hardware-and-pac-man-25274055.aspx https://boards.fool.com/atari-2600-hardware-and-pac-man-2527...

shard 5y ago
TIL that Motley Fool has a community where people discuss video games.

qayxc 5y ago

> In reality, every monitor was a CRT. They just drew what looked good on their development devices. Oh you don't even know the half of it, believe me! That was not how it went back in the day. While every monitor was indeed a CRT, the difference between composite, EGA (later VGA), and RF cable, TV and computer monitors were in fact quite visible. You could draw perfectly good pixel art on a nice, well calibrated 14" computer monitor only to see the same graphics look like a blend of mouse excrements and frog barf on a PAL TV via RF cable. In fact, artists needed to make sure their palette and graphics worked reasonably well on both PAL and NTSC devices (different resolutions, slightly different colours, etc.). Some companies made good ports that worked- and looked well on both PAL and NTSC, while many games had terrible PAL versions.

joshspankit 5y ago
^ Can confirm. The tech itself might have had less “complexity”, but devs had to practically (or actually) become engineers of every single piece of the pipeline. The different connectors, the different tubes, how colour works, how the memory functioned (not just how the docs said it functioned), the math that each chip did as the functions were run, everything. Lack of knowledge of any specific part could mean anything from muddy graphics to a bug in the retail version of the game in a time when there was literally no way to patch a game after release. Those bugs could ruin a company.
tinus_hn 5y ago
Also the other way around, using alternating patterns on analog tv standards you can confuse the comb filter and create extra colors.

gryson 5y ago

The focus here should really be on output signal, not CRT. Specifically, composite vs. RGB output. And yes, at least in some cases, designers very carefully took into consideration how the art would look on a CRT via composite, in contrast to how they saw it on the high end monitors they were designing on via RGB. Here are two of the designers of the original Sonic the Hedgehog games discussing the point: https://twitter.com/MegaDriveShock/status/1390466020419178498?s=20 https://twitter.com/MegaDriveShock/status/139046602041917849...

gfaure 5y ago

Even if they didn't draw specifically for CRT output, I imagine the process to have been iterative -- if something ended up looking bad on end-user output devices, they would make tweaks until the product looked good enough on CRTs. Or are you suggesting that artists of that era never looked at their art on CRTs at all?

crazygringo 5y ago

Seriously, and also pixel art is so constrained designing "for a CRT" doesn't really mean much of anything, especially when different CRT's had drastically different properties. At most, it might mean artists perhaps tried to increase color contrast between pixels a bit, to compensate for known blur. But on the other hand, they were usually working with a limited color palette so that kind of subtle adjustment often wouldn't even be possible -- the colors just are what they are. The preference to blur 8-bit video games on modern systems is totally valid, or to even try to emulate actual CRT characteristics, but so is the preference not to. It's an entirely aesthetic preference that doesn't really have anything to do with original "design intent". And then stuff like this (from the article) is just ridiculous: > Look at how much detail you're missing when youre only looking at the raw pixels. Richter's hair is barely visible! Look at how much clearer his boots read as leather on the right! Color contrast (the hair) has nothing to do with pixellation and everything to do with different overall gamma, contrast, and brightness of the display -- which you can customize on your modern display to your heart's content. I guarantee you "Richter's hair" was "barely visible" on plenty of CRT's as well. And I don't know about you, but his legs/boots read equally skin/leather to me in both images. But I guess you can see anything you want if you're motivated to...

simonw 5y ago

The example in this tweet is amazing: https://twitter.com/CRTpixels/status/1408451743214616587 https://twitter.com/CRTpixels/status/1408451743214616587 Single red pixels bleed into each other, creating eyes that span multiple pixels. It's an incredible effect.

RetroSpark 5y ago

> In reality, every monitor was a CRT. They just drew what looked good on their development devices. True, but there was a huge difference between a good-quality RGB monitor and a consumer TV connected via composite video or RF. Ideally designers would have been using development devices that took that difference into account. For example, I've heard of artists at Sega drawing on PCs and using custom hardware so they could simultaneously view their work on a real Genesis connected to a typical TV.

gdubs 5y ago

A watercolor artist doesn’t necessarily sit down and think about the Navier-Stokes equations, but they sure do take advantage of the fluidity of their medium.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]