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I always hated the weird fuzziness, soft lines, and curved image that old TVs imparted on games, it is amazing to me that entire communities have been built up

I always hated the weird fuzziness, soft lines, and curved image that old TVs imparted on games, it is amazing to me that entire communities have been built up around it. When I started playing games on an emulator and pixels were hard and square and the image was actually flat, I was like YES!!

c-hendricks 3y ago
It's interesting, because artists on some games accounted for the fuzziness and used it to their advantage. You should play them how you want of course, but for something like Gameboy emulation I absolutely turn on shaders to avoid the nasty black-and-white.
- pdntspa 3y ago
  Is a shader really needed just to get the correct color palette? That should be a simple LUT
  - c-hendricks 3y ago
    And a LUT is involved, but then you've got grid lines, response times, and contrast.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  > because artists on some games accounted for the fuzziness and used it to their advantage Everybody repeats this, but I've honestly never been convinced. Different screens and different systems had different types of different degrees of fuzziness. Designing for it seems like it would be impossible. I've never once seen an example of pixel art that looked good crisp and bad fuzzy, and then was somehow modified in a way to look worse crisp and yet better fuzzy. It doesn't even make sense to me how that could be. I'm happy to be proven wrong, but I need to see an example with my own eyes. And I've never seen anybody demonstrate it with a 2x2 example like that. Super Mario on a crisp LCD has always seemed aesthetically better than on a CRT. Not as nostalgic, sure. But nothing feels lost artistically -- to the contrary, it's clearer.
  - c-hendricks 3y ago
    It doesn't make sense that people designed for the end result to be softer?
    - crazygringo 3y ago
      No, it doesn't. How would you even do that? Nobody has ever managed to explain how that would result in a different design -- not that I've been able to find.
      - c-hendricks 3y ago
        https://vgdensetsu.tumblr.com/post/179656817318/designing-2d-graphics-in-the-japanese-industry https://vgdensetsu.tumblr.com/post/179656817318/designing-2d... > Once the industry switched from hexadecimal to graphic editors, it wasn’t rare for graphic designers to have not one but two screens on their desk: a computer monitor and a CRT, the second one being used to display the result of the work made on the first one. It’s hard to tell whether this was a standardized practice or not, but we know that many developers, graphic designers as well as programmers, used that technique, from Kazuko Shibuya (Square) and Akira Yasuda (Capcom) to the developers behind Thunder Force IV (1992) who used many CRTs to take into account the specifities of each kind of screen. Masato Nishimura, graphic designer in charge of the backgrounds from Sonic CD, mentioned something he had been told about the first Sonic the Hedgehog (1991): the developers used up to 3 CRTs to previsualize the game and see how were rendered the scrolling and blur effects. > This practice can be explained by at least 3 reasons. The first one is related to the differences in rendering between a computer screen and a CRT, the pixels look generally sharper on a monitor. The second one lies in the specificities of each machine: display resolution, shape of the pixels (rarely as square as one would expect), rendering of the colors -the red color bleeded on the others on Mega Drive, it was recommanded to add neutral colors around to compensate. The third reason is related to the second one but also concerns programmers: a workstation doesn’t necessary simulate every aspect of the machine for which a game is being developed. For example, the parallax scrolling effect featured in the Mega Drive game Thunder Force IV couldn’t be tested on X68000. > Tatsuro Iwamoto, graphic designer on the first episodes of the Phoenix Wright / Gyakuten Saiban series released on Game Boy Advance, explained that he took account of that (sometimes unwanted) effect on Nintendo’s portable console.
kiwijamo 3y ago
I had the same experience going switching between CRT and LCD e.g. I disliked playing games on the PlayStation on our CRT TV (using crappy analog RGB input) but loved playing games on my GameBoy Pocket with its crisp LCD screen. Even when LCD TVs came along it was a while before the input became digital and lost all of that analog fuzziness.
RunSet 3y ago
The curvature in particular seems like revisionist history because I remember the cost premium associated with flat CRTs. https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/flat-crt https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/flat-crt They also look amazing but I recommend paying someone else to move them. Especially up stairs.
NikkiA 3y ago
All of the retro shaders and things like cool-retro-term seem to overdo the curve too, making everything look like a 9" TV, when for me 14" was the most common size and much less pronounced curvature. The tail end of my CRT experience however was 19" and 21" Sony and Viewsonic flat tube monitors with trinitron masks and 36" trinitron TVs, so retro stuff never looks right.

c-hendricks 3y ago

It's interesting, because artists on some games accounted for the fuzziness and used it to their advantage. You should play them how you want of course, but for something like Gameboy emulation I absolutely turn on shaders to avoid the nasty black-and-white.

pdntspa 3y ago
Is a shader really needed just to get the correct color palette? That should be a simple LUT
- c-hendricks 3y ago
  And a LUT is involved, but then you've got grid lines, response times, and contrast.
crazygringo 3y ago
> because artists on some games accounted for the fuzziness and used it to their advantage Everybody repeats this, but I've honestly never been convinced. Different screens and different systems had different types of different degrees of fuzziness. Designing for it seems like it would be impossible. I've never once seen an example of pixel art that looked good crisp and bad fuzzy, and then was somehow modified in a way to look worse crisp and yet better fuzzy. It doesn't even make sense to me how that could be. I'm happy to be proven wrong, but I need to see an example with my own eyes. And I've never seen anybody demonstrate it with a 2x2 example like that. Super Mario on a crisp LCD has always seemed aesthetically better than on a CRT. Not as nostalgic, sure. But nothing feels lost artistically -- to the contrary, it's clearer.
- c-hendricks 3y ago
  It doesn't make sense that people designed for the end result to be softer?
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    No, it doesn't. How would you even do that? Nobody has ever managed to explain how that would result in a different design -- not that I've been able to find.
    - c-hendricks 3y ago
      https://vgdensetsu.tumblr.com/post/179656817318/designing-2d-graphics-in-the-japanese-industry https://vgdensetsu.tumblr.com/post/179656817318/designing-2d... > Once the industry switched from hexadecimal to graphic editors, it wasn’t rare for graphic designers to have not one but two screens on their desk: a computer monitor and a CRT, the second one being used to display the result of the work made on the first one. It’s hard to tell whether this was a standardized practice or not, but we know that many developers, graphic designers as well as programmers, used that technique, from Kazuko Shibuya (Square) and Akira Yasuda (Capcom) to the developers behind Thunder Force IV (1992) who used many CRTs to take into account the specifities of each kind of screen. Masato Nishimura, graphic designer in charge of the backgrounds from Sonic CD, mentioned something he had been told about the first Sonic the Hedgehog (1991): the developers used up to 3 CRTs to previsualize the game and see how were rendered the scrolling and blur effects. > This practice can be explained by at least 3 reasons. The first one is related to the differences in rendering between a computer screen and a CRT, the pixels look generally sharper on a monitor. The second one lies in the specificities of each machine: display resolution, shape of the pixels (rarely as square as one would expect), rendering of the colors -the red color bleeded on the others on Mega Drive, it was recommanded to add neutral colors around to compensate. The third reason is related to the second one but also concerns programmers: a workstation doesn’t necessary simulate every aspect of the machine for which a game is being developed. For example, the parallax scrolling effect featured in the Mega Drive game Thunder Force IV couldn’t be tested on X68000. > Tatsuro Iwamoto, graphic designer on the first episodes of the Phoenix Wright / Gyakuten Saiban series released on Game Boy Advance, explained that he took account of that (sometimes unwanted) effect on Nintendo’s portable console.

kiwijamo 3y ago

I had the same experience going switching between CRT and LCD e.g. I disliked playing games on the PlayStation on our CRT TV (using crappy analog RGB input) but loved playing games on my GameBoy Pocket with its crisp LCD screen. Even when LCD TVs came along it was a while before the input became digital and lost all of that analog fuzziness.

RunSet 3y ago

The curvature in particular seems like revisionist history because I remember the cost premium associated with flat CRTs. https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/flat-crt https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/flat-crt They also look amazing but I recommend paying someone else to move them. Especially up stairs.

NikkiA 3y ago

All of the retro shaders and things like cool-retro-term seem to overdo the curve too, making everything look like a 9" TV, when for me 14" was the most common size and much less pronounced curvature. The tail end of my CRT experience however was 19" and 21" Sony and Viewsonic flat tube monitors with trinitron masks and 36" trinitron TVs, so retro stuff never looks right.