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> You deserve to see them as they were intended to be seen. I've never bought that argument, and I grew up playing games on CRT's. The reality is that differe

> You deserve to see them as they were intended to be seen. I've never bought that argument, and I grew up playing games on CRT's. The reality is that different CRT's had wildly different characteristics in terms of sharpness, color, and other artifacts -- and it also varied tremendously depending on the type of video output/input. Were you hooked up to a TV? A cheap monitor? An expensive monitor? About the only thing you can say for sure is that CRT's were blurrier. And the comparison image you provide is completely misleading because the brightnesses are totally different, which suggests that the LCD/LED version isn't using correct gamma. If you used a random CRT her skin tone also had a good chance of turning greenish or whatever because that's just what CRT's did -- the color artifacts could be atrocious. I definitely appreciate wanting to blur the image in an emulator to remove the jaggies, and the retro CRT effects are a cool novelty. But I just don't buy the argument that it's "how the games were intended to be seen", because there was just way too much variation and the screen quality was so low. It's like only listening to music from the 90's on cheap speakers over the roar of the road because it's how the music was "intended to be heard". No it wasn't. It's just the best you had at the time.

amiga386 2y ago
> I just don't buy the argument that it's "how the games were intended to be seen" I do, though. At its most extreme, compare how this CGA imagery looks like on an NTSC television, with the crisp, clean signals that generated it. The demo makers here absolutely intend you to see this via NTSC, it will look like complete trash if you don't. https://int10h.org/blog/img/1k16_flowergirl_cga_1024_colors.png https://int10h.org/blog/img/1k16_flowergirl_cga_1024_colors.... (from https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-illustrated/ https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-...) This article gives you more examples: https://www.datagubbe.se/crt/ https://www.datagubbe.se/crt/ And it links to this video with yet more examples: https://www.tiktok.com/@mylifeisanrpg/video/7164193246401383726 https://www.tiktok.com/@mylifeisanrpg/video/7164193246401383... There's no mistaking it. The artists on those 80s/90s games worked with the expectation of how it looked on display hardware of the time. The actual pixels, in complete precision on a vastly higher resolution display, look like shit. Or they look "retro".
- crazygringo 2y ago
  Your first link is using weird color hacks that maybe could have worked on some specific hardware, but nothing like that was used on any average popular video game of the time as far as I know. So that's not an example of how regular video game artists were working, it's an example of how some (current-day?) demoscene people are trying to push specific vintage hardware to its limits. And like I said -- you can apply a blur filter (or basic interpolation) to get rid of jaggies, that's totally understandable. The pixels weren't meant to be sharp square blocks, just blobs of color. But a lot of these pages are showing how CRT's supposedly looked so much better are doing a lot of cherry-picking -- the reality was that they looked like blurry color-distorted wavy jittery messes just as often. There just wasn't any kind of consistency between dramatically different displays. Artists couldn't plan for some highly specific amount of horizontal smear to look "just right" because there was gigantic variance.
  - amiga386 2y ago
    > a lot of these pages are showing how CRT's supposedly looked so much better That's shifting the goalposts. The question is whether old games were intended to be seen on CRTs, or intended to be seen on LCD screens created years later. There's no question, they were intended to be seen on CRTs. The pixels were placed by artists who looked at how they rendered on a CRT, and they'd change pixels here and there, do hand dithering, and play with the colour palette until they got what they wanted on the CRT. That was the canvas they painted with. The artists didn't have high-resolution LCD screens. And the thesis of all the things I linked were "the artists intended you to see this on a CRT". And yet, people playing games in emulators on modern high-res LCD screens have picked up this unintended visual style and dubbed it "retro", and modern artists have created new art that was intended be seen on LCD and look "retro" while doing so. They didn't even get a CRT to check how it looks on it. Two different sets of artists, with two different intents, separated by time and fashion.
    - weinzierl 2y ago
      "The question is whether old games were intended to be seen on CRTs, or intended to be seen on LCD screens created years later." I think the counter-argument is that they were intended to be seen on CRTs but the differences between CRTs were bigger than the difference between CRT and LCD. I don't know if this holds water but I think this is the point some try to make.
mrandish 2y ago
GP here. I don't want to repeat the lengthy technical explanation I already posted in another response downthread, so please refer to that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42817006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42817006 > The reality is that different CRT's had wildly different characteristics in terms of sharpness, color, and other artifacts -- and it also varied tremendously depending on the type of video output/input. As a video engineer old enough to have started my career in the analog era, I fully agree composite video displayed on consumer TVs could vary wildly. I already explained the technical point about decoding the signal information properly in my other post but you're making a different point about variability, so I'll add that just because TVs could be mis-adjusted (or even broken) doesn't mean there's not a technically correct way to display the encoded image data. This is why we used color bars to calibrate TVs. > I definitely appreciate wanting to blur the image in an emulator to remove the jaggies But that's not my point, blur was an undesirable artifact of the composite video standard. 80s and 90s 2D pixel art was hand-crafted knowing that the blur would blend some colors together, minimize interlace artifacts and soften hard edges. However, I only use shaders that model a small amount of blur and I run my CRT in analog RGB instead of composite, which can be quite sharp. My goal is not nostalgia for the analog past or to degrade a game's output as much as my parent's shitty 1970s living room TV did. I had to engineer analog video in that past - and I hated it's shortcomings every day. When I play 80s and 90s video games, whether via shaders or on my analog RGB CRT, it probably looks quite a bit sharper and clearer than the original artists ever saw it - but that's not due to some subjective up-res or up-scaling - it's due to accurately decoding and displaying the original content to the technical standard it was created to comply with (even if many consumer TVs didn't live up to that standard). In the 90s I worked at a TV station and after hours we'd bring in consoles just to play them on the $3,000 Sony BVM broadcast reference monitor. And they looked great! That's what I'm after. Accurately reflecting the original artist's intent in the maximum possible quality - without slipping over the line into editorializing colors or pixels that were never in the original data in the first place. I want to play the game as it would have looked back in the day on the best video output available, through the best cable available and on the best screen money could buy. And via emulation and shaders, now everyone can have that experience!
dahart 2y ago
You have very valid points, variation in CRTs was very high back in the day, and the example image does have a gamma/brightness discrepancy, I agree with that. Back when CRTs were dominant, gamma and brightness were all over the map, almost nobody knew what those were. You couldn’t even count on where the visible edges of the screen were. And you’re right that saying “the way it was intended” is perhaps slightly hyperbolic or maybe isn’t quite meant the way you’re taking it. It’s not that using CRTs or not was a choice, but it is fair to say artists used CRTs when creating game art and intended for it to look as good as it could on CRTs, and they did not intend for the pixels to turn into multi-pixel solid color blocks. Yes exactly CRTs were blurrier, and that alone affects artistic choices. It is fair to say that CRT art looks different than LCD art because CRTs are blurrier. Games developed on CRTs with low resolutions don’t look as good when displayed on high res LCDs with up-resing and nearest neighbor sampling. The problem with using a solid 2x2, 3x3, 4x4 block of LCD pixels to represent a low res CRT pixel is that it’s a poor reconstruction, introduces unwanted high frequencies, and looks very different from the original. It’s true from a signal processing perspective that 4-up LCD reconstruction of old CRT art is quite wrong and bad. This does extend into music, kinda. We can look at music from the 30s and 50s for an even stronger example - early recorded music was both technically limited to, and also artistically designed for, a frequency range of, I don’t know, like 500-3k Hz. Some audiophiles do argue that using an old record player to play old vinyl is a superior experience to listening to a digitized copy on modern hardware, and often with the same argument - that the old stuff is the way it was intended to be heard. However, the analogy to music is slightly broken since today’s digital music - unlike LCD up-resing of old games - never tried to reconstruct old music using nearest neighbor sampling. When you do that with audio, you can instantly hear it’s all wrong. If you were actually comparing nearest-neighbor audio reconstruction to blurry reconstruction, you would 100% agree that the blurry reconstruction was the ‘way it was intended to be heard’. The biggest problem with this whole argument that neither you nor the parent addressed is that LCD nearest-neighbor reconstruction is crappy, and as long as we try to blur when using LCDs, most of this discussion is moot. So anyway, in many ways I think your argument already does agree with the idea that games designed on CRTs look better on CRTs than, e.g., 4-up reconstructions on LCDs. The entire sticking point in your argument might hinge on how you interpret the word “intended”. I’m saying the original argument isn’t necessarily claiming that the intent was conscious or explicit, it’s merely saying that the intent was a byproduct of having used CRTs during the creation process. In that sense, it’s a valid argument.

amiga386 2y ago

> I just don't buy the argument that it's "how the games were intended to be seen" I do, though. At its most extreme, compare how this CGA imagery looks like on an NTSC television, with the crisp, clean signals that generated it. The demo makers here absolutely intend you to see this via NTSC, it will look like complete trash if you don't. https://int10h.org/blog/img/1k16_flowergirl_cga_1024_colors.png https://int10h.org/blog/img/1k16_flowergirl_cga_1024_colors.... (from https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-illustrated/ https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-...) This article gives you more examples: https://www.datagubbe.se/crt/ https://www.datagubbe.se/crt/ And it links to this video with yet more examples: https://www.tiktok.com/@mylifeisanrpg/video/7164193246401383726 https://www.tiktok.com/@mylifeisanrpg/video/7164193246401383... There's no mistaking it. The artists on those 80s/90s games worked with the expectation of how it looked on display hardware of the time. The actual pixels, in complete precision on a vastly higher resolution display, look like shit. Or they look "retro".

crazygringo 2y ago
Your first link is using weird color hacks that maybe could have worked on some specific hardware, but nothing like that was used on any average popular video game of the time as far as I know. So that's not an example of how regular video game artists were working, it's an example of how some (current-day?) demoscene people are trying to push specific vintage hardware to its limits. And like I said -- you can apply a blur filter (or basic interpolation) to get rid of jaggies, that's totally understandable. The pixels weren't meant to be sharp square blocks, just blobs of color. But a lot of these pages are showing how CRT's supposedly looked so much better are doing a lot of cherry-picking -- the reality was that they looked like blurry color-distorted wavy jittery messes just as often. There just wasn't any kind of consistency between dramatically different displays. Artists couldn't plan for some highly specific amount of horizontal smear to look "just right" because there was gigantic variance.
- amiga386 2y ago
  > a lot of these pages are showing how CRT's supposedly looked so much better That's shifting the goalposts. The question is whether old games were intended to be seen on CRTs, or intended to be seen on LCD screens created years later. There's no question, they were intended to be seen on CRTs. The pixels were placed by artists who looked at how they rendered on a CRT, and they'd change pixels here and there, do hand dithering, and play with the colour palette until they got what they wanted on the CRT. That was the canvas they painted with. The artists didn't have high-resolution LCD screens. And the thesis of all the things I linked were "the artists intended you to see this on a CRT". And yet, people playing games in emulators on modern high-res LCD screens have picked up this unintended visual style and dubbed it "retro", and modern artists have created new art that was intended be seen on LCD and look "retro" while doing so. They didn't even get a CRT to check how it looks on it. Two different sets of artists, with two different intents, separated by time and fashion.
  - weinzierl 2y ago
    "The question is whether old games were intended to be seen on CRTs, or intended to be seen on LCD screens created years later." I think the counter-argument is that they were intended to be seen on CRTs but the differences between CRTs were bigger than the difference between CRT and LCD. I don't know if this holds water but I think this is the point some try to make.

mrandish 2y ago

GP here. I don't want to repeat the lengthy technical explanation I already posted in another response downthread, so please refer to that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42817006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42817006 > The reality is that different CRT's had wildly different characteristics in terms of sharpness, color, and other artifacts -- and it also varied tremendously depending on the type of video output/input. As a video engineer old enough to have started my career in the analog era, I fully agree composite video displayed on consumer TVs could vary wildly. I already explained the technical point about decoding the signal information properly in my other post but you're making a different point about variability, so I'll add that just because TVs could be mis-adjusted (or even broken) doesn't mean there's not a technically correct way to display the encoded image data. This is why we used color bars to calibrate TVs. > I definitely appreciate wanting to blur the image in an emulator to remove the jaggies But that's not my point, blur was an undesirable artifact of the composite video standard. 80s and 90s 2D pixel art was hand-crafted knowing that the blur would blend some colors together, minimize interlace artifacts and soften hard edges. However, I only use shaders that model a small amount of blur and I run my CRT in analog RGB instead of composite, which can be quite sharp. My goal is not nostalgia for the analog past or to degrade a game's output as much as my parent's shitty 1970s living room TV did. I had to engineer analog video in that past - and I hated it's shortcomings every day. When I play 80s and 90s video games, whether via shaders or on my analog RGB CRT, it probably looks quite a bit sharper and clearer than the original artists ever saw it - but that's not due to some subjective up-res or up-scaling - it's due to accurately decoding and displaying the original content to the technical standard it was created to comply with (even if many consumer TVs didn't live up to that standard). In the 90s I worked at a TV station and after hours we'd bring in consoles just to play them on the $3,000 Sony BVM broadcast reference monitor. And they looked great! That's what I'm after. Accurately reflecting the original artist's intent in the maximum possible quality - without slipping over the line into editorializing colors or pixels that were never in the original data in the first place. I want to play the game as it would have looked back in the day on the best video output available, through the best cable available and on the best screen money could buy. And via emulation and shaders, now everyone can have that experience!

dahart 2y ago

You have very valid points, variation in CRTs was very high back in the day, and the example image does have a gamma/brightness discrepancy, I agree with that. Back when CRTs were dominant, gamma and brightness were all over the map, almost nobody knew what those were. You couldn’t even count on where the visible edges of the screen were. And you’re right that saying “the way it was intended” is perhaps slightly hyperbolic or maybe isn’t quite meant the way you’re taking it. It’s not that using CRTs or not was a choice, but it is fair to say artists used CRTs when creating game art and intended for it to look as good as it could on CRTs, and they did not intend for the pixels to turn into multi-pixel solid color blocks. Yes exactly CRTs were blurrier, and that alone affects artistic choices. It is fair to say that CRT art looks different than LCD art because CRTs are blurrier. Games developed on CRTs with low resolutions don’t look as good when displayed on high res LCDs with up-resing and nearest neighbor sampling. The problem with using a solid 2x2, 3x3, 4x4 block of LCD pixels to represent a low res CRT pixel is that it’s a poor reconstruction, introduces unwanted high frequencies, and looks very different from the original. It’s true from a signal processing perspective that 4-up LCD reconstruction of old CRT art is quite wrong and bad. This does extend into music, kinda. We can look at music from the 30s and 50s for an even stronger example - early recorded music was both technically limited to, and also artistically designed for, a frequency range of, I don’t know, like 500-3k Hz. Some audiophiles do argue that using an old record player to play old vinyl is a superior experience to listening to a digitized copy on modern hardware, and often with the same argument - that the old stuff is the way it was intended to be heard. However, the analogy to music is slightly broken since today’s digital music - unlike LCD up-resing of old games - never tried to reconstruct old music using nearest neighbor sampling. When you do that with audio, you can instantly hear it’s all wrong. If you were actually comparing nearest-neighbor audio reconstruction to blurry reconstruction, you would 100% agree that the blurry reconstruction was the ‘way it was intended to be heard’. The biggest problem with this whole argument that neither you nor the parent addressed is that LCD nearest-neighbor reconstruction is crappy, and as long as we try to blur when using LCDs, most of this discussion is moot. So anyway, in many ways I think your argument already does agree with the idea that games designed on CRTs look better on CRTs than, e.g., 4-up reconstructions on LCDs. The entire sticking point in your argument might hinge on how you interpret the word “intended”. I’m saying the original argument isn’t necessarily claiming that the intent was conscious or explicit, it’s merely saying that the intent was a byproduct of having used CRTs during the creation process. In that sense, it’s a valid argument.