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> 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

> 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.
    - crazygringo 2y ago
      Right, it's about the differences between CRT's. > 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. The issue is, sure they could do that for their CRT. But plug in a different one and the colors are different, the hand-dithering effect looks totally different, etc. This stuff was drawn using zoom levels where the pixels really were squares. Obviously the artists looked at the preview to get a rough idea of how it would look blurry, but they also couldn't optimize too much for their particular display. It was more important for the design to be robust across a wide variety of displays, some of which would just look like crap no matter what. So I'm saying, if you just apply some blur it's fine. Nobody needs to be emulating the exact characteristics of a CRT to chase down some "artistic intent" that only vintage CRT's provide. Just blurring out the jaggies is really the only thing that was ever consistent across displays, and even that varied greatly.
- egypturnash 2y ago
  Sonic the Hedgehog, 1991. First level of the game. Gorgeous translucent waterfalls on the family TV of the time. Weird solid vertical bars on a high-end monitor or in a modern emulation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0weL5XDpPs&t=45s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0weL5XDpPs&t=45s Artists couldn't plan for a very specific amount of smear but they sure could plan for a general amount of smear.
wang_li 2y ago
I don't buy it either. Showing something that came out 30 years after the time in question is not supportive of the argument. People wrote games and developed games and made game art on CRTs. They just developed on what they had. No one was sitting down and factoring in blur, scanlines, phosphor persistence, or etc.
- mrandish 2y ago
  > They just developed on what they had Correct. > No one was sitting down and factoring in blur, scanlines, phosphor persistence I get why you'd assume that from today's digital context. But analog video was different. I created video games in the 1980s and I know a lot of other people who did too. We still get together and hang at places like the Hacker's Conference and reminisce about hand-coding composite video pixels on 8-bit processors in assembly language. Good times. Back in the day, we not only considered how the pixel data we put in memory would be displayed differently on screens, we had to iteratively test it because analog video output circuits weren't always consistent between platforms (Woz made things a lot trickier by saving a nickel on the video output of the Apple II). Take a look at this http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2021/10/apple-ii-composite-artifact-color-ntsc.html http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2021/10/apple-ii-composi... Part way down the page you'll see a clear example of how we could put a specific pattern of black and white pixel data in memory that would cause the monitor to display 15 different colors. What we put in memory was not what the monitor displayed. And we wrote whole games this way. It also wasn't just the Apple II. Every arcade board and computer system could have it's own quirks. So, thinking about the blur, scanlines, and phosphors you mentioned was actually the easy part. The hard part was manipulating the display circuit in unnatural ways by hand-counting CPU cycles to display pixels in the "off-limits" overscan area or to switch display modes in the middle of a raster. There's even a book about programming the Atari video system that's literally called "Racing the Beam" (as in racing the electron beam scanning the CRT raster 59.94 times every second with the CPU). Most 80s games programmers had to know a lot about analog video signals. In fact, that's how I eventually crossed over from computer programming to video engineering.
  - crazygringo 2y ago

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.
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    Right, it's about the differences between CRT's. > 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. The issue is, sure they could do that for their CRT. But plug in a different one and the colors are different, the hand-dithering effect looks totally different, etc. This stuff was drawn using zoom levels where the pixels really were squares. Obviously the artists looked at the preview to get a rough idea of how it would look blurry, but they also couldn't optimize too much for their particular display. It was more important for the design to be robust across a wide variety of displays, some of which would just look like crap no matter what. So I'm saying, if you just apply some blur it's fine. Nobody needs to be emulating the exact characteristics of a CRT to chase down some "artistic intent" that only vintage CRT's provide. Just blurring out the jaggies is really the only thing that was ever consistent across displays, and even that varied greatly.
egypturnash 2y ago
Sonic the Hedgehog, 1991. First level of the game. Gorgeous translucent waterfalls on the family TV of the time. Weird solid vertical bars on a high-end monitor or in a modern emulation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0weL5XDpPs&t=45s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0weL5XDpPs&t=45s Artists couldn't plan for a very specific amount of smear but they sure could plan for a general amount of smear.

wang_li 2y ago

I don't buy it either. Showing something that came out 30 years after the time in question is not supportive of the argument. People wrote games and developed games and made game art on CRTs. They just developed on what they had. No one was sitting down and factoring in blur, scanlines, phosphor persistence, or etc.

mrandish 2y ago
> They just developed on what they had Correct. > No one was sitting down and factoring in blur, scanlines, phosphor persistence I get why you'd assume that from today's digital context. But analog video was different. I created video games in the 1980s and I know a lot of other people who did too. We still get together and hang at places like the Hacker's Conference and reminisce about hand-coding composite video pixels on 8-bit processors in assembly language. Good times. Back in the day, we not only considered how the pixel data we put in memory would be displayed differently on screens, we had to iteratively test it because analog video output circuits weren't always consistent between platforms (Woz made things a lot trickier by saving a nickel on the video output of the Apple II). Take a look at this http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2021/10/apple-ii-composite-artifact-color-ntsc.html http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2021/10/apple-ii-composi... Part way down the page you'll see a clear example of how we could put a specific pattern of black and white pixel data in memory that would cause the monitor to display 15 different colors. What we put in memory was not what the monitor displayed. And we wrote whole games this way. It also wasn't just the Apple II. Every arcade board and computer system could have it's own quirks. So, thinking about the blur, scanlines, and phosphors you mentioned was actually the easy part. The hard part was manipulating the display circuit in unnatural ways by hand-counting CPU cycles to display pixels in the "off-limits" overscan area or to switch display modes in the middle of a raster. There's even a book about programming the Atari video system that's literally called "Racing the Beam" (as in racing the electron beam scanning the CRT raster 59.94 times every second with the CPU). Most 80s games programmers had to know a lot about analog video signals. In fact, that's how I eventually crossed over from computer programming to video engineering.
- crazygringo 2y ago