4 ms·

The Effect of CRTs on Pixel Art (2024)

• TulliusCicero 6d ago
  Related, I usually hate CRT filters in game, the scan lines usually look too strong (and often the image is darkened inappropriately), but I really liked the one in Cyber Shadow. It just felt right.
  • WCSTombs 6d ago
    It's very hit or miss. Abylight Studios (Super Hydorah, Cursed Castilla) seems to do them pretty well, but then I've seen some that left me wondering how they ever made it past QC. (I won't name them because it's been a while and I don't want to name the wrong game.) I want to point out though that it's impossible for any CRT filter to have a peak brightness that's not significantly lower than without the filter, since it can darken pixels but not brighten them past what the maximum already is.
  • swozey 6d ago
    I know someone who uses a CRT filter for vscode... I thought that was just a meme theme we all downloaded and clicked once to check it out then turned it off but he likes it along with his exploding text characters, forgot the name of that, powerblock or whatever. His vscode triggers my ADHD like trying to read a too busy restaurant menu, literally can't absorb anything.
    • ehe78qhe 6d ago
      I use it in Windows Terminal when in a cmd.exe shell (as opposed to a PowerShell or Git Bash shell)
      • achairapart 6d ago
        Also, for MacOS: https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term
      • TiredOfLife 6d ago
        This seems like, probably, the only appropriate usage of crt effect.
• fasterik 6d ago
  I like to think of modern pixel art as its own aesthetic and art form. It's designed to be viewed on high DPI LED screens, and that's fine. I don't think it should be judged by how it looks on a CRT. There's an undeniable charm to the older era of pixel art, and surely part of that is nostalgia, but I also think a lot of it comes from the fact that the economics and the hardware were a lot different. Up until the mid 1990s, the highest paid artists in the industry were working on pixel art games. The hardware was slow enough that there were real creative constraints, and we know that constraints often drive creativity.
  • pvillano 6d ago
    Ironically, pixel art today is the affordable default for indie games.
    • goosejuice 6d ago
      Maybe not for long. It seems to be the art style most difficult to get right for diffusion models.
      • hmry 6d ago
        Yeah it seems very clear that the cheapest artstyle of the future will be whatever AI can output with minimal human editing or involvement. And some studios will go that route. Although I don't see AI in game art becoming accepted by the wider public any time soon, and definitely not by the indie crowd. I've also been thinking about this for animation. I foresee cheap limited animation (sliding layers, only mouth moving, etc) being replaced by incoherent un-/barely edited AI output instead.
        • p-e-w 6d ago
          > And some studios will go that route. All of them will. It can save nearly 100% of costs for art production. Nobody can afford not to use it, unless they aren’t developing the game to make a profit. > Although I don't see AI in game art becoming accepted by the wider public any time soon It’s already being used everywhere without “the wider public” even noticing. Same in professional film and TV productions. It doesn’t look AI generated because they don’t just run Stable Diffusion and call it a day, but the reductions in labor costs are still immense even with the post-processing that’s currently still required to match AAA quality.
• layer8 6d ago
  Follow-up article: https://datagubbe.se/crt2/ https://datagubbe.se/crt2/
• AdeptusAquinas 6d ago
  This seems a bit focused on a specific era of pixel art games AND CRTs. For me, nostalgia was things like Master of Magic or Civilization 1/2, and I played those on CRTs attached to PCs, not in an arcade - the pixels absolutely did not blend together into rounded shapes due to fuzzy scan lines.
  • mrob 6d ago
    The article is about SD CRTs (480i for NTSC or 576i for PAL, or more commonly for games 240p/288p progressive scan using non-standard timing, often underscanned with pixels left unused in the borders). VGA MS-DOS games usually ran at 320x200, but VGA CRTs supported up to 640x480 resolution. There was hardware line doubling from 200 lines up to 400 lines so you actually got two scanlines per pixel. It wasn't LCD sharp but the individual pixels were easily distinguishable. And lots of people played these game on SVGA CRTs so the pixels would be even sharper.
    • cubefox 6d ago
      The sharpness of the pixel is in the display connector, not the resolution.
      • mrob 6d ago
        If you assume a SD CRT, as the article does, then yes, the display connection makes the most difference (although there are still differences between individual CRTs). But that does not cover all CRTs relevant to pixel art. If you display low resolution art on a CRT designed for high resolutions it makes a big difference in pixel sharpness.
        • cubefox 6d ago
          If you use RF or composite on a high res screen, including LCD or OLED, the result would be similarly fuzzy.
          • 6d ago
• cubefox 6d ago
  The article contradicts itself for some reason. First it repeats the popular myth that CRTs made the image fuzzy, then it clarifies that this was mostly caused by RF or composite connectors. Which would produce similarly fuzzy results on LCDs or OLED screens. As the article points out, CRTs connected via S-Video or SCART did look quite sharp. The same is true for PC CRTs connected via VGA or similar.
  • miladyincontrol 6d ago
    That does relate some to my issue with a lot of CRT evangelism. Retroactively its easy to say "oh well you just needed the right input, avoid all these CRT brands, and other pitfalls. Maybe mod your console to have cleaner video output, and so on". The reality is most people had far less than ideal setups, yet most will try to hold CRTs to a standard near impossible to most of the era.
    • cubefox 6d ago
      The real advantage of CRTs was the fact that they strobed the frames, unlike sample-and-hold screens (LCD and OLED). The latter cause a blurry image during eye movement ("smooth pursuit"). Games which ran at a frame rate which was equal to the CRT Hz did have basically zero persistence blur. The UFO would appear perfectly sharp: https://testufo.com/ https://testufo.com/
    • opan 6d ago
      If your CRT had Component or SCART (not sure this was a brand thing so much as model to model, like imagine your parents bought a Sony TV with no HDMI port in the current year and then insisted you told them Sony was good in their defense) you often just needed one official cable and you were good to go. SNES and newer should be simple, NES needed modding but I wouldn't call that the norm.
      • ThatPlayer 6d ago
        The N64 goes back to requiring mods for RGB SCART though. The later SNES models removed RGB support too. Similarly later GameCube models removed support for component cables.
• xyzzy_plugh 6d ago
  Why is no one manufacturing CRTs in 2026? Seriously this is such a lost art.
  • Unai 6d ago
    Seems obvious that it would be incredibly expensive to do for something very few would buy. Let's say you manage to build a product you could sell as a niche expensive thing and not as a super duper expensive rich-people-only thing; you would still be competing against people buying an old CRT for 20 bucks or just using shaders for free (which gets you 99% there on an HDR 4k TV and takes 0% space in your house). Another advantage of shaders is that you can make them look exactly how you want, down to particular CRT models, screen curvatures, analog signal aberrations, etc. And almost everything you could want comes already included on RetroArch by default, with lots of presents if you don't want to mess with that stuff yourself. Hard to compete with that. A CRT TV comes with only one look. But again, working with the TV you already own instead of occupying a cubic meter of your house is probably the biggest advantage. I play retro games almost exclusively and I would never get a CRT myself, not even if it was free.
    • Unai 6d ago
      *presets
    • mrob 6d ago
      >or just using shaders for free (which gets you 99% there on an HDR 4k It gets you about 90% of the image quality and 0% of the motion quality. Simulating CRT motion quality on a sample-and-hold display requires around 1000Hz refresh rate.
      • Unai 5d ago
        Well, seems like we're getting there in terms of refresh rate, if not there already, so still easier and cheaper than making new CRTs.
  • numpad0 6d ago
    CRTs emit gamma ray at high power(>5kV is usually the quoted figure), and the standard solution was a bandaid fix of attaching leaded gamma ray blocking glass onto the screen. This high lead glass cannot be recycled, and the EU(rightfully) don't like any of that. I don't know if manufacturing of CRTs are banned or legally infeasible, but it's clearly not encouraged. There are still some types of CRT-related vacuum tubes in production for applications digital equivalents are objectively less performant in.
• nayuki 6d ago
  > Modern flatscreens all have fixed resolutions True by design. > and purely digital interfaces, True but not relevant. Even if you connected an LCD monitor over an analog interface like VGA or composite video, it would have to re-digitize the signal. The fact that a screen uses a digital interface can be designed independently of whether a screen has fixed pixels (LCD, OLED) or not (monochrome CRT with continuous phosphor, without shadow mask or aperture grille). > ensuring a fixed aspect (width-to-height) ratio True by definition because the pixels are pieces of physical hardware in the screens. > and completely square pixels. This is a design choice. Nothing prevents someone from designing an LCD or OLED matrix with non-square pixels. But there's also no good reason to do so. (Side note: Due to RGB striping, single-color subpixels have an aspect ratio of 1:3, so those are non-square.) Potentially useful trivia: Some image/video formats support declaring the pixel aspect ratio. Examples include PNG ( https://w3c.github.io/png/#11pHYs https://w3c.github.io/png/#11pHYs ) and Matroska.
  • anyfoo 6d ago
    It’s interesting though that composite PAL/NTSC (especially NTSC) has a massive effect on the picture, owed to the fact that the color carrier was embedded into the luminance spectrum, so a re-digitized PAL/NTSC signal will still look very different from a digital-output-first signal, or a re-digitized VGA or component signal. There’s some evidence that console games of the era were sometimes designed for the effect composite NTSC has on the overall picture: https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-case-for-composite.html?m=1 https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-case-for-co...
• egypturnash 6d ago
  My main gripe is with sloppy technique. A lot - not all, but a lot - of modern pixel art is purposely made to look overly blocky. Dithering and anti-aliasing just isn't utilized, which makes it look even chunkier than actual old game art does on a modern screen. It seems to me as if the artists are worried that classic pixel art techniques would make things look too good, though I personally believe the opposite applies. I think a lot of this is due to where the nostalgia is being aimed. The number of pixelly games trying to look like a c64 or Amiga is vanishingly small compared to the number trying to look like an NES, SNES, or Genesis. (Or a PSX or N64.) And they’re mostly trying to make things like early first-party hits, not later third-party games that do crazy techniques. How many 8-bit-looking games sound like a Tim Follin soundtrack? And of course given that those machines are from a generation that stopped being the new hotness about 30y ago, we have pro pixel artists who have never seen a game through a shitty connection to a TV unless they deliberately sought one out or had obsessively retro gaming parents; they just like making these square mosaics look like things.
  • JuniperMesos 6d ago
    My family had a real SNES hooked up to a real (and real shitty) CRT TV, and I played games on it. But I also had a desktop PC and then eventually a laptop computer where I played a lot more games than we actually owned via ZSNES. We also had a NES at one point that I think we got from our older cousin, but it broke. So I only ever played Final Fantasy 1 or Chrystalis emulated. If I was today going to make a pixel art game grounded in nostalgia for these games, what style of screen should I be aiming for? Do I even want to do that, as opposed to making a pixel art game that looks good on a modern screen?
    • vunderba 6d ago
      If you want to look at a company that does pixel art right for the modern era, Yacht Club Games is probably the gold standard with games like Shovel Knight and Mina the Hollower. https://www.yachtclubgames.com/blog/the-art-of-the-game https://www.yachtclubgames.com/blog/the-art-of-the-game
    • egypturnash 6d ago
• schmeichel 6d ago
  This is a great post. Also reminded me of a video I saw a few months ago that was equally as entertaining (and somewhat informative): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-8y2R6IxI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-8y2R6IxI
  • jakzurr 6d ago
    Heck yeah, you are so right. Also, the video was fun, thanks. My old 19-inch CRT's are dead, but I'm so glad I saved save three 17-inchers - one shadow-mask, and two aperture-grill. But the older I get, the heavier they seem go be, oh well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_mask https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_mask https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_grille https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_grille
• etaioinshrdlu 6d ago
  I thought the Macbook Pro LCDs were bright enough, high-res-enough, and fast enough to make a very accurate CRT simulation. Here it is: https://github.com/baragona/crt-xdr https://github.com/baragona/crt-xdr It looks so much like a CRT to me. It looks like pressing your face up to a TV to see the individual phosphors. Try setting "signal" to dropped image and viewing some images. It looks like an old TV. Bottom line, whatever you think a CRT is doing, you can probably simulate it quite accurately.
  • layer8 6d ago
    You can’t simulate the motion clarity of CRTs (yet).
    • Measter 6d ago
      You don't want to simulate the god-awful flicker my CRT has at 60Hz.
      • PowerElectronix 6d ago
        You can increase the refresh rate until it goes away. I don't think anyone notices flicker at 80Hz or so.
      • mrob 6d ago
        You do want to simulate it, because it's the only way to preserve the original motion quality of games designed around a fixed 60 fps frame rate without changing the gameplay or adding latency.
      • sublinear 6d ago
        The hysteresis of the phosphor makes this a non-issue in reality. 60Hz looks great on a CRT when the input is a game console or VCR from the era. Maybe you mean screen tearing, bad deinterlacing, etc. caused by software running on a PC?
      • anthk 5d ago
        My CRT did 1024x768@85 just fine.
• gryson 6d ago
  I appreciate the author calling out the point that dithering etc. was definitely visible on better-quality CRT monitors via RGB/VGA signals. So many people these days mistake the blurring from composite signals as being due to the CRT. A CRT doesn't magically blend pixels together. And there are certainly many tradeoffs to using composite so that many people prefer the sharper pixels of RGB.
• Zeetah 6d ago
  In a similar vein, for chip manufacturing, in the lithography process, they predistort features so that after etching, they get the desired shape.
• miladyincontrol 6d ago
  I'd more than argue that even on a modern digital display, a pixel is NOT a little square.
• rasz 6d ago
  TLDR: "It wasn't CRT technology itself that made pixel art look better - it was the blatant artefacts of cheap, low dot pitch PAL and NTSC consumer electronics that coincided to create just the right amount of fuzz."
• r3trohack3r 6d ago
  > I also agree that modern, blocky pixel art often is a kind of misdirected, anachronistic nostalgia. Pixel art, for me, is the Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advanced which I never played on a CRDT.
  • opan 6d ago
    Same thought here, GBA was the peak of mainstream 2D graphics for me. I look at games from that era and often times they have aged well, they still look ideal to me.
    • ymolodtsov 6d ago
      I enjoyed playing GBA game the most on my Anbernic. They do feel good to play in the way the previous generation just doesn't.
  • latexr 6d ago
    Hear hear. I’m so tired of this pixel art elitism (exhibited in the article) which asserts with certainty that our fondness for pixel art comes from viewing it distorted on CRTs. The Game Boy was insanely popular, is part of many people’s introduction to and fondness for pixel art, and it had an LCD screen.
    • vardump 6d ago
      This is not elitism, it's about historical accuracy. This is how many remember the games of their youth.
      • spankibalt 6d ago
        And not just that; invoking the Game Boy here is not the closer many people think it is, given that its STN LCD screen was fuzzy (e. g. ghosting) yet also had this distinct, subdued lo-fi glow, almost like looking through a zoetrope. Somewhat analog to lo-fi CRT setups.
        • 6d ago
• bitwize 6d ago
  CRTs are to video games what vinyl is to music and celluloid is to cinema. The flaws associated with the physical medium have become the defining aesthetic, such that a new medium which removes those flaws feels "sterile" and "hollow", like a concrete-slab brutalist building. There's also the sense of nostalgia. Rock music was less commercialized, or perceived as less commercialized, at the peak of the vinyl era (1960s-1970s). Computers and video games were more fun at the peak of the CRT era (1980s-1990s). So our brains kind of do this substitution wherein "warm fuzzy feelings we associate when X was popular" -> "X is better". All I know is that when CDs hit the market I savored the additional detail they provided. A good, non-loudness-crushed recording had so many sumptuous highs I used to reach my fingers out and try to "feel" the consonants and vowels of the vocals. And when LCD monitors began to supplant CRTs my eyes were relieved at the additional sharpness. I remember these transition points, so I can say definitively that there was a time when we thought the newer stuff was indeed an improvement.
  • zajio1am 6d ago
    > I remember these transition points, so I can say definitively that there was a time when we thought the newer stuff was indeed an improvement. Exactly. Around 1999, I switched from 17" CRT to 14" LCD, as the sharpness of the LCD was breathtaking and made up for the smaller screen size.
• applfanboysbgon 6d ago
  Somebody had better let know Nintendo they were doing pixel art wrong for the GB/A, this guy has Opinions. Pokemon is such a fake aesthetic, the only authentic and pure pixel art is whatever bullshit that happens to be exactly what the writer made.
  • Lammy 6d ago
    What? The GBA knows exactly what it is and has all sorts of sprite scaling and rotation features that would look like total crap on a CRT: https://gbadev.net/gbadoc/sprites.html#attr3 https://gbadev.net/gbadoc/sprites.html#attr3 Look at Kuru Kuru Kururin for example, a launch title where the GBA's fancy new sprite rotation effect is kinda the entire game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYvUZXT_43k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYvUZXT_43k https://www.spriters-resource.com/game_boy_advance/kurukurukururin/asset/37882/ https://www.spriters-resource.com/game_boy_advance/kurukuruk...
• Rhaskins 6d ago
  Modern displays just can't replicate the warmth and blending a good CRT offered, especially for 2D sprites.
• lloeki 6d ago
  Good watch on the topic that very much drives the point home in excruciating detail with a ton of side by side comparisons what did you do by Noodle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-8y2R6IxI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-8y2R6IxI
• ereiamjh 6d ago
  It's not that CRTs were "forgiving", it's that designers leaned into what they'd do to pixels. A classic example is the tanks in Atari 2600 Combat - they look ridiculous on a hi-res screen. On a CRT they sort of look like tanks. I have a JAMMA cabinet at home. It has a CRT in it. I usually play on x-in-1 pirate emulator board. So I don't mind that not all the hardware is authentic. But it's important to me that the screen is authentic, or it all just feels wrong. The curve must be there, the scanlines must be there. I really get quite cross when you visit a museum and they've got retro games playing on flatscreen LCDs. Doubly so when it's meant to be a vector game.
• socalgal2 6d ago
  I wish museums having old video game exhibits would respect the medium and display them on CRTs and that if they used LCD screens they would be as shamed as if they showed prints of paintings instead of the actual paintings
• cbolton 6d ago
  Not so clear in the article is that also with consoles the game pixel grid didn't match the CRT grid (e.g. horizontally the number of "pixels" is similar but not 1:1) so just by geometry you have blending of one pixel data into several CRT "pixels" (plus varying intensity even in a single phosphor patch as the analog RGB signals rise and fall in intensity). As for CRT filters one can argue how realistic they are but they show that scanline gaps and blending at least can produce amazing perceptual improvements as shown in this video: https://youtu.be/nw2QfPREu-Q https://youtu.be/nw2QfPREu-Q
• empath75 6d ago
  I think when people think about CRTs and NES/Atari, they aren’t thinking about _monitors_ they are thinking about the low quality TVs and hooked up through the antenna adapter, which absolutely did wash pixels out to some extent.
• gwbas1c 6d ago
  > I don't know if the CRT version is taken from an actual CRT, but I doubt it - I actually think it looks too fuzzy. I may be wrong - it could be an effect of a close-up photo scaled up - but it's more likely a CRT approximation generated by a software filter on a modern machine. On both the NES and SNES, the pixels were so large that you could clearly see them even when using an RF adaptor. Each pixel was two scan lines, and wide enough that dithering was still very visible. The same goes for older games in the arcades up to (roughly) the early 1990s, (and I didn't spend much time in arcades after that.) Not to say that artists didn't take advantage of CRT quirks, but you needed a really $h1tty TV, (much worse than the ones that I and my friends had) if they were going to fuzz away the edges.
  • corysama 5d ago
    The 12” TV that I played SNES on had convenient brightness/tint/sharpness dials. Depending on my mood I’d turn sharpness all the way up for hard pixels or all the way down for a free Gaussian sampling filter ;)
• BearOso 6d ago
  The two articles by the author are focused on the sharpness aspect. What's missing are the dilation/contraction due to beam intensity and resultant gamma. You can take away the scanlines and phosphor filter and still get a more "classic" image with just a modified bilinear filter. A particularly good example of this are the whites of Mario's and Yoshi's eyes in SMW. They look much better with dilation. (No pun intended)
• ChrisRR 5d ago
  As a retro gamer I think the people worrying about pixel blurring is overblown. I think a lot fewer artists actually intentionally used it than these articles make out There's a reason it always comes back to the same few examples, peach hanging from a rope, dracula's eyes, sonic behind the waterfall. If it were used as widely as some people make out then we wouldn't have to keep resorting to the same 3 examples. That and CRTs stopped being so blurry over the years anyway (especially PC CRTs), so by the time you reached the 16 bit era you couldn't rely on a blurry TV to create your effect
  • cbolton 5d ago
    This video has 30 examples: https://youtu.be/nw2QfPREu-Q https://youtu.be/nw2QfPREu-Q Not saying you're wrong on the main message (and those examples are with filters rather than true CRT) but it's still impressive how it can make the pixel art better looking in those cases.
• olivierestsage 5d ago
  Pixelation is clear on a CRT. Long before people stopped using CRTs, the blocky pixel aesthetic was immediately recognizable to everyone as the “video game look”. The earliest Flash movies on sites like Newgrounds, around the turn of the millennium, used the blocky pixel art style (and we were all still using CRT TVs at that point). I simply don’t see the argument about the pixel aesthetic being not original to that time.