In case you wonder, these screenshots come from games made for two revisions of the NEC PC-9801, a Japanese 8086 IBM PC-incompatible computer. To be fair, while

In case you wonder, these screenshots come from games made for two revisions of the NEC PC-9801, a Japanese 8086 IBM PC-incompatible computer. To be fair, while I think they look good as is you've got to note that the PC-98 used a CRT monitor that would make http://i.imgur.com/18YHG.gif http://i.imgur.com/18YHG.gif appear more like http://i.imgur.com/HNmUopH.jpg http://i.imgur.com/HNmUopH.jpg, hence the dithering. The pixel art of the time, especially that in console video games, was designed with color bleeding, scan lines and other CRT TV artifacts in mind, which is why it can look "wrong" (oversaturated, overly sharp or lacking in detail) on a modern LCD screen. CRT scan lines are especially good at creating an illusion of detail since they add texture to large areas of flat color typical of NES-era graphics. For those reasons some console emulators today include so-called "NTSC filters" that simulate what a CRT TV would do to raw pixel data. See http://web.archive.org/web/20120313013017/http://www.slack.net/~ant/libs/ntsc.html http://web.archive.org/web/20120313013017/http://www.slack.n... for what's probably the most popular implementation to date.