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fasterik 13 hours 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 13 hours ago [-]
Ironically, pixel art today is the affordable default for indie games.
GuB-42 55 minutes ago [-]
I think it is, again, a way to work around limitations. Economic limitations in this case rather than technical.
Compared to modern HD graphics, pixel art is more affordable because you can hide a lot of details you would normally have to work on behind these fat pixels.
And the most interesting trick, to me, is that pixel art looks sharp! The non-CRT-like square pixels is a feature.
Blurry usually doesn't look good, it is as if your eyes can't focus, or that you are looking through a dirty window, it naturally registers as a problem. Real life has details and you are missing them. With sharp pixel boundaries, you are telling the brain "there is no problem with your eyes, everything is fine".
It is not the only way of introducing artificial details to make low detail pictures look fine: scanline effect, screen door effect, ostensible dithering, etc... But pixel art is a good compromise, in addition to being a recognizable somewhat nostalgic art style.
That's my theory at least.
ymolodtsov 3 hours ago [-]
Good pixel art is quite difficult to make. This default pixel art usually isn't; it's just not that great.
goosejuice 8 hours ago [-]
Maybe not for long. It seems to be the art style most difficult to get right for diffusion models.
hmry 5 hours 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 4 hours 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.
RugnirViking 16 minutes ago [-]
> Nobody can afford not to use it
The games market has a massive oversupply. It's not enough to just "make a game", you have to make a good one. That is to say, better than all the other things your audience could be playing. Cheaping out is literally not an option. You can cheap out in one area to spend more effort in another area, but you can't just say "this is cheaper therefore it will be the default" because the default isn't good enough. Most games fail
spankibalt 3 hours ago [-]
> All of them will. [...] It’s already being used everywhere without “the wider public” even noticing.
Doesn't your lot ever get tired of the intellectually lazy, rubbish absolutisms you peddle? Same goes for the projections; just because you slop it, doesn't mean everyone will.
ktallett 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
This is not correct. Your profit doesn't have to be relative to what another company makes. It would only be affected if games passed the savings on to the customers. You make more profit if you do use it potentially but it doesn't mean you don't make profit if you choose to go the traditional route.
4 hours ago [-]
r3trohack3r 6 hours 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 5 hours 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 3 hours 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 3 hours 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 1 hours ago [-]
This is not elitism, it's about historical accuracy. This is how many remember the games of their youth.
spankibalt 40 minutes 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.
latexr 5 minutes ago [-]
> elitism
I was being facetious with that word, I don’t believe it literally.
> it's about historical accuracy.
Historical accuracy means recognising not everyone had the same experience. Yes, many remember pixel art from CRTs, but many also remember it from LCDs.
My criticism if of the idea that liking sharp pixels is “a kind of misdirected, anachronistic nostalgia”, a misremembering of the CRT days. Even before we consider LCDs, it is reductive to link this to nostalgia—pixel art is an art form of its own that stands on its own.
etaioinshrdlu 9 hours 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
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 37 minutes ago [-]
You can’t simulate the motion clarity of CRTs (yet).
socalgal2 40 minutes 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
ereiamjh 45 minutes 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.
TulliusCicero 14 hours 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 13 hours 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 13 hours 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 13 hours ago [-]
I use it in Windows Terminal when in a cmd.exe shell (as opposed to a PowerShell or Git Bash shell)
This seems like, probably, the only appropriate usage of crt effect.
nayuki 11 hours 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 ) and Matroska.
anyfoo 9 hours 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.
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.
lloeki 2 hours ago [-]
Good watch on the topic that very much drives the point home in excruciating detail with a ton of side by side comparisons
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
jakzurr 9 hours 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.
In a similar vein, for chip manufacturing, in the lithography process, they predistort features so that after etching, they get the desired shape.
xyzzy_plugh 12 hours ago [-]
Why is no one manufacturing CRTs in 2026? Seriously this is such a lost art.
Unai 10 hours 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 2 hours ago [-]
*presets
bob1029 3 hours ago [-]
I think plasma displays are a much better option. We really should bring them back. The latest generation of plasma TVs drove their active elements at frequencies in excess of 600hz. You could do a lot of clever things with these panels. They are basically digital CRTs.
A plasma TV in a pitch black room set to its maximum output power is still the most incredible experience I've ever had outside of a commercial venue.
Self emission is the real magic trick. Not the pattern with which we scan.
Ekaros 3 hours ago [-]
No demand. There is some imaginary demand but I doubt it will realise. And on other side LCD screens are very cheap. 74,25€ for 24" IPS. With 25,5% of that being tax... There is no way CRTs with current volumes would be anywhere close.
numpad0 10 hours 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.
agalunar 8 hours ago [-]
X-rays! not gamma rays.
duskwuff 8 hours ago [-]
> There are still some types of CRT-related vacuum tubes in production for applications digital equivalents are objectively less performant in.
Like what? The only significant applications I'm aware of for vacuum tubes nowadays are high-power RF amplifiers (including household microwave magnetrons) and intentional X-ray emitters.
numpad0 6 hours ago [-]
Night vision goggles. The photodiode + CsO + lead coated charged glass capillary amp thing is apparently still superior to solid state image sensors with amplifiers in metrics like SNR, minimum luminosity, and longer wave IR response. The performance gap is wide enough that there's a Chinese Norinco subsidiary that entered the market during 2010s by licensing technology from an EU company.
protocolture 5 hours ago [-]
You can get these tiny 3 inch black and white CRTs from china. They arent really good for anything but writing hackaday articles tho.
PowerElectronix 3 hours ago [-]
Consumers at large don't like them. In the same desk or table you have a crt monitor or tv, you can have a muuuuch bigger flat screen with higher resolution that weighs a tenth as much.
phkahler 10 hours ago [-]
First weight. Then resolution. I think SoTA for CRTs peaked at early HD resolution 720. One might be able to modulate the beam faster now. Size. And safety - anyone starting up production now would have to solve the safety issues from scratch. Nothing like a few cubic feet of vacuum imploding to ruin your day.
PowerElectronix 3 hours ago [-]
Resolutions were very high for the time, I have a 2002 LG f900p (pretty high end, yes but it wasn't super expensive even back in the day) running at 1920*1200@85hz and it's a delight to work and play on it.
IMO, the only factor that kills the crt vs a moderm monitor is the size and weight. I imagine resolution would be limited by how small the dot pitch can actually be made to be with modern processes but with the advances in magnets and power electronics devices I imagine going at MHz horizontal frequency would be not that hard.
cwillu 5 hours ago [-]
CRT monitors up to 1600×1200 were available and 1280×1024 was very common.
opan 4 hours ago [-]
I used to have a ViewSonic PC CRT that went up to 2048x1536. Sadly my family didn't realize the worth and tossed it out along with a bunch of other CRTs many years ago. In hindsight we should've tested them all and kept the nicest ones.
lstodd 5 hours ago [-]
I sat before a second-hand 20" 1280x1024 monitor in 2001. And it was old (as in >5 years) at that point.
then there was Iiyama Vision Master Pro 514 with 140-ish kHz horisontal scan
rsoto2 4 hours ago [-]
bet they are in China
Rhaskins 4 hours ago [-]
Modern displays just can't replicate the warmth and blending a good CRT offered, especially for 2D sprites.
miladyincontrol 7 hours ago [-]
I'd more than argue that even on a modern digital display, a pixel is NOT a little square.
bitwize 6 hours 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.
egypturnash 11 hours 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 8 hours 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?
egypturnash 6 hours ago [-]
These are all aesthetic decisions. What feelings does a smeary CRT SNES screen evoke? What does a crisper 1993 DOS screen feel like to you? Which one better matches the mood of the game you want to make?
Probably you should screengrab some games from the first couple years of the SNES’ life and doodle things for your game that look like those screens. Possibly some later games that more directly inspired the game you’re making, too. Possibly you should read up on the precise technical limitations of its graphics and be precise about how many colors and moving objects you allow yourself. Possibly you might decide to break those limitations for the sake of making the game more fun, but it’s probably better to break them knowingly.
Then look at DOS games from that era. Same decisions and rabbit holes as above. Does it feel like there’s a harmony between them? Does one feel much better for the game you want to make? Play with shitty TV filters on the SNES and DOS shots.
Then doodle some things with fewer limitations. How do they feel? Does the lack of limitations make it easier or harder to animate an entire new game entity? And which one is more fun? Experiment, sketch, play, explore. It’s art. It’s also business. Maybe. Maybe you have a skazillion bucks to pay your bills and pay artists and musicians and whatnot while you develop it with no care for it selling even a single copy. Limited funds can stretch further with limited scope.
There is no single right answer to these questions. You need to find them yourself.
JuniperMesos 2 hours ago [-]
Indeed! My question was (mostly) rhetorical - I happen to be of the right age to have organically played some real 8 and 16-bit console video games on real CRT ; and also organically played a lot more 8 and 16-bit console video games emulated on a laptop LCD display, in an era where emulators were (mostly) playable but by no means autistically perfect. And I simply don't care whether modern pixel art games look like their pixels might've been smeared in a way characteristic of a real CRT or not. It honestly wasn't something I noticed very much at the time. It's not an artistic decision that I think should have much weight, compared to every other artistic decision someone making a modern pixel-art game needs to make.
Personally, my favorite 2D video game aesthetic was the vibrant look of high-quality late-SNES games, particularly Chrono Trigger (which obviously had a whole lot of things going right for it besides the art design). I've played a number of modern pixel-art games made by people who were clearly inspired by Chrono Trigger and eager to make graphics that look like it but without any of the SNES's technological limitations, and I'm all for it - Crosscode and (especially) Chained Echoes are salient examples, and I think both those games look great.
vunderba 7 hours 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.
SNES 1chip using RGB/SCART is worthy of imitation. Don't bother recreating a crummy Composite signal.
AdeptusAquinas 13 hours 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 13 hours 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.
AdeptusAquinas 11 hours ago [-]
Ha I remember SVGA. Darn we're old. But pixel art was definitely a style of it's own then and thats what my modern efforts attempt to replicate, at least
cubefox 12 hours ago [-]
The sharpness of the pixel is in the display connector, not the resolution.
mrob 11 hours 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 4 hours ago [-]
If you use RF or composite on a high res screen, including LCD or OLED, the result would be similarly fuzzy.
mrob 2 hours ago [-]
But in practice, VGA and SVGA CRTs always used RGB connections, so that's not relevant to games.
cubefox 2 hours ago [-]
In Europe, TV CRTs and game consoles also commonly used RGB connections (SCART), so the distinction between CRT and connection matters.
mrob 1 hours ago [-]
Those are the SD CRTs the article talks about, not the VGA or SVGA CRTs used to play DOS games.
cubefox 1 hours ago [-]
I still think this isn't really true:
> If you display low resolution art on a CRT designed for high resolutions it makes a big difference in pixel sharpness.
Basically, PC CRTs would always be quite sharp, due to VGA, no matter whether it (the CRT) had a low or high resolution.
mrob 39 minutes ago [-]
>PC CRTs would always be quite sharp, due to VGA, no matter whether it (the CRT) had a low or high resolution.
VGA CRTs are always "high resolution" compared to the SD CRTs discussed in the article. If you display a mode 13h DOS game on SD CRT, which is possible with special hardware, it will not look as sharp as it would on the VGA CRT is was designed for.
This sharpness from using higher resolution CRTs is in addition to the sharpness from using RGB connections. And if you somehow manage to connect a VGA CRT over composite, it will be less sharp but still sharper than a SD CRT over composite.
The point is there are two factors here: the sharpness of the CRT itself and the sharpness of the connection method. The article only talks about SD CRTs, so the CRT's sharpness isn't going to make much difference there. But when you consider MS-DOS games, which used sharper CRTs, the CRT's sharpness becomes important.
Ekaros 59 minutes ago [-]
Not always true. I just recently watched video about Tandy VGM-225. Which had bad picture. Most likely due to being reused cheap TV. You can't magic more resolution out when you do not have enough "subpixels"... That is the grid of holes is too coarse compared to resolution.
Then again this is early 90s CRT most likely with design from 80s just upgraded to display VGA. Later and more expensive CRTs got much better.
bitwize 6 hours ago [-]
Brand-new arcade CRTs are razor sharp, and certainly do not accept an RF signal (I don't think they accept composite either). With time the electron beam starts to diverge, and things can get a little blurry or color-fringey.
What I've found—based on limited experience with a "modern" arcade cabinet (Fix-it Felix Jr., a tie-in promotion to the 2012 film Wreck-it Ralph)—is that if you have an LCD or OLED that can do true enough blacks, the effect is very similar to having a brand spanking new CRT, even in arcade applications.
But that goes only for raster games. Nothing we currently have can replace the razor-sharp, completely unaliased lines of an original Asteroids and its vector display.
cubefox 2 hours ago [-]
> if you have an LCD or OLED that can do true enough blacks, the effect is very similar to having a brand spanking new CRT, even in arcade applications.
CRTs are inherently less blurry when your eyes follow moving objects on screen, which they do all the time ("smooth pursuit"). The reason is that LCDs and OLED displays show each frame for the entire frame time (like 1/60th of a second) during which your eyes, and the corresponding tracked object, move. This creates a blur. E.g. if an object moves on the screen 10 pixels horizontally per frame, on an LCD/OLED you would then see 10 pixels of horizontal blur. This doesn't happen on CRTs because they flash each frame only for an extremely short period of time and are relatively dark otherwise. At 60 Hz, they don't show the frame for 1/60th of a second, but about 1/1000th or something like that. This time is so short that during it, even fast moving objects and the eyes that track them hardly move at all, which results in basically zero blur. See https://testufo.com/ to see the blur. On a CRT, with matched FPS and Hz, the test would appear completely sharp.
It is true that LCDs and OLED screens are much brighter (especially LCD) and that OLED has better black levels, but CRT screens have much better motion clarity.
cubefox 13 hours 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 7 hours 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.
opan 4 hours 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 3 hours 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.
cubefox 7 hours 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/
applfanboysbgon 4 hours 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 4 hours 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
Look at Kuru Kuru Kururin for example, a launch title where the GBA's fancy new sprite rotation effect is kinda the entire game:
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."
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.
Compared to modern HD graphics, pixel art is more affordable because you can hide a lot of details you would normally have to work on behind these fat pixels.
And the most interesting trick, to me, is that pixel art looks sharp! The non-CRT-like square pixels is a feature.
Blurry usually doesn't look good, it is as if your eyes can't focus, or that you are looking through a dirty window, it naturally registers as a problem. Real life has details and you are missing them. With sharp pixel boundaries, you are telling the brain "there is no problem with your eyes, everything is fine".
It is not the only way of introducing artificial details to make low detail pictures look fine: scanline effect, screen door effect, ostensible dithering, etc... But pixel art is a good compromise, in addition to being a recognizable somewhat nostalgic art style.
That's my theory at least.
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.
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.
The games market has a massive oversupply. It's not enough to just "make a game", you have to make a good one. That is to say, better than all the other things your audience could be playing. Cheaping out is literally not an option. You can cheap out in one area to spend more effort in another area, but you can't just say "this is cheaper therefore it will be the default" because the default isn't good enough. Most games fail
Doesn't your lot ever get tired of the intellectually lazy, rubbish absolutisms you peddle? Same goes for the projections; just because you slop it, doesn't mean everyone will.
This is not correct. Your profit doesn't have to be relative to what another company makes. It would only be affected if games passed the savings on to the customers. You make more profit if you do use it potentially but it doesn't mean you don't make profit if you choose to go the traditional route.
Pixel art, for me, is the Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advanced which I never played on a CRDT.
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.
I was being facetious with that word, I don’t believe it literally.
> it's about historical accuracy.
Historical accuracy means recognising not everyone had the same experience. Yes, many remember pixel art from CRTs, but many also remember it from LCDs.
My criticism if of the idea that liking sharp pixels is “a kind of misdirected, anachronistic nostalgia”, a misremembering of the CRT days. Even before we consider LCDs, it is reductive to link this to nostalgia—pixel art is an art form of its own that stands on its own.
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.
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.
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.
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 ) and Matroska.
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-co...
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.
what did you do by Noodle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-8y2R6IxI
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/Aperture_grille
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.
A plasma TV in a pitch black room set to its maximum output power is still the most incredible experience I've ever had outside of a commercial venue.
Self emission is the real magic trick. Not the pattern with which we scan.
There are still some types of CRT-related vacuum tubes in production for applications digital equivalents are objectively less performant in.
Like what? The only significant applications I'm aware of for vacuum tubes nowadays are high-power RF amplifiers (including household microwave magnetrons) and intentional X-ray emitters.
IMO, the only factor that kills the crt vs a moderm monitor is the size and weight. I imagine resolution would be limited by how small the dot pitch can actually be made to be with modern processes but with the advances in magnets and power electronics devices I imagine going at MHz horizontal frequency would be not that hard.
then there was Iiyama Vision Master Pro 514 with 140-ish kHz horisontal scan
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.
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.
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?
Probably you should screengrab some games from the first couple years of the SNES’ life and doodle things for your game that look like those screens. Possibly some later games that more directly inspired the game you’re making, too. Possibly you should read up on the precise technical limitations of its graphics and be precise about how many colors and moving objects you allow yourself. Possibly you might decide to break those limitations for the sake of making the game more fun, but it’s probably better to break them knowingly.
Then look at DOS games from that era. Same decisions and rabbit holes as above. Does it feel like there’s a harmony between them? Does one feel much better for the game you want to make? Play with shitty TV filters on the SNES and DOS shots.
Then doodle some things with fewer limitations. How do they feel? Does the lack of limitations make it easier or harder to animate an entire new game entity? And which one is more fun? Experiment, sketch, play, explore. It’s art. It’s also business. Maybe. Maybe you have a skazillion bucks to pay your bills and pay artists and musicians and whatnot while you develop it with no care for it selling even a single copy. Limited funds can stretch further with limited scope.
There is no single right answer to these questions. You need to find them yourself.
Personally, my favorite 2D video game aesthetic was the vibrant look of high-quality late-SNES games, particularly Chrono Trigger (which obviously had a whole lot of things going right for it besides the art design). I've played a number of modern pixel-art games made by people who were clearly inspired by Chrono Trigger and eager to make graphics that look like it but without any of the SNES's technological limitations, and I'm all for it - Crosscode and (especially) Chained Echoes are salient examples, and I think both those games look great.
https://www.yachtclubgames.com/blog/the-art-of-the-game
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.
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.
> If you display low resolution art on a CRT designed for high resolutions it makes a big difference in pixel sharpness.
Basically, PC CRTs would always be quite sharp, due to VGA, no matter whether it (the CRT) had a low or high resolution.
VGA CRTs are always "high resolution" compared to the SD CRTs discussed in the article. If you display a mode 13h DOS game on SD CRT, which is possible with special hardware, it will not look as sharp as it would on the VGA CRT is was designed for.
This sharpness from using higher resolution CRTs is in addition to the sharpness from using RGB connections. And if you somehow manage to connect a VGA CRT over composite, it will be less sharp but still sharper than a SD CRT over composite.
The point is there are two factors here: the sharpness of the CRT itself and the sharpness of the connection method. The article only talks about SD CRTs, so the CRT's sharpness isn't going to make much difference there. But when you consider MS-DOS games, which used sharper CRTs, the CRT's sharpness becomes important.
Then again this is early 90s CRT most likely with design from 80s just upgraded to display VGA. Later and more expensive CRTs got much better.
What I've found—based on limited experience with a "modern" arcade cabinet (Fix-it Felix Jr., a tie-in promotion to the 2012 film Wreck-it Ralph)—is that if you have an LCD or OLED that can do true enough blacks, the effect is very similar to having a brand spanking new CRT, even in arcade applications.
But that goes only for raster games. Nothing we currently have can replace the razor-sharp, completely unaliased lines of an original Asteroids and its vector display.
CRTs are inherently less blurry when your eyes follow moving objects on screen, which they do all the time ("smooth pursuit"). The reason is that LCDs and OLED displays show each frame for the entire frame time (like 1/60th of a second) during which your eyes, and the corresponding tracked object, move. This creates a blur. E.g. if an object moves on the screen 10 pixels horizontally per frame, on an LCD/OLED you would then see 10 pixels of horizontal blur. This doesn't happen on CRTs because they flash each frame only for an extremely short period of time and are relatively dark otherwise. At 60 Hz, they don't show the frame for 1/60th of a second, but about 1/1000th or something like that. This time is so short that during it, even fast moving objects and the eyes that track them hardly move at all, which results in basically zero blur. See https://testufo.com/ to see the blur. On a CRT, with matched FPS and Hz, the test would appear completely sharp.
It is true that LCDs and OLED screens are much brighter (especially LCD) and that OLED has better black levels, but CRT screens have much better motion clarity.
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.
Similarly later GameCube models removed support for component cables.
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.spriters-resource.com/game_boy_advance/kurukuruk...