The Effect of CRTs on Pixel Art

An article to the same effect, but with more example images: https://wackoid.com/game/10-pictures-that-show-why-crt-tvs-a...

There are several instances where you can clearly see the artists not merely "living with" the CRT rendering but actually using it to their advantage: the eyes resulting from a single red pixel in the Castlevania picture, the smooth gradients in the Streets of Rage picture arising out of just 3 or 4 colors...

Last year I was playing Super Mario Bros on an NES on a CRT for the first time since my childhood, and was blown away at how cool the shining coins and question-mark blocks were. They look like polished brass in bright sunshine. Somehow this effect is completely lost on a modern display.

I'm guessing the blur in the SMRPG Peach screenshot comes from a combination of an out-of-focus camera shot of phosphors, and possibly an older 2-PPU SNES's slow color transitions due to flawed silicon design. I don't see any composite artifacts but don't know if the image is RGB or S-Video.

> When it comes to computer screens, there are always two resolutions involved: the one produced by the computer, such as 320x200, and the dot pitch, or "dots per inch", of the screen proper.

The fun thing about CRTs is that there's always more things affecting resolution, like spot size (PVMs/BVMs and their narrow spots made interlacing more obvious) and amplifier bandwidth (if you run at a high enough hsync rate, you can get horizontal blur because the electron gun changes brightness slower than once per phosphor).

As I understand, 320x200/240 on a VGA monitor is actually line-doubled because VGA cards and displays can't take hsync rates below 30 kHz. This can be seen in your Duke Nukem 3D screenshot if you watch the source video, switch to 4K resolution, and zoom into the HUD or main screen. Line-doubling affects the appearance of pixel art in complex ways (taking it partway to how a LCD would look with blocky pixels, you've said later in the article it looks "basically as crisp and blocky").

Even among VGA monitors, the same resolution can look different; my newer VX720 has sharper focus (a smaller spot size) with visible gaps at 640x480 (and even faint gaps up to 1024x768), while I didn't see any scanline gaps in the Scandisk section of the video, even when I could make out phosphors.

> I also agree that modern, blocky pixel art often is a kind of misdirected, anachronistic nostalgia.

Articles like this (and /r/CRTgaming over on reddit) always seem to forget that devices like the Game Boy existed. I put hundreds of hours into Pokemon Sapphire, so I can pretty safely say that my nostalgia for crisp pixel art isn't "misdirected".

The fact that some old games were designed with CRTs in mind doesn't mean that others weren't, or that one rendering is inherently better than the other.

I like the article's illustration of the variable CRT aspect ratios, though. It's easy to forget that "pixels" weren't always perfect squares like they more or less are today.

When I see pictures and video from 8 and 16 bit era Nintendo development, they draw their sketches on checked paper and transfer to work stations with professional monitors.

This doesn’t square with the idea that they optimized for cheap TVs, with rectangular pixels.

Let's not discount the years since 1997 when people actually did play retro games on high resolution computer monitors, with big chunky pixels.

One piece of hardware I periodically search the internet for, is a CRT emulation box. I want a piece of physical hardware I can place between my 4-port RCA switcher, and an HDMI connected modern TV, that emulates the display properties of a CRT.

I know that a real CRT would be the best for my nostalgia vibes, but honestly they take up so much space. This theoretical product doesn't need to be perfect, just give me a few knobs to turn to adjust whatever settings are available, and inject vertical bars to fix the aspect ratio. I'd pay good money for such a device.

I don't mind modern games not having the CRT effect. It certainly does look cool, but I can also enjoy graphics with sharp pixels, if it's good.

I'm more annoyed by games where the developer ignores constraints of pixelated graphics.

When objects are restricted to be placed on the same pixel grid, or when they don't have a uniform pixel size.

The worst is when objects are being rotated by rotating the sprite directly. Meaning you get rotated pixels.

This argument of CRT purism and nostalgia is getting old. It assumes to know why people like something based on one limited idea.

My favourite consoles were always the different Game Boys, which used LCDs, not CRTs¹. Furthermore, I enjoy modern pixel art² more than I ever liked it in old games (that were new when I played them). Even comparing the examples of old games I still prefer the non-CRT look because I enjoy the clarity of how the sprite is made, it’s easy to learn from it.

So that’s your arguments out the window. Neither CRTs nor nostalgia shaped my appreciation for the medium, and I’m not alone. Pixel art is an interesting aesthetic, and it’s great to see games both adhering to its limitations and “cheating” to do effects that were impossible at the time.

¹ https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Support/Game-Boy-Pocket-Color...

² https://cross-code.com

This guy records games on a CRT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWv-rnSAzVw

Not all developers are/were equal. Some of the comparison shots between the raw bitmap and the CRT image can be absolutely shocking with talented artists.

https://x.com/CRTpixels/status/1408451743214616587?lang=en

It seems like the blur of the CRT allows the mind to fill in details more, like an upscaler built into the human brain. Possibly accidentally triggering a built in compensation layer for vision degradation? Which would have been very common prior to glasses.

Especially with the human forms, the eye sees details that just aren’t possibly really there.

Some of his pixel art. Absolutely lovely, and it really gives off 90s vibes. Wish he built an adventure game.

https://www.datagubbe.se/pix/pixman.png

https://www.datagubbe.se/pixels/Grip-Frog.png

https://www.datagubbe.se/pixels/Grip-ShroomWithAView.png

> 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.

Or lot of pixel art games come from people who are coders first and not artists. So they may not really know of or how to apply those techniques.

There is a reason why raster demos were so extremely popular on Commodore 64.

CRT's resolution was so blurred and totally dependent on the user, not the programmer. I started with a black-white TV out on my VC 20 and many of my friends had to use family's old b-w TVs for their computers.

Colors blended a lot and what really made an impression was color cycling.

Later on many graphical artists made use of the color blending or blurring effect by mixing colors (dithering so to say). Everything was multi-color, hardly anything low res/hi res.

Later on, when sharper monitors specialized for computers were available, a shift towards hi-res appeared, blending was abandoned just to be revived with the bulky 4*4 FLI modes etc.

Hardware and artistry went hand in hand just to impress the audience. That's why some demos from the 80th nowadays look awful to some, but were the latest and coolest thing around, in regards to color action on screen.

Remember, action movies were not really CGI, no fast paced stuff - that came with the computers.

Seems like it is long forgotten about the use of blending colors ONLY at the CRT pixel level as a form of "FOR YOUR EYES ONLY".

Such visual sleigh of working "stegography" code whose name has eluded me to date.

Its code is quite easily recreateable today but the diminishing supply of RGB-based CRT monitors has rendered this mode of stealthy delivery of info rather obsolete.

This approach does not use least-bit of an element of RGB for hidden data stream but more about neighboring RGB pixels creating a separate color particularly on the CRT screen in which to "draw" a picture or set of words.

The higher resolution of today's LCD monitor has now eluded our eye's perceptual resolution (although I could imagine someone getting up super close to a LCD screen to get such color-infused "messages".

Would escape nearly all stego detectors today due to lack of deep matrix (RGB mixing), no?

Somewhat related, the resale market for crts has skyrocketed. Consider this a public service announcement: if you find a crt on the side of the road and you want an extra few hundred bucks you should definitely pick it up.

CRTs enrich their content through their qualities as a medium; the article notes some level of the content definition - but not in depth with regard to the design qualities of the content.

To indicate remarkable cases of the latter, I suggest you consider (after the article wanted to oppose Maniac Mansion and Mayhem in Monsterland) Monstro Giganto (C64, year 2022, uses the original character set in the C64 ROM).

https://pirates-of-zanzibar.itch.io/monstro-giganto

Similar lack of understanding the old medium can be seen amongst photographers shooting digital and then applying "film" LUTs. There is more to the film look than just grain.

Previous related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35115703

> The latter was never available in the US of A (an apparently poor and technologically backwards nation), which means Americans will simply have to take my word when I say that RGB SCART on a good TV is nearly as sharp as an actual RGB computer monitor - but just nearly.

No, the US didn't have SCART (well, they did, it just wasn't common). Instead, they had VGA (by far superior to SCART for RGB signals) and component (better for native YPbPr/YCbCr, such as most consoles used).

This "SCART is superior" BS is just a weird anachronism from retroheads and europhiles. PS2, GameCube, Xbox, etc all benefit more from component due to 480p support, everything before that generation benefits equally from SCART or Component (it just comes down to what you can get out of your console, SCART tends to be easiest), and everything after benefits best from HDMI (or DisplayPort, if it's supported).

It’s not just 8bit and 16bit games though. Everything up to the GameCube can benefit from a CRT. Resident Evil 4 looks insanely better on a CRT to the point that if you are not playing on a CRT, you are playing it wrong.

>I also agree that modern, blocky pixel art often is a kind of misdirected, anachronistic nostalgia.

I think everything here (the author and his sources) misses the point. Modern pixel art is not trying to create a faithful reproduction of how some arcade or home console might have looked.

Pixel art, certainly now, is just an art style like many others. If you need some demonstration look at actual pixel art games, they often freely use totally anachronistic methods, such as very complex shaders. Many don't even align different objects to the same pixel grid. Clearly the artists do not want their games to look like faithful recreations.

Criticizing modern pixel art not for its merits or lack thereof, but for not accomplishing a goal, it never set out to accomplish is ridiculous to be frank.

CRTs just have a richer, warmer picture.