• Captain Aggravated
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    112 months ago

    I tell you something that will make a big difference for titles pre-2005 or so: playing on a CRT television.

    Especially on SNES titles which I played a lot as a kid, the extremely sharp look you get from emulators on flat panel displays just looks wrong.

      • Captain Aggravated
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        42 months ago

        Sort of. They do add things like blur and scan lines, some even distort the frame to try to simulate the bulbous screen of a CRT. But it’s a bit like that VHS filter that Gen Z is so inordinately fond of; it’s artificially emphasizing the worst qualities of the medium, while still not achieving the benefits.

        Plus, input lag is real. A lot of modern games are designed to take the lag between the console and the display into account, retro games aren’t. Playing Donkey Kong Country on an LCD TV made me feel like my reflexes had aged 50 years, hauling out my old CRT fixed that (but made my back feel like it aged 50 years).

        • @[email protected]
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          12 months ago

          Some filters are better than others for certain tastes. The glow effect on CRT Royale is what gives me the nostalgia buzz, but it looks much better on 4K displays. On my 1080p displays I use a package that adds a bezel for the display to reflect off of which gives me a similar effect.

          I’d rather have a native CRT display, but I’m used to larger displays at this point and I couldn’t physically handle anything even in the high 20 inches range.

    • @[email protected]
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      12 months ago

      The artists also took that into account, used it in their favour.

      Source: worked with pixel artists early 2000.

      • Captain Aggravated
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        32 months ago

        The artists did and the engineers did.

        For example, the Apple II achieved 16 onscreen colors via NTSC artifacting. The 8-Bit Guy did a great video on this; programmers could choose like 4 colors, but if you put them next to each other in certain combinations they would turn other colors. Which is why white text would turn green and/or purple at the edges.

        The IBM CGA card took it to a whole other level; it had a 4-bit digital RGBI video port for computer monitors and a composite port for televisions. When plugged into an RGBI monitor, you got a sharp picture that would display in one of four four-color palettes: black, white, cyan and magenta, or black, yellow, red and green, both in bright and dark. But if the artist dithered the graphics properly, and the card was plugged into a composite TV or monitor, the same graphics would appear softer, but in 16 colors. Text was harder to read, but games looked better, so business customers could buy an RGBI monitor and gamers could use a TV.

        In the 16-bit era, I can cite titles on the SNES and Genesis that took advantage of the limitations of the NTSC standard to get graphical tricks done that the console couldn’t actually do. Like transparent water. I think it’s in Emerald Hill Zone in Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and in some levels of Super Mario World, where you can enter and exit water that is drawn by rapidly jiggling a dithered pattern back and forth. On a CRT television this blurs into a translucent effect, when viewed on an entirely digital monitor it looks like an opaque checkerboard or grille.