[HN Gopher] The effect of CRTs on pixel art
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The effect of CRTs on pixel art
Author : zdw
Score : 145 points
Date : 2024-07-31 02:57 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.datagubbe.se)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.datagubbe.se)
| bitwize wrote:
| CRTs just have a richer, warmer picture.
| 73kl4453dz wrote:
| For an even richer, even warmer picture, be sure to outline the
| circumference of the screen in green Marker.
| naikrovek wrote:
| The "warmth" is X-rays.
| Dwedit wrote:
| Let's not discount the years since 1997 when people actually did
| play retro games on high resolution computer monitors, with big
| chunky pixels.
| blargey wrote:
| Notably, pixel art has been developed for and played on LCD
| screens since 1989 with the Gameboy.
|
| Including the entire Pokemon series until its move to 3D, as
| well as many ports and continuations of older "pixel art"
| series originating on the NES/SNES.
|
| The blockiness wasn't exaggerated, of course, but there wasn't
| any CRT magic obfuscating it either, so that would change later
| generations' experience of the medium.
| scheeseman486 wrote:
| For Gameboy, Game Gear, GBC and GBA in particular there's
| pixel art and graphical effects that are often designed in
| mind for the characteristics of the LCDs in those handhelds.
| The slow pixel response is used to fake more shades of
| grey/colour and fonts in games for the GBC/GBA often lean
| heavily on the subpixel arrangement that ends up making them
| look much worse if you simply scale the pixels up. As a
| result most modern emulators have features that emulate the
| LCD panels as well.
| pieix wrote:
| Agree completely. For me, the author missed the mark with:
|
| > modern, blocky pixel art often is a kind of misdirected,
| anachronistic nostalgia.
|
| All of _my_ pixel art nostalgia comes from the 240x160px LCD
| Game Boy Advance and crystal clear blocky 16x16 sprites.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| 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.
| evaneykelen wrote:
| Previous related discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35115703
| jbverschoor wrote:
| This guy records games on a CRT
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWv-rnSAzVw
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Here's a good comparison from roughly what TFA calls the golden
| age of pixel art on the SFC. Note particularly the messed up
| aspect ratio of the latter. Also Look at Guinevere's dress in
| the opening movie, particularly while she is running; there is
| no AA used in it, but the CRT gives is a more organic look.
|
| CRT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9QhG2KU6A4
|
| Not CRT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8V2IG0makoo
| vardump wrote:
| That's a VERY high-end CRT monitor, not really representing
| what 99.9% of people had to use.
| titusjohnson wrote:
| 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.
| scheeseman486 wrote:
| https://www.retrotink.com/product-page/retrotink-4k
|
| It does all of what you ask, plus a lot more. CRT filters that
| emulate CRT shadow masks from different manufacturers, HDR to
| boost the max brightness to emulate the phosphor glow, VRR to
| allow for arbitrary refresh rates (useful for arcade
| superguns).
| titusjohnson wrote:
| Oh excellent, that's exactly what I'm looking for! Not quite
| impulse-buy territory but now I know what it'll take.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| As I understand, the OSSC Pro is significantly cheaper for
| most of the feature set, while the RT5x and OSSC provide
| varying feature sets (the OSSC only has a line buffer, not
| framebuffer, which affects the resolutions it can output).
| scheeseman486 wrote:
| You're not wrong that's the OSSC Pro has most of the same
| feature set, but that deeply undersells the headline
| feature the RT4K has, particularly given the OP wants
| something that properly emulates the visual
| characteristics of a CRT. For that, it's impossible to
| beat the RetroTINK 4K. Matched with a 4K OLED it's CRT
| shaders are uncannily real looking.
| snvzz wrote:
| Not him, but the main feature of OSSC and OSSC Pro is
| them being Open Source Hardware proper.
|
| I own OSSC and have enjoyed its flexibility, and the
| improvements it got over time and does continue to get.
|
| Getting a OSSC Pro is in my TODO.
| unwind wrote:
| Just to save folks a whole click or two, it's $750 which
| does seem ... steep but I'm not into retro computing (yet,
| a part of my brain feels like adding). I've heard it
| mentioned on Youtube ("8-bit guy", I think) but never
| looked it up, thanks GP.
| 6SixTy wrote:
| Here's my 2 cents: no one needs that kind of stuff. Retro
| can be free, and only reason you would want to break out
| your wallet is if you really care that much about things
| beyond the game.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| 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.
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| In some cases, developers used grid paper with rectangular
| cells sized to match the aspect ratio of rectangular pixels on
| the intended display.
| 6SixTy wrote:
| Be careful mentioning pixels next to the word 'CRT', as you'll
| get people parroting that CRTs have no real pixels even though
| it's more complicated than that which would be disingenuous
| being condensed.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Yeah but you're talking about primary source documents from
| real developers, aka knowledge. Can you somehow turn this into
| a 5 page long intellectually self edifying blog post about your
| personal brilliance?
| throwup238 wrote:
| How self-edifying would you prefer, on a scale of 1 to
| Wolfram?
| xcv123 wrote:
| It does square with it. The analogy is in music production.
| Professional music studios use high end expensive studio
| monitors with flat frequency response. It's a reference point.
| From this reference point they can optimize the mix to sound
| good on other speakers that don't accurately represent the
| frequency range.
| Dwedit wrote:
| Some developers used graph paper, other developers drew the
| graphics using the actual hardware on a TV. Plot the pixels
| while zoomed in, but see the real thing live on a TV.
|
| To make drawing on actual hardware work, you either used
| battery-backed memory, or you used a connection to a PC.
| vardump wrote:
| Tooling wasn't static, but improved over the years.
|
| The first games might have been checked paper sketches and
| might not have been so CRT optimized.
|
| Even in the eighties, nothing prevented a Nintendo game
| developing team from using Amiga (or PC) Deluxe Paint for
| drawing the graphics. (They had also other specialized systems
| in Japan for pixeling graphics.)
| burnte wrote:
| Because they weren't. The exact same art techniques used for
| 320x200 res games have been used for centuries in other media.
| Pixel art was most like tile mosaics, which also use dithering,
| and around for millennia. We designed pixel art that way not
| because CRTs looked like that, but because we had to pack
| maximum communication in those pixels. Yes, CRTs had a
| softening and blurring effect. We didn't really talk about that
| back then because it was obvious, and it wasn't something we
| had the ability to turn off or on, it was simply a fact of the
| technology.
|
| No one designed differently for monochrome monitors with higher
| resolutions, or for the nascent LCD technologies of the day
| either. Every single article that says what this article says
| is literally just inventing a story.
| bernawil wrote:
| yup, honestly this whole take is so tired. Its a factoid pulled
| out of nowhere.
|
| and the counterexample is easy: the gameboy launched with LCD
| screens and games definitely where meant to look blocky. The
| pokemon games are perhaps the most influential nowadays in
| terms of pixelart style and show all examples of it: the very
| blocky styles of the overhead view and the more detailed
| pictures of the pokemon. They also cover the 8-bit and 16-bit
| era with the gameboy advance.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| 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
| raldi wrote:
| 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.
| causality0 wrote:
| 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
| paol wrote:
| 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...
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