> a lot of these pages are showing how CRT's supposedly looked so much better
That's shifting the goalposts. The question is whether old games were intended to be seen on CRTs, or intended to be seen on LCD screens created years later. There's no question, they were intended to be seen on CRTs.
The pixels were placed by artists who looked at how they rendered on a CRT, and they'd change pixels here and there, do hand dithering, and play with the colour palette until they got what they wanted on the CRT. That was the canvas they painted with. The artists didn't have high-resolution LCD screens.
And the thesis of all the things I linked were "the artists intended you to see this on a CRT". And yet, people playing games in emulators on modern high-res LCD screens have picked up this unintended visual style and dubbed it "retro", and modern artists have created new art that was intended be seen on LCD and look "retro" while doing so. They didn't even get a CRT to check how it looks on it.
Two different sets of artists, with two different intents, separated by time and fashion.
"The question is whether old games were intended to be seen on CRTs, or intended to be seen on LCD screens created years later."
I think the counter-argument is that they were intended to be seen on CRTs but the differences between CRTs were bigger than the difference between CRT and LCD.
I don't know if this holds water but I think this is the point some try to make.
> The pixels were placed by artists who looked at how they rendered on a CRT, and they'd change pixels here and there, do hand dithering, and play with the colour palette until they got what they wanted on the CRT.
The issue is, sure they could do that for their CRT. But plug in a different one and the colors are different, the hand-dithering effect looks totally different, etc.
This stuff was drawn using zoom levels where the pixels really were squares. Obviously the artists looked at the preview to get a rough idea of how it would look blurry, but they also couldn't optimize too much for their particular display. It was more important for the design to be robust across a wide variety of displays, some of which would just look like crap no matter what.
So I'm saying, if you just apply some blur it's fine. Nobody needs to be emulating the exact characteristics of a CRT to chase down some "artistic intent" that only vintage CRT's provide. Just blurring out the jaggies is really the only thing that was ever consistent across displays, and even that varied greatly.
> Nobody needs to be emulating the exact characteristics of a CRT to chase down some "artistic intent" that only vintage CRT's provide.
While it's true that blurring is one aspect of CRTs, there are multiple different things we're talking about here. Let's get specific. This is an image of an Apple II's composite video output as seen on a naive RGB LCD.
This is not just blurring. The colors aren't even there on the naive RGB image. This is because modern displays don't properly decode the pixel pattern data as specified in the RS-170A analog video standard. A CRT shader can do many things including add blur, cross-talk, noise, scanlines, etc. But it ALSO does something else - properly decode the bit patterns in the first image to add the colors in the second image. The bit pattern was put there on purpose by the original artist/dev. Not decoding it properly means the colors are wrong or missing.
Admittedly, this is an extreme example. Most games shown undecoded in naive RGB still have roughly the right number of pixels, in about the right colors, and in about the right places. So people accept it. But without composite decoding, some colors will be incorrect and some shades will be missing. It's as objectively wrong as decoding surround sound improperly. I don't care if you use a shader to "Make it look more like a fuzzy-ass old screen." In fact, I'd prefer you didn't. Adding excess blurring or noise just degrades pixels I worked hard on. But please, when you play games I wrote almost 40 years ago, I ask that you properly decode the color data I painstakingly encoded by hand and tested on a variety of different displays from Amdek monitors to cheap ass old TVs. If you don't, you're not playing the games I wrote. You don't have to buy a CRT. Shaders are free - and just a few clicks away. Use a high-quality one that just properly decodes composite and doesn't add any degradation bullshit.
Note: those images are borrowed from this blog, which is a good discussion of composite video color encoding on the Apple II but the same principles apply to all analog composite video sources and displays. http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2021/10/apple-ii-composi...
> whether old games were intended to be seen on CRTs, or intended to be seen on LCD screens created years later.
A lot of older games were designed on grid paper or workstations, not on the consoles or homecomputer that were running them later on. Just look at all the NES and SNES games with broken aspect ratio (i.e. circles not being round), that's not rare outliers, but like half of the library.
Also the CRT vs LCD comparison are extremely disingenuous to begin with, since you are not supposed to be so f'n close to the TV to begin with. If you watch a game at its intended viewing distance and screen size your eyeballs will smooth out the LCD picture just the same as they would a CRT. If you sit close enough to see the shadow mask of your CRT, you are using it wrong.
While I agree that the pixel-art look is drastically overdone in modern retro games, it's not like it didn't exist back in the day. Most old hardware had sprite or layer scaling that allowed you to enlarge the image. The Pokemon in the battle screen on GameBoy for example are all heavily pixelated, so are many SNES games that make use of Mode7 or the enemy sprites in games like AstroBot on GBA. Meanwhile most of the C64 library uses a mode that requires pixels be twice as wide as tall, which also makes everything look blocky.
In PC gaming most of this didn't matter to begin with, since the monitors where capable of far sharper and higher resolution images than your average TV, much like a LCDs, while most of the early games where still doing 320x200. So things did end up look blocky even on original hardware.
That's not to say that CRTs don't have benefits, the motion clarity is much better than sample-and-hold/full-persistance LCDs and LCD scaling gets incredible ugly when it's not a integer multiple of the original resolution and colors/vibrancy of early LCD was also horrible. But most of those are slowly going away with black-frame insertion, 4k resolution and HDR.
And yes, sometimes you come across a Sonic waterfall that is designed to specifically take advantage of CRT TVs, but those effects are pretty rare.
That's shifting the goalposts. The question is whether old games were intended to be seen on CRTs, or intended to be seen on LCD screens created years later. There's no question, they were intended to be seen on CRTs.
The pixels were placed by artists who looked at how they rendered on a CRT, and they'd change pixels here and there, do hand dithering, and play with the colour palette until they got what they wanted on the CRT. That was the canvas they painted with. The artists didn't have high-resolution LCD screens.
And the thesis of all the things I linked were "the artists intended you to see this on a CRT". And yet, people playing games in emulators on modern high-res LCD screens have picked up this unintended visual style and dubbed it "retro", and modern artists have created new art that was intended be seen on LCD and look "retro" while doing so. They didn't even get a CRT to check how it looks on it.
Two different sets of artists, with two different intents, separated by time and fashion.