"While pixel artists used their CRT screens as a guide, that's not to say they really 'mastered' their work to any exact standard," says TroggleMonkey. With that in mind, without information on the equipment used it's easier to say what the artists didn't see than what they did see. Higher quality consumer CRTs offer sharper images and flatter screens, while individual scanlines tend to be more distinct as your display size increases. By the turn of the century, VGA and component cables gave players additional high-quality options to play with. RGB SCART in particular was prized by importers for TV compatibility reasons. In the beginning, many systems typically supported video over RF and nothing else, but by the end of the Eighties they had started to incorporate support for composite AV cables, as well as higher quality S-Video and RGB SCART. Secondly, the type and quality of your cables plays a part. It gets more complex when you recognise that different production runs and motherboard revisions of consoles can also deliver drastically different results – just ask any SNES enthusiast that has spent time hunting for the 1CHIP motherboard. Firstly, it's important to note that the console itself can play an important part of determining how a game looks, as some systems have distinctive quirks, like the N64's blurring or the Mega Drive's dreadful composite output. However, the big problem is that people's experiences of gaming on a CRT can vary enormously. Certain types of graphics can benefit greatly from the CRT look, including higher detail pixel art and particularly digitised sprites, and these can be persuasive examples in favour of the argument that chasing the CRT look is the only way to preserve the experience intended by developers. The most obvious example is the use of dithering, pixel patterns that would blend in composite video to create the illusion of extra colours and even transparency effects. Indeed, there are plenty of images showing developers working with a computer monitor and a consumer CRT side by side, and it's easy to see ways in which artists designed their work with the limitations of old display technologies in mind. If you want in-depth features on classic video games delivered straight to your doorstop, subscribe to Retro Gamer today.ĬRT display advocates feel that the imprecise nature of old analogue video signals, the scanline effect and even the aperture grille on the TV itself are integral to the proper presentation of retro games. We didn't start thinking of Mario, Link, or Samus in terms of sharp, blocky pixels until the console emulator craze started taking off on PC in the late Nineties." Gaming unfiltered "Not only did every console gamer at the time use a CRT screen (except for the occasional projection screen or rear-projection TV), but the artists knew that and authored their pixel art accordingly. "I tend to agree, at least in the case of home console games through the Nintendo 64 era," says TroggleMonkey, the author of the popular RetroArch shader 'crt-royale'. There are plenty of people who feel that a CRT display is crucial to the look of a retro game, and some argue that by simply showing razor-sharp pixels, many emulated games – and indeed, this magazine – misrepresent the original intent of the graphic artists. "It wasn't until I learned about RGB video, upscalers and PVMs that I realised that yes, input lag is real yes, the consoles are treated very differently on proper 15kHz CRTs and no, TV manufacturers don't care about optimising the gaming experience, especially for outdated analogue output consoles."īut if that's the case, surely the way to make our games look good is to simply bypass low-resolution analogue video and play them in high definition on devices designed to output to modern displays? Unfortunately it's not that clear cut either. "At first I was somewhat blind to what other small pieces of the classic console experience were being eroded away as I bought newer and newer displays," says Marc Duddleson of the YouTube channel My Life In Gaming.
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