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Discussion (18 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
There's an undeniable charm to the older era of pixel art, and surely part of that is nostalgia, but I also think a lot of it comes from the fact that the economics and the hardware were a lot different. Up until the mid 1990s, the highest paid artists in the industry were working on pixel art games. The hardware was slow enough that there were real creative constraints, and we know that constraints often drive creativity.
I want to point out though that it's impossible for any CRT filter to have a peak brightness that's not significantly lower than without the filter, since it can darken pixels but not brighten them past what the maximum already is.
True by design.
> and purely digital interfaces,
True but not relevant. Even if you connected an LCD monitor over an analog interface like VGA or composite video, it would have to re-digitize the signal. The fact that a screen uses a digital interface can be designed independently of whether a screen has fixed pixels (LCD, OLED) or not (monochrome CRT with continuous phosphor, without shadow mask or aperture grille).
> ensuring a fixed aspect (width-to-height) ratio
True by definition because the pixels are pieces of physical hardware in the screens.
> and completely square pixels.
This is a design choice. Nothing prevents someone from designing an LCD or OLED matrix with non-square pixels. But there's also no good reason to do so. (Side note: Due to RGB striping, single-color subpixels have an aspect ratio of 1:3, so those are non-square.)
Potentially useful trivia: Some image/video formats support declaring the pixel aspect ratio. Examples include PNG ( https://w3c.github.io/png/#11pHYs ) and Matroska.
Let's say you manage to build a product you could sell as a niche expensive thing and not as a super duper expensive rich-people-only thing; you would still be competing against people buying an old CRT for 20 bucks or just using shaders for free (which gets you 99% there on an HDR 4k TV and takes 0% space in your house).
Another advantage of shaders is that you can make them look exactly how you want, down to particular CRT models, screen curvatures, analog signal aberrations, etc. And almost everything you could want comes already included on RetroArch by default, with lots of presents if you don't want to mess with that stuff yourself. Hard to compete with that. A CRT TV comes with only one look. But again, working with the TV you already own instead of occupying a cubic meter of your house is probably the biggest advantage.
I play retro games almost exclusively and I would never get a CRT myself, not even if it was free.
I think a lot of this is due to where the nostalgia is being aimed. The number of pixelly games trying to look like a c64 or Amiga is vanishingly small compared to the number trying to look like an NES, SNES, or Genesis. (Or a PSX or N64.) And they’re mostly trying to make things like early first-party hits, not later third-party games that do crazy techniques. How many 8-bit-looking games sound like a Tim Follin soundtrack?
And of course given that those machines are from a generation that stopped being the new hotness about 30y ago, we have pro pixel artists who have never seen a game through a shitty connection to a TV unless they deliberately sought one out or had obsessively retro gaming parents; they just like making these square mosaics look like things.
VGA MS-DOS games usually ran at 320x200, but VGA CRTs supported up to 640x480 resolution. There was hardware line doubling from 200 lines up to 400 lines so you actually got two scanlines per pixel. It wasn't LCD sharp but the individual pixels were easily distinguishable. And lots of people played these game on SVGA CRTs so the pixels would be even sharper.
But that does not cover all CRTs relevant to pixel art. If you display low resolution art on a CRT designed for high resolutions it makes a big difference in pixel sharpness.