We're misremembering retro games: they look a lot different with clear pixels on newer LCD screens

Old games look a lot different with clear pixels on newer LCD screens, especially if it's high definition (but low poly) 3D. You can see all the imperfections of the textures and polygon seams. You can tell the backgrounds are flat. Even with 2D games you weren't supposed to be able to see the pixels, so the retro-pixel aesthetic is very much a 21st century one. Discuss.

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  1. 3 years ago
    Anonymous

    someone had to draw the sprites, and they had to think about individual pixels and not blurry crt blobs (for pixelart games at least)
    whether they would also think about how the screen artifacts affect the output cannot be known
    mario world and sonic 1 used this for water transparency

    • 3 years ago
      Anonymous

      >cannot be known

      there are absolutely situations where the obscuring of the artwork was accounted for. there are entire games made from the ground up visually to take this factor into account. stop talking out of your ass. really irritating when someone who doesn't know shit says that something that is an established historical fact "cannot be known". lurk.

      • 3 years ago
        Anonymous

        you are one dumb frick Black person, huh? have you considered that the "cannot" refers to the "indie/true retro" dichotomy of op post image? huh? did everybody create graphics taking the artifacts into consideration? no, no the did not you subhuman beast. did nobody do so? no, no again you angry spaz. some artists did, some did not. you cannot know who did and who didnt unless you uh... ask them yourself. everything else is is troony cope. my post was refuting the notion that jaded homosexual Black person cucks have about how retro games are not pixely because the screens produce a blurry output. muh shaders. only idiotic shit eaters think a game is defined by its hardware. well, mr gorilla idiot, i am blind. that means that real nes graphics are all black... homosexual? i think so. go back your centrist hugbox and eat a dick.

    • 3 years ago
      Anonymous

      We know Leonardo DaVinci implemented the shifting quality of the Mona Lisa's expression through an accurate understanding of how human perception shifts shape and value clustering depending on the areas of direct and peripherical focus. We KNOW this and it happened 5 centuries instead of 3 decades ago.

      • 3 years ago
        Anonymous

        The Mona Lisa is a masterpiece of traditional painting made by an expert, while a 16x32 sprite of Link from Zelda II was just a fricking sprite drawn by a literraly who for a forgotten video game. What is your point? There is more historical knowledge of Hitler's life than there is of your own... except by your own logic that is impossible because that was a 100 years ago compared to 0 years ago that was before this very moment? What gives? I know: some things are not worth recording. Nobody gives a damn about how someone scribbled the textures of some commerical flop for the PS1.

        • 3 years ago
          Anonymous

          >This isn't important therefore I dont need knowledge or arguments to discuss it
          >I have no knowledge or arguments to discuss it therefore it's not important
          To be fair, whichever you're operating is kind of equally embarrassing

          • 3 years ago
            Anonymous

            Just admit that you have the reading comprehension of a moron and apologize for your rancid """argument""".

            • 3 years ago
              Anonymous

              Delet this. The use of extra quotations is literally devastating

      • 3 years ago
        Anonymous

        >We know Leonardo DaVinci implemented

  2. 3 years ago
    Anonymous
    • 3 years ago
      Anonymous

      CRTbros...

      • 3 years ago
        Anonymous

        sup

      • 3 years ago
        Anonymous

        The doxmatrixchads won

  3. 3 years ago
    Anonymous

    I agree there was a very specialized craft in predicting and making use of how the visual information was output by the hardware of the era, but the "nobody knew pixels" stance on the matter is the real 21st century byproduct here. People just need extreme black and white moral certainty about everything now, including pointless shit like this.

  4. 3 years ago
    Anonymous

    Don't care, still emulating games raw and without filters.

  5. 3 years ago
    Anonymous

    I don't know, you pick

  6. 3 years ago
    Anonymous

    Which, if any, Retroarch shaders are designed for improving upscaled video (e.g. native multiplied by 3/4/5/etc)? I don't want the tiny original resolution on my physically big modern screen.

  7. 3 years ago
    Anonymous

    Sprite design has been documented, though.
    https://desuarchive.org/vr/thread/5163337/

    • 3 years ago
      Anonymous

      Not a good argument because Pac-Man was designed to be played on a RGB arcade monitor.

  8. 3 years ago
    Anonymous

    The artists' intentions are irrelevant to how players actually experienced those games, which would be through the effects of a CRT. Player's judgements and purchase choices would be based on that end result. So whether the artist designed around CRT or not is irrelevant, since ultimately that is how their work would be evaluated either way. Maybe they didn't consider CRT display but nonetheless their art looked great on it, or vice versa. The result is that you have decades worth of mostly unconscious selection towards what worked well on those end user displays, even if you take the ridiculous assumption that business-savvy developers somehow neglected having their artists anticipate the way their art would be displayed for the consumer.

  9. 3 years ago
    Anonymous

    I don’t know why anyone would want to filter beautiful spritework with scanlines.

    • 3 years ago
      Anonymous

      [...]

      • 3 years ago
        Anonymous

        What you gain in "shading," you lose tenfold in all that static over the image.

      • 3 years ago
        Anonymous

        Both are shit. Clearly graphics designed to be raw pixels, like mario, hold up better.

      • 3 years ago
        Anonymous
        • 3 years ago
          Anonymous

          Thank you. When you don't blow up sprites to 500x their original resolution, they look better.

          Retro gaming protip: sit farther back.

    • 3 years ago
      Anonymous

      It is more true to the retro era, when people put window blinders over their tvs to get the experience the developers intended.

  10. 3 years ago
    Anonymous

    >you weren't supposed to be able to see the pixels

    This is not true as a blanket statement. You could absolutely see chunky pixels on computer games. And, in fact, when playing NES/SNES games on retro emulators.

  11. 3 years ago
    Anonymous

    Reminder that CRT filters are a meme. All you need for that retro look is a shader emulating your choice of shitty analog signal. Of course this can always be combined with a CRT one.

  12. 3 years ago
    Anonymous

    What a retro game looked like on the developer's computer monitor as he was designing it:

    • 3 years ago
      Anonymous

      you do know that monitors were CRT's back then right?
      you also do know that famicom was exclusively RF right?

      • 3 years ago
        Anonymous

        >you do know that monitors were CRT's back then right?
        Very different way of displaying graphics. Monitors were not merely TVs hooked up to a computer.

        >you also do know that famicom was exclusively RF right?
        Do you know that monitors don't use RF?

        • 3 years ago
          Anonymous

          uh huh

          • 3 years ago
            Anonymous

            >setting floppy disks on top of a CRT monitor
            What are you doing, you fool?

            • 3 years ago
              Anonymous

              >What are you doing, you fool?
              making the greatest mario game ever

          • 3 years ago
            Anonymous

            There are plenty of interviews where devs talk about the differences between their monitors and TV output.

      • 3 years ago
        Anonymous

        >nintendo is the only videogame company in the world

    • 3 years ago
      Anonymous

      you would have thought he sometimes would look at an unscaled view to see how it would end up looking in the final game

  13. 3 years ago
    Anonymous

    If you couldn't see the imperfections in early 3D on your CRT, it was probably because you were 5 years old and using imagination-o-vision.

  14. 3 years ago
    Anonymous

    Don't care, still playing snes on my childhood snes + 20 inch crt.

    • 3 years ago
      Anonymous

      Based

    • 3 years ago
      Anonymous

      >still playing snes on my childhood snes
      I prefer playing SNES on my Genesis, but to each their own.

  15. 3 years ago
    Anonymous

    In today's age of "everything is a social construct," it's controversial that CRTs and LCDs are different and that only CRTs were used in the past.

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