I like to think of modern pixel art as its own aesthetic and art form. It's designed to be viewed on high DPI LED screens, and that's fine. I don't think it should be judged by how it looks on a CRT.
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 think it is, again, a way to work around limitations. Economic limitations in this case rather than technical.
Compared to modern HD graphics, pixel art is more affordable because you can hide a lot of details you would normally have to work on behind these fat pixels.
And the most interesting trick, to me, is that pixel art looks sharp! The non-CRT-like square pixels is a feature.
Blurry usually doesn't look good, it is as if your eyes can't focus, or that you are looking through a dirty window, it naturally registers as a problem. Real life has details and you are missing them. With sharp pixel boundaries, you are telling the brain "there is no problem with your eyes, everything is fine".
It is not the only way of introducing artificial details to make low detail pictures look fine: scanline effect, screen door effect, ostensible dithering, etc... But pixel art is a good compromise, in addition to being a recognizable somewhat nostalgic art style.
Note that classical pixel art was not necessary particularly fat/blocky. Since SVGA become common, games like SimCity 2000 or Transport Tycoon Deluxe run in 640x480 on 14" CRT, which is ~60 DPI. Later (in second half of 1990s), higher resolution became common, but also higher screen sizes, so DPI was in 70-80 range. That is not really that different from full HD on 24" LCD (~92 DPI), which dominated later era.
Now I’m wondering what were some of the last generation of games to dominantly use fully hand-drawn pixel art. After 1995 or so, games using isometric art such as Red Alert (1996) and Fallout (1997) were more and more switching to sprites and environments rasterized from 3D models and hand-tweaked at most, as desktop 3D modeling became more affordable and SVGA resolutions meant less need to hand-fix aliasing artifacts.
Yeah it seems very clear that the cheapest artstyle of the future will be whatever AI can output with minimal human editing or involvement. And some studios will go that route.
Although I don't see AI in game art becoming accepted by the wider public any time soon, and definitely not by the indie crowd.
I've also been thinking about this for animation. I foresee cheap limited animation (sliding layers, only mouth moving, etc) being replaced by incoherent un-/barely edited AI output instead.
All of them will. It can save nearly 100% of costs for art production. Nobody can afford not to use it, unless they aren’t developing the game to make a profit.
> Although I don't see AI in game art becoming accepted by the wider public any time soon
It’s already being used everywhere without “the wider public” even noticing. Same in professional film and TV productions. It doesn’t look AI generated because they don’t just run Stable Diffusion and call it a day, but the reductions in labor costs are still immense even with the post-processing that’s currently still required to match AAA quality.
> All of them will. It can save nearly 100% of costs for art production. Nobody can afford not to use it, unless they aren’t developing the game to make a profit.
This is not correct. Your profit doesn't have to be relative to what another company makes. It would only be affected if games passed the savings on to the customers. You make more profit if you do use it potentially but it doesn't mean you don't make profit if you choose to go the traditional route.
The games market has a massive oversupply. It's not enough to just "make a game", you have to make a good one. That is to say, better than all the other things your audience could be playing. Cheaping out is literally not an option. You can cheap out in one area to spend more effort in another area, but you can't just say "this is cheaper therefore it will be the default" because the default isn't good enough. Most games fail
I don't agree that the cheaper option is less good. I can admit that ai often (but not always) writes code with more attention to detail than I do, and much faster. Diffusion by itself does not produce human tier graphics (usually), but in combination with llms and heuristics it can do some things better than humans. When wielded by a graphic artist who could do it by hand with mixed media much less digitally, the amount of top tier art that can be produced is increased. Less expensive art doesn't have to mean worse art, it can mean equally good art, just note of it, art everywhere.
> All of them will. [...] It’s already being used everywhere without “the wider public” even noticing.
Doesn't your lot ever get tired of the intellectually lazy, rubbish absolutisms you peddle? Same goes for the projections; just because you slop it, doesn't mean everyone will.
It seems like a good pixel art model should be trained from scratch to emit high-quality low-resolution outputs, rather than trying to jerry-rig a generalist high-resolution model to unnaturally output tiny images (or even worse, a regular grid of exactly NxN color blocks).
CRTs are to video games what vinyl is to music and celluloid is to cinema. The flaws associated with the physical medium have become the defining aesthetic, such that a new medium which removes those flaws feels "sterile" and "hollow", like a concrete-slab brutalist building. There's also the sense of nostalgia. Rock music was less commercialized, or perceived as less commercialized, at the peak of the vinyl era (1960s-1970s). Computers and video games were more fun at the peak of the CRT era (1980s-1990s). So our brains kind of do this substitution wherein "warm fuzzy feelings we associate when X was popular" -> "X is better".
All I know is that when CDs hit the market I savored the additional detail they provided. A good, non-loudness-crushed recording had so many sumptuous highs I used to reach my fingers out and try to "feel" the consonants and vowels of the vocals. And when LCD monitors began to supplant CRTs my eyes were relieved at the additional sharpness. I remember these transition points, so I can say definitively that there was a time when we thought the newer stuff was indeed an improvement.
> I don't know if the CRT version is taken from an actual CRT, but I doubt it - I actually think it looks too fuzzy. I may be wrong - it could be an effect of a close-up photo scaled up - but it's more likely a CRT approximation generated by a software filter on a modern machine.
On both the NES and SNES, the pixels were so large that you could clearly see them even when using an RF adaptor. Each pixel was two scan lines, and wide enough that dithering was still very visible. The same goes for older games in the arcades up to (roughly) the early 1990s, (and I didn't spend much time in arcades after that.)
Not to say that artists didn't take advantage of CRT quirks, but you needed a really $h1tty TV, (much worse than the ones that I and my friends had) if they were going to fuzz away the edges.
The 12” TV that I played SNES on had convenient brightness/tint/sharpness dials. Depending on my mood I’d turn sharpness all the way up for hard pixels or all the way down for a free Gaussian sampling filter ;)
It's not that CRTs were "forgiving", it's that designers leaned into what they'd do to pixels. A classic example is the tanks in Atari 2600 Combat - they look ridiculous on a hi-res screen. On a CRT they sort of look like tanks.
I have a JAMMA cabinet at home. It has a CRT in it. I usually play on x-in-1 pirate emulator board. So I don't mind that not all the hardware is authentic. But it's important to me that the screen is authentic, or it all just feels wrong. The curve must be there, the scanlines must be there.
I really get quite cross when you visit a museum and they've got retro games playing on flatscreen LCDs. Doubly so when it's meant to be a vector game.
Same thought here, GBA was the peak of mainstream 2D graphics for me. I look at games from that era and often times they have aged well, they still look ideal to me.
Hear hear. I’m so tired of this pixel art elitism (exhibited in the article) which asserts with certainty that our fondness for pixel art comes from viewing it distorted on CRTs.
The Game Boy was insanely popular, is part of many people’s introduction to and fondness for pixel art, and it had an LCD screen.
I was being facetious with that word, I don’t believe it literally.
> it's about historical accuracy.
Historical accuracy means recognising not everyone had the same experience. Yes, many remember pixel art from CRTs, but many also remember it from LCDs.
My criticism if of the idea that liking sharp pixels is “a kind of misdirected, anachronistic nostalgia”, a misremembering of the CRT days. Even before we consider LCDs, it is reductive to link this to nostalgia—pixel art is an art form that stands on its own.
And not just that; invoking the Game Boy here is not the closer many people think it is, given that its STN LCD screen was fuzzy (e. g. ghosting) yet also had this distinct, subdued lo-fi glow, almost like looking through a zoetrope. Somewhat analog to lo-fi CRT setups.
The ghosting on the original Game Boy did not blend pixel boundaries and did not affect static images. It looks nothing like a CRT and nothing like a zoetrope (which has sharp images and reasonably low sample-and-hold blur because of the strobing).
> The ghosting on the original Game Boy did not blend pixel boundaries and did not affect static images.
It still gives you, especially when factoring in the condition of the STN screen, a "fuzzy" picture and with its own lo-fi glow, analogous to a CRT setup. Which was the point. I owned a brick, from 1992 onwards.
> It looks nothing [...] like a zoetrope (which has sharp images and reasonably low sample-and-hold blur because of the strobing).
"Sharp images" is certainly not the experience I had when looking through 'em at country fairs back in East Germany in the mid-to-late 80s.
While the Sonic waterfall is probably deliberate, I find it more likely that people have always preferred the highest resolution and the crispest graphics they can afford.
>I remember the game magazines had advertistements in the back for VGA adapters for the SNES.
Those adapters have converter chips in them and are a very recent thing. One from your link was released in 2025, a full year after last gaming magazine stopped being printed, and 30 years since last magazine covering SNES shut down.
snes rgb cables on the other hand were always available, and even bundled with console in certain markets.
Related, I usually hate CRT filters in game, the scan lines usually look too strong (and often the image is darkened inappropriately), but I really liked the one in Cyber Shadow. It just felt right.
It's very hit or miss. Abylight Studios (Super Hydorah, Cursed Castilla) seems to do them pretty well, but then I've seen some that left me wondering how they ever made it past QC. (I won't name them because it's been a while and I don't want to name the wrong game.)
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.
I know someone who uses a CRT filter for vscode... I thought that was just a meme theme we all downloaded and clicked once to check it out then turned it off but he likes it along with his exploding text characters, forgot the name of that, powerblock or whatever. His vscode triggers my ADHD like trying to read a too busy restaurant menu, literally can't absorb anything.
I thought the Macbook Pro LCDs were bright enough, high-res-enough, and fast enough to make a very accurate CRT simulation. Here it is: https://github.com/baragona/crt-xdr
It looks so much like a CRT to me. It looks like pressing your face up to a TV to see the individual phosphors. Try setting "signal" to dropped image and viewing some images. It looks like an old TV.
Bottom line, whatever you think a CRT is doing, you can probably simulate it quite accurately.
perhaps was 60hz interlaced. I had memories of my first CRT monitor only allowing to do 1024x768 in interlaced and doing a very obvious flickering. But was flicker free at 800x600 and lower resolutions.
You do want to simulate it, because it's the only way to preserve the original motion quality of games designed around a fixed 60 fps frame rate without changing the gameplay or adding latency.
Not so clear in the article is that also with consoles the game pixel grid didn't match the CRT grid (e.g. horizontally the number of "pixels" is similar but not 1:1) so just by geometry you have blending of one pixel data into several CRT "pixels" (plus varying intensity even in a single phosphor patch as the analog RGB signals rise and fall in intensity).
As for CRT filters one can argue how realistic they are but they show that scanline gaps and blending at least can produce amazing perceptual improvements as shown in this video: https://youtu.be/nw2QfPREu-Q
I appreciate the author calling out the point that dithering etc. was definitely visible on better-quality CRT monitors via RGB/VGA signals.
So many people these days mistake the blurring from composite signals as being due to the CRT. A CRT doesn't magically blend pixels together. And there are certainly many tradeoffs to using composite so that many people prefer the sharper pixels of RGB.
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.
It’s interesting though that composite PAL/NTSC (especially NTSC) has a massive effect on the picture, owed to the fact that the color carrier was embedded into the luminance spectrum, so a re-digitized PAL/NTSC signal will still look very different from a digital-output-first signal, or a re-digitized VGA or component signal.
Pixelation is clear on a CRT. Long before people stopped using CRTs, the blocky pixel aesthetic was immediately recognizable to everyone as the “video game look”. The earliest Flash movies on sites like Newgrounds, around the turn of the millennium, used the blocky pixel art style (and we were all still using CRT TVs at that point). I simply don’t see the argument about the pixel aesthetic being not original to that time.
This seems a bit focused on a specific era of pixel art games AND CRTs. For me, nostalgia was things like Master of Magic or Civilization 1/2, and I played those on CRTs attached to PCs, not in an arcade - the pixels absolutely did not blend together into rounded shapes due to fuzzy scan lines.
The article is about SD CRTs (480i for NTSC or 576i for PAL, or more commonly for games 240p/288p progressive scan using non-standard timing, often underscanned with pixels left unused in the borders).
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.
Ha I remember SVGA. Darn we're old. But pixel art was definitely a style of it's own then and thats what my modern efforts attempt to replicate, at least
If you assume a SD CRT, as the article does, then yes, the display connection makes the most difference (although there are still differences between individual CRTs).
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.
>PC CRTs would always be quite sharp, due to VGA, no matter whether it (the CRT) had a low or high resolution.
VGA CRTs are always "high resolution" compared to the SD CRTs discussed in the article. If you display a mode 13h DOS game on SD CRT, which is possible with special hardware, it will not look as sharp as it would on the VGA CRT is was designed for.
This sharpness from using higher resolution CRTs is in addition to the sharpness from using RGB connections. And if you somehow manage to connect a VGA CRT over composite, it will be less sharp but still sharper than a SD CRT over composite.
The point is there are two factors here: the sharpness of the CRT itself and the sharpness of the connection method. The article only talks about SD CRTs, so the CRT's sharpness isn't going to make much difference there. But when you consider MS-DOS games, which used sharper CRTs, the CRT's sharpness becomes important.
Not always true. I just recently watched video about Tandy VGM-225. Which had bad picture. Most likely due to being reused cheap TV. You can't magic more resolution out when you do not have enough "subpixels"... That is the grid of holes is too coarse compared to resolution.
Then again this is early 90s CRT most likely with design from 80s just upgraded to display VGA. Later and more expensive CRTs got much better.
Brand-new arcade CRTs are razor sharp, and certainly do not accept an RF signal (I don't think they accept composite either). With time the electron beam starts to diverge, and things can get a little blurry or color-fringey.
What I've found—based on limited experience with a "modern" arcade cabinet (Fix-it Felix Jr., a tie-in promotion to the 2012 film Wreck-it Ralph)—is that if you have an LCD or OLED that can do true enough blacks, the effect is very similar to having a brand spanking new CRT, even in arcade applications.
But that goes only for raster games. Nothing we currently have can replace the razor-sharp, completely unaliased lines of an original Asteroids and its vector display.
> if you have an LCD or OLED that can do true enough blacks, the effect is very similar to having a brand spanking new CRT, even in arcade applications.
CRTs are inherently less blurry when your eyes follow moving objects on screen, which they do all the time ("smooth pursuit"). The reason is that LCDs and OLED displays show each frame for the entire frame time (like 1/60th of a second) during which your eyes, and the corresponding tracked object, move. This creates a blur. E.g. if an object moves on the screen 10 pixels horizontally per frame, on an LCD/OLED you would then see 10 pixels of horizontal blur. This doesn't happen on CRTs because they flash each frame only for an extremely short period of time and are relatively dark otherwise. At 60 Hz, they don't show the frame for 1/60th of a second, but about 1/1000th or something like that. This time is so short that during it, even fast moving objects and the eyes that track them hardly move at all, which results in basically zero blur. See https://testufo.com/ to see the blur. On a CRT, with matched FPS and Hz, the test would appear completely sharp.
It is true that LCDs and OLED screens are much brighter (especially LCD) and that OLED has better black levels, but CRT screens have much better motion clarity.
CRTs almost never show the entire frame at all. The phosphor decay on a typical television CRT is so rapid that by the time the beam hits the right-hand side of any given scanline, the left side is completely dark.
And unfortunately that motion clarity comes at a cost: flicker. Some people, like my sister, cannot bear that cost. She has photosensitive epilepsy, but even before that ripened into full-on seizures in her 20s she became profoundly uncomfortable playing video games, and never got truly into them until flat panels predominated. Even without photosensitive epilepsy, flicker can be annoyingly perceptible and cause eyestrain even if you don't consciously register it. Most of the motion blur mitigation strategies we see on panels, like black frame insertion, suffer from the same problems. The only way we'll come close to solving both problems at once is with very high speed panels, but until then I'll take a bit of blur, thank you.
Yeah flicker, that is true. But people without epilepsy didn't really notice it on video content (TV or video games), even at 50 Hz (PAL) in Europe.
On PCs with static content, flicker was a lot more noticable at 60 Hz, e.g. when staring at a white Word document. But increasing the Hz to something like 85 Hz made the flicker practically disappear. (Not sure whether that would sufficient for people with photosensitive epilepsy. And it wasn't a solution available for consoles anyway.)
As somebody that grew up in Canada (NTSC), I noticed the 50Hz flicker on visits to Europe whenever the screen was white, but eventually my brain would filter it out and it didn't bother me. I wonder if I'd notice it on a modern NTSC screen. It's been a long time since I saw one...
Later many or even most PAL TVs were actually 100 Hz (advertised as "100 Hz flicker-free"), but I don't remember seeing the difference. They weren't optimal for games because they used a digital cache to double the input frame rate. Native Hz CRTs could be completely analog with extremely low input latency.
This is a great post. Also reminded me of a video I saw a few months ago that was equally as entertaining (and somewhat informative):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-8y2R6IxI
Heck yeah, you are so right. Also, the video was fun, thanks.
My old 19-inch CRT's are dead, but I'm so glad I saved save three 17-inchers - one shadow-mask, and two aperture-grill. But the older I get, the heavier they seem go be, oh well.
The two articles by the author are focused on the sharpness aspect. What's missing are the dilation/contraction due to beam intensity and resultant gamma. You can take away the scanlines and phosphor filter and still get a more "classic" image with just a modified bilinear filter.
A particularly good example of this are the whites of Mario's and Yoshi's eyes in SMW. They look much better with dilation. (No pun intended)
The article contradicts itself for some reason. First it repeats the popular myth that CRTs made the image fuzzy, then it clarifies that this was mostly caused by RF or composite connectors. Which would produce similarly fuzzy results on LCDs or OLED screens. As the article points out, CRTs connected via S-Video or SCART did look quite sharp. The same is true for PC CRTs connected via VGA or similar.
That does relate some to my issue with a lot of CRT evangelism. Retroactively its easy to say "oh well you just needed the right input, avoid all these CRT brands, and other pitfalls. Maybe mod your console to have cleaner video output, and so on".
The reality is most people had far less than ideal setups, yet most will try to hold CRTs to a standard near impossible to most of the era.
The real advantage of CRTs was the fact that they strobed the frames, unlike sample-and-hold screens (LCD and OLED). The latter cause a blurry image during eye movement ("smooth pursuit"). Games which ran at a frame rate which was equal to the CRT Hz did have basically zero persistence blur. The UFO would appear perfectly sharp: https://testufo.com/
If your CRT had Component or SCART (not sure this was a brand thing so much as model to model, like imagine your parents bought a Sony TV with no HDMI port in the current year and then insisted you told them Sony was good in their defense) you often just needed one official cable and you were good to go. SNES and newer should be simple, NES needed modding but I wouldn't call that the norm.
I think when people think about CRTs and NES/Atari, they aren’t thinking about _monitors_ they are thinking about the low quality TVs and hooked up through the antenna adapter, which absolutely did wash pixels out to some extent.
As a retro gamer I think the people worrying about pixel blurring is overblown. I think a lot fewer artists actually intentionally used it than these articles make out
There's a reason it always comes back to the same few examples, peach hanging from a rope, dracula's eyes, sonic behind the waterfall. If it were used as widely as some people make out then we wouldn't have to keep resorting to the same 3 examples.
That and CRTs stopped being so blurry over the years anyway (especially PC CRTs), so by the time you reached the 16 bit era you couldn't rely on a blurry TV to create your effect
Not saying you're wrong on the main message (and those examples are with filters rather than true CRT) but it's still impressive how it can make the pixel art better looking in those cases.
Seems obvious that it would be incredibly expensive to do for something very few would buy.
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.
>or just using shaders for free (which gets you 99% there on an HDR 4k
It gets you about 90% of the image quality and 0% of the motion quality. Simulating CRT motion quality on a sample-and-hold display requires around 1000Hz refresh rate.
CRTs emit gamma ray at high power(>5kV is usually the quoted figure), and the standard solution was a bandaid fix of attaching leaded gamma ray blocking glass onto the screen. This high lead glass cannot be recycled, and the EU(rightfully) don't like any of that. I don't know if manufacturing of CRTs are banned or legally infeasible, but it's clearly not encouraged.
There are still some types of CRT-related vacuum tubes in production for applications digital equivalents are objectively less performant in.
Leaded glass was a cost-cutting measure, used only for the back and sides of CRT. Leaded glass gradually turns brown under X-ray exposure, so the front screen used barium and strontium instead. There's no reason the whole CRT couldn't use this kind of glass. There are probably other heavy elements that would work too.
(Early black-and-white CRTs running at lower voltage did use leaded glass for the front too, but they aren't the CRTs people interested in old games care about.)
> There are still some types of CRT-related vacuum tubes in production for applications digital equivalents are objectively less performant in.
Like what? The only significant applications I'm aware of for vacuum tubes nowadays are high-power RF amplifiers (including household microwave magnetrons) and intentional X-ray emitters.
Night vision goggles. The photodiode + CsO + lead coated charged glass capillary amp thing is apparently still superior to solid state image sensors with amplifiers in metrics like SNR, minimum luminosity, and longer wave IR response. The performance gap is wide enough that there's a Chinese Norinco subsidiary that entered the market during 2010s by licensing technology from an EU company.
I think plasma displays are a much better option. We really should bring them back. The latest generation of plasma TVs drove their active elements at frequencies in excess of 600hz. You could do a lot of clever things with these panels. They are basically digital CRTs.
A plasma TV in a pitch black room set to its maximum output power is still the most incredible experience I've ever had outside of a commercial venue.
Self emission is the real magic trick. Not the pattern with which we scan.
As far as I know, all plasma screens use pulse width modulation to control the brightness of each subpixel. This produces even worse motion quality than a typical LCD; you get both sample-and-hold blur from the high persistence, and phantom array effect artifacts from the PWM. IMO, plasma displays are only suitable for watching movies, which have terrible motion quality anyway because of the low 24 fps frame rate.
I agree the response time is not fantastic, but if we are going for the effect of CRTs, it's not that far off the mark. Certainly higher latency than CRT and (properly driven) LCD.
Consumers at large don't like them. In the same desk or table you have a crt monitor or tv, you can have a muuuuch bigger flat screen with higher resolution that weighs a tenth as much.
First weight. Then resolution. I think SoTA for CRTs peaked at early HD resolution 720. One might be able to modulate the beam faster now. Size. And safety - anyone starting up production now would have to solve the safety issues from scratch. Nothing like a few cubic feet of vacuum imploding to ruin your day.
Resolutions were very high for the time, I have a 2002 LG f900p (pretty high end, yes but it wasn't super expensive even back in the day) running at 1920*1200@85hz and it's a delight to work and play on it.
IMO, the only factor that kills the crt vs a moderm monitor is the size and weight. I imagine resolution would be limited by how small the dot pitch can actually be made to be with modern processes but with the advances in magnets and power electronics devices I imagine going at MHz horizontal frequency would be not that hard.
I used to have a ViewSonic PC CRT that went up to 2048x1536. Sadly my family didn't realize the worth and tossed it out along with a bunch of other CRTs many years ago. In hindsight we should've tested them all and kept the nicest ones.
No demand. There is some imaginary demand but I doubt it will realise. And on other side LCD screens are very cheap. 74,25€ for 24" IPS. With 25,5% of that being tax... There is no way CRTs with current volumes would be anywhere close.
My main gripe is with sloppy technique. A lot - not all, but a lot - of modern pixel art is purposely made to look overly blocky. Dithering and anti-aliasing just isn't utilized, which makes it look even chunkier than actual old game art does on a modern screen. It seems to me as if the artists are worried that classic pixel art techniques would make things look too good, though I personally believe the opposite applies.
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.
My family had a real SNES hooked up to a real (and real shitty) CRT TV, and I played games on it. But I also had a desktop PC and then eventually a laptop computer where I played a lot more games than we actually owned via ZSNES. We also had a NES at one point that I think we got from our older cousin, but it broke. So I only ever played Final Fantasy 1 or Chrystalis emulated.
If I was today going to make a pixel art game grounded in nostalgia for these games, what style of screen should I be aiming for? Do I even want to do that, as opposed to making a pixel art game that looks good on a modern screen?
These are all aesthetic decisions. What feelings does a smeary CRT SNES screen evoke? What does a crisper 1993 DOS screen feel like to you? Which one better matches the mood of the game you want to make?
Probably you should screengrab some games from the first couple years of the SNES’ life and doodle things for your game that look like those screens. Possibly some later games that more directly inspired the game you’re making, too. Possibly you should read up on the precise technical limitations of its graphics and be precise about how many colors and moving objects you allow yourself. Possibly you might decide to break those limitations for the sake of making the game more fun, but it’s probably better to break them knowingly.
Then look at DOS games from that era. Same decisions and rabbit holes as above. Does it feel like there’s a harmony between them? Does one feel much better for the game you want to make? Play with shitty TV filters on the SNES and DOS shots.
Then doodle some things with fewer limitations. How do they feel? Does the lack of limitations make it easier or harder to animate an entire new game entity? And which one is more fun? Experiment, sketch, play, explore. It’s art. It’s also business. Maybe. Maybe you have a skazillion bucks to pay your bills and pay artists and musicians and whatnot while you develop it with no care for it selling even a single copy. Limited funds can stretch further with limited scope.
There is no single right answer to these questions. You need to find them yourself.
Indeed! My question was (mostly) rhetorical - I happen to be of the right age to have organically played some real 8 and 16-bit console video games on real CRT ; and also organically played a lot more 8 and 16-bit console video games emulated on a laptop LCD display, in an era where emulators were (mostly) playable but by no means autistically perfect. And I simply don't care whether modern pixel art games look like their pixels might've been smeared in a way characteristic of a real CRT or not. It honestly wasn't something I noticed very much at the time. It's not an artistic decision that I think should have much weight, compared to every other artistic decision someone making a modern pixel-art game needs to make.
Personally, my favorite 2D video game aesthetic was the vibrant look of high-quality late-SNES games, particularly Chrono Trigger (which obviously had a whole lot of things going right for it besides the art design). I've played a number of modern pixel-art games made by people who were clearly inspired by Chrono Trigger and eager to make graphics that look like it but without any of the SNES's technological limitations, and I'm all for it - Crosscode and (especially) Chained Echoes are salient examples, and I think both those games look great.
Really I think that deliberately courting persnickity people dissecting how Wrong it is that your pixel-art game has art displayed in three different pixel sizes that have aggressively non-integer relationships to each other might be a great way to get some free marketing. :)
If you want to look at a company that does pixel art right for the modern era, Yacht Club Games is probably the gold standard with games like Shovel Knight and Mina the Hollower.
I wish museums having old video game exhibits would respect the medium and display them on CRTs and that if they used LCD screens they would be as shamed as if they showed prints of paintings instead of the actual paintings
TLDR: "It wasn't CRT technology itself that made pixel art look better - it was the blatant artefacts of cheap, low dot pitch PAL and NTSC consumer electronics that coincided to create just the right amount of fuzz."
Somebody had better let know Nintendo they were doing pixel art wrong for the GB/A, this guy has Opinions. Pokemon is such a fake aesthetic, the only authentic and pure pixel art is whatever bullshit that happens to be exactly what the writer made.
What? The GBA knows exactly what it is and has all sorts of sprite scaling and rotation features that would look like total crap on a CRT: https://gbadev.net/gbadoc/sprites.html#attr3
Look at Kuru Kuru Kururin for example, a launch title where the GBA's fancy new sprite rotation effect is kinda the entire game:
I like to think of modern pixel art as its own aesthetic and art form. It's designed to be viewed on high DPI LED screens, and that's fine. I don't think it should be judged by how it looks on a CRT.
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.
Ironically, pixel art today is the affordable default for indie games.
I think it is, again, a way to work around limitations. Economic limitations in this case rather than technical.
Compared to modern HD graphics, pixel art is more affordable because you can hide a lot of details you would normally have to work on behind these fat pixels.
And the most interesting trick, to me, is that pixel art looks sharp! The non-CRT-like square pixels is a feature.
Blurry usually doesn't look good, it is as if your eyes can't focus, or that you are looking through a dirty window, it naturally registers as a problem. Real life has details and you are missing them. With sharp pixel boundaries, you are telling the brain "there is no problem with your eyes, everything is fine".
It is not the only way of introducing artificial details to make low detail pictures look fine: scanline effect, screen door effect, ostensible dithering, etc... But pixel art is a good compromise, in addition to being a recognizable somewhat nostalgic art style.
That's my theory at least.
Note that classical pixel art was not necessary particularly fat/blocky. Since SVGA become common, games like SimCity 2000 or Transport Tycoon Deluxe run in 640x480 on 14" CRT, which is ~60 DPI. Later (in second half of 1990s), higher resolution became common, but also higher screen sizes, so DPI was in 70-80 range. That is not really that different from full HD on 24" LCD (~92 DPI), which dominated later era.
Now I’m wondering what were some of the last generation of games to dominantly use fully hand-drawn pixel art. After 1995 or so, games using isometric art such as Red Alert (1996) and Fallout (1997) were more and more switching to sprites and environments rasterized from 3D models and hand-tweaked at most, as desktop 3D modeling became more affordable and SVGA resolutions meant less need to hand-fix aliasing artifacts.
c&c Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 used Boxes instead of sprites. But yes, PC pixel art was easy to see in the late 90s, specially in RTS games .
No, I mean that eg. Red Alert clearly used 3D modeled and rasterized sprites, not hand-drawn.
Good pixel art is quite difficult to make. This default pixel art usually isn't; it's just not that great.
Maybe not for long. It seems to be the art style most difficult to get right for diffusion models.
Yeah it seems very clear that the cheapest artstyle of the future will be whatever AI can output with minimal human editing or involvement. And some studios will go that route.
Although I don't see AI in game art becoming accepted by the wider public any time soon, and definitely not by the indie crowd.
I've also been thinking about this for animation. I foresee cheap limited animation (sliding layers, only mouth moving, etc) being replaced by incoherent un-/barely edited AI output instead.
> And some studios will go that route.
All of them will. It can save nearly 100% of costs for art production. Nobody can afford not to use it, unless they aren’t developing the game to make a profit.
> Although I don't see AI in game art becoming accepted by the wider public any time soon
It’s already being used everywhere without “the wider public” even noticing. Same in professional film and TV productions. It doesn’t look AI generated because they don’t just run Stable Diffusion and call it a day, but the reductions in labor costs are still immense even with the post-processing that’s currently still required to match AAA quality.
> All of them will. It can save nearly 100% of costs for art production. Nobody can afford not to use it, unless they aren’t developing the game to make a profit.
This is not correct. Your profit doesn't have to be relative to what another company makes. It would only be affected if games passed the savings on to the customers. You make more profit if you do use it potentially but it doesn't mean you don't make profit if you choose to go the traditional route.
> Nobody can afford not to use it
The games market has a massive oversupply. It's not enough to just "make a game", you have to make a good one. That is to say, better than all the other things your audience could be playing. Cheaping out is literally not an option. You can cheap out in one area to spend more effort in another area, but you can't just say "this is cheaper therefore it will be the default" because the default isn't good enough. Most games fail
I don't agree that the cheaper option is less good. I can admit that ai often (but not always) writes code with more attention to detail than I do, and much faster. Diffusion by itself does not produce human tier graphics (usually), but in combination with llms and heuristics it can do some things better than humans. When wielded by a graphic artist who could do it by hand with mixed media much less digitally, the amount of top tier art that can be produced is increased. Less expensive art doesn't have to mean worse art, it can mean equally good art, just note of it, art everywhere.
> All of them will. [...] It’s already being used everywhere without “the wider public” even noticing.
Doesn't your lot ever get tired of the intellectually lazy, rubbish absolutisms you peddle? Same goes for the projections; just because you slop it, doesn't mean everyone will.
It seems like a good pixel art model should be trained from scratch to emit high-quality low-resolution outputs, rather than trying to jerry-rig a generalist high-resolution model to unnaturally output tiny images (or even worse, a regular grid of exactly NxN color blocks).
CRTs are to video games what vinyl is to music and celluloid is to cinema. The flaws associated with the physical medium have become the defining aesthetic, such that a new medium which removes those flaws feels "sterile" and "hollow", like a concrete-slab brutalist building. There's also the sense of nostalgia. Rock music was less commercialized, or perceived as less commercialized, at the peak of the vinyl era (1960s-1970s). Computers and video games were more fun at the peak of the CRT era (1980s-1990s). So our brains kind of do this substitution wherein "warm fuzzy feelings we associate when X was popular" -> "X is better".
All I know is that when CDs hit the market I savored the additional detail they provided. A good, non-loudness-crushed recording had so many sumptuous highs I used to reach my fingers out and try to "feel" the consonants and vowels of the vocals. And when LCD monitors began to supplant CRTs my eyes were relieved at the additional sharpness. I remember these transition points, so I can say definitively that there was a time when we thought the newer stuff was indeed an improvement.
> I remember these transition points, so I can say definitively that there was a time when we thought the newer stuff was indeed an improvement.
Exactly. Around 1999, I switched from 17" CRT to 14" LCD, as the sharpness of the LCD was breathtaking and made up for the smaller screen size.
> I don't know if the CRT version is taken from an actual CRT, but I doubt it - I actually think it looks too fuzzy. I may be wrong - it could be an effect of a close-up photo scaled up - but it's more likely a CRT approximation generated by a software filter on a modern machine.
On both the NES and SNES, the pixels were so large that you could clearly see them even when using an RF adaptor. Each pixel was two scan lines, and wide enough that dithering was still very visible. The same goes for older games in the arcades up to (roughly) the early 1990s, (and I didn't spend much time in arcades after that.)
Not to say that artists didn't take advantage of CRT quirks, but you needed a really $h1tty TV, (much worse than the ones that I and my friends had) if they were going to fuzz away the edges.
The 12” TV that I played SNES on had convenient brightness/tint/sharpness dials. Depending on my mood I’d turn sharpness all the way up for hard pixels or all the way down for a free Gaussian sampling filter ;)
It's not that CRTs were "forgiving", it's that designers leaned into what they'd do to pixels. A classic example is the tanks in Atari 2600 Combat - they look ridiculous on a hi-res screen. On a CRT they sort of look like tanks.
I have a JAMMA cabinet at home. It has a CRT in it. I usually play on x-in-1 pirate emulator board. So I don't mind that not all the hardware is authentic. But it's important to me that the screen is authentic, or it all just feels wrong. The curve must be there, the scanlines must be there.
I really get quite cross when you visit a museum and they've got retro games playing on flatscreen LCDs. Doubly so when it's meant to be a vector game.
> I also agree that modern, blocky pixel art often is a kind of misdirected, anachronistic nostalgia.
Pixel art, for me, is the Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advanced which I never played on a CRDT.
Same thought here, GBA was the peak of mainstream 2D graphics for me. I look at games from that era and often times they have aged well, they still look ideal to me.
I enjoyed playing GBA game the most on my Anbernic. They do feel good to play in the way the previous generation just doesn't.
Hear hear. I’m so tired of this pixel art elitism (exhibited in the article) which asserts with certainty that our fondness for pixel art comes from viewing it distorted on CRTs.
The Game Boy was insanely popular, is part of many people’s introduction to and fondness for pixel art, and it had an LCD screen.
This is not elitism, it's about historical accuracy. This is how many remember the games of their youth.
> elitism
I was being facetious with that word, I don’t believe it literally.
> it's about historical accuracy.
Historical accuracy means recognising not everyone had the same experience. Yes, many remember pixel art from CRTs, but many also remember it from LCDs.
My criticism if of the idea that liking sharp pixels is “a kind of misdirected, anachronistic nostalgia”, a misremembering of the CRT days. Even before we consider LCDs, it is reductive to link this to nostalgia—pixel art is an art form that stands on its own.
And not just that; invoking the Game Boy here is not the closer many people think it is, given that its STN LCD screen was fuzzy (e. g. ghosting) yet also had this distinct, subdued lo-fi glow, almost like looking through a zoetrope. Somewhat analog to lo-fi CRT setups.
The ghosting on the original Game Boy did not blend pixel boundaries and did not affect static images. It looks nothing like a CRT and nothing like a zoetrope (which has sharp images and reasonably low sample-and-hold blur because of the strobing).
> The ghosting on the original Game Boy did not blend pixel boundaries and did not affect static images.
It still gives you, especially when factoring in the condition of the STN screen, a "fuzzy" picture and with its own lo-fi glow, analogous to a CRT setup. Which was the point. I owned a brick, from 1992 onwards.
> It looks nothing [...] like a zoetrope (which has sharp images and reasonably low sample-and-hold blur because of the strobing).
"Sharp images" is certainly not the experience I had when looking through 'em at country fairs back in East Germany in the mid-to-late 80s.
Also I remember the game magazines had advertistements in the back for VGA adapters for the SNES.
My neighbor had one and we all agreed that the sharper picture looked better.
https://www.jamesfmackenzie.com/2026/09/06/plugging-a-snes-d...
While the Sonic waterfall is probably deliberate, I find it more likely that people have always preferred the highest resolution and the crispest graphics they can afford.
>I remember the game magazines had advertistements in the back for VGA adapters for the SNES.
Those adapters have converter chips in them and are a very recent thing. One from your link was released in 2025, a full year after last gaming magazine stopped being printed, and 30 years since last magazine covering SNES shut down.
snes rgb cables on the other hand were always available, and even bundled with console in certain markets.
Follow-up article: https://datagubbe.se/crt2/
Related, I usually hate CRT filters in game, the scan lines usually look too strong (and often the image is darkened inappropriately), but I really liked the one in Cyber Shadow. It just felt right.
It's very hit or miss. Abylight Studios (Super Hydorah, Cursed Castilla) seems to do them pretty well, but then I've seen some that left me wondering how they ever made it past QC. (I won't name them because it's been a while and I don't want to name the wrong game.)
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.
I know someone who uses a CRT filter for vscode... I thought that was just a meme theme we all downloaded and clicked once to check it out then turned it off but he likes it along with his exploding text characters, forgot the name of that, powerblock or whatever. His vscode triggers my ADHD like trying to read a too busy restaurant menu, literally can't absorb anything.
I use it in Windows Terminal when in a cmd.exe shell (as opposed to a PowerShell or Git Bash shell)
Also, for MacOS: https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term
The Phosphor screensaver module in xscreensaver doubles as a functional console.
https://marcelwunderlich.com/using-phosphor-xscreensaver-for...
This seems like, probably, the only appropriate usage of crt effect.
I thought the Macbook Pro LCDs were bright enough, high-res-enough, and fast enough to make a very accurate CRT simulation. Here it is: https://github.com/baragona/crt-xdr
It looks so much like a CRT to me. It looks like pressing your face up to a TV to see the individual phosphors. Try setting "signal" to dropped image and viewing some images. It looks like an old TV.
Bottom line, whatever you think a CRT is doing, you can probably simulate it quite accurately.
You can’t simulate the motion clarity of CRTs (yet).
You don't want to simulate the god-awful flicker my CRT has at 60Hz.
The hysteresis of the phosphor makes this a non-issue in reality. 60Hz looks great on a CRT when the input is a game console or VCR from the era.
Maybe you mean screen tearing, bad deinterlacing, etc. caused by software running on a PC?
No, I mean the screen noticeably flickers when displaying a static image at 60Hz progressive.
I mean... are you bobbing and weaving your head while rolling your tongue or what?
I get that CRTs aren't perfect, but I'm not sure how else to reproduce what you're calling "flicker".
perhaps was 60hz interlaced. I had memories of my first CRT monitor only allowing to do 1024x768 in interlaced and doing a very obvious flickering. But was flicker free at 800x600 and lower resolutions.
You can increase the refresh rate until it goes away. I don't think anyone notices flicker at 80Hz or so.
Yeah, there's no visible flicker at 70Hz or higher.
My CRT did 1024x768@85 just fine.
The flicker is fine, especially with 240p and 480p.
You do want to simulate it, because it's the only way to preserve the original motion quality of games designed around a fixed 60 fps frame rate without changing the gameplay or adding latency.
Repo should have at least a few screenshots
Not so clear in the article is that also with consoles the game pixel grid didn't match the CRT grid (e.g. horizontally the number of "pixels" is similar but not 1:1) so just by geometry you have blending of one pixel data into several CRT "pixels" (plus varying intensity even in a single phosphor patch as the analog RGB signals rise and fall in intensity).
As for CRT filters one can argue how realistic they are but they show that scanline gaps and blending at least can produce amazing perceptual improvements as shown in this video: https://youtu.be/nw2QfPREu-Q
I appreciate the author calling out the point that dithering etc. was definitely visible on better-quality CRT monitors via RGB/VGA signals.
So many people these days mistake the blurring from composite signals as being due to the CRT. A CRT doesn't magically blend pixels together. And there are certainly many tradeoffs to using composite so that many people prefer the sharper pixels of RGB.
> Modern flatscreens all have fixed resolutions
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.
It’s interesting though that composite PAL/NTSC (especially NTSC) has a massive effect on the picture, owed to the fact that the color carrier was embedded into the luminance spectrum, so a re-digitized PAL/NTSC signal will still look very different from a digital-output-first signal, or a re-digitized VGA or component signal.
There’s some evidence that console games of the era were sometimes designed for the effect composite NTSC has on the overall picture: https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-case-for-co...
Pixelation is clear on a CRT. Long before people stopped using CRTs, the blocky pixel aesthetic was immediately recognizable to everyone as the “video game look”. The earliest Flash movies on sites like Newgrounds, around the turn of the millennium, used the blocky pixel art style (and we were all still using CRT TVs at that point). I simply don’t see the argument about the pixel aesthetic being not original to that time.
This seems a bit focused on a specific era of pixel art games AND CRTs. For me, nostalgia was things like Master of Magic or Civilization 1/2, and I played those on CRTs attached to PCs, not in an arcade - the pixels absolutely did not blend together into rounded shapes due to fuzzy scan lines.
The article is about SD CRTs (480i for NTSC or 576i for PAL, or more commonly for games 240p/288p progressive scan using non-standard timing, often underscanned with pixels left unused in the borders).
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.
Ha I remember SVGA. Darn we're old. But pixel art was definitely a style of it's own then and thats what my modern efforts attempt to replicate, at least
The sharpness of the pixel is in the display connector, not the resolution.
If you assume a SD CRT, as the article does, then yes, the display connection makes the most difference (although there are still differences between individual CRTs).
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.
If you use RF or composite on a high res screen, including LCD or OLED, the result would be similarly fuzzy.
But in practice, VGA and SVGA CRTs always used RGB connections, so that's not relevant to games.
In Europe, TV CRTs and game consoles also commonly used RGB connections (SCART), so the distinction between CRT and connection matters.
Those are the SD CRTs the article talks about, not the VGA or SVGA CRTs used to play DOS games.
I still think this isn't really true:
> If you display low resolution art on a CRT designed for high resolutions it makes a big difference in pixel sharpness.
Basically, PC CRTs would always be quite sharp, due to VGA, no matter whether it (the CRT) had a low or high resolution.
>PC CRTs would always be quite sharp, due to VGA, no matter whether it (the CRT) had a low or high resolution.
VGA CRTs are always "high resolution" compared to the SD CRTs discussed in the article. If you display a mode 13h DOS game on SD CRT, which is possible with special hardware, it will not look as sharp as it would on the VGA CRT is was designed for.
This sharpness from using higher resolution CRTs is in addition to the sharpness from using RGB connections. And if you somehow manage to connect a VGA CRT over composite, it will be less sharp but still sharper than a SD CRT over composite.
The point is there are two factors here: the sharpness of the CRT itself and the sharpness of the connection method. The article only talks about SD CRTs, so the CRT's sharpness isn't going to make much difference there. But when you consider MS-DOS games, which used sharper CRTs, the CRT's sharpness becomes important.
Not always true. I just recently watched video about Tandy VGM-225. Which had bad picture. Most likely due to being reused cheap TV. You can't magic more resolution out when you do not have enough "subpixels"... That is the grid of holes is too coarse compared to resolution.
Then again this is early 90s CRT most likely with design from 80s just upgraded to display VGA. Later and more expensive CRTs got much better.
>due to VGA
Notably, the OG VGA card from IBM could already do 640×480 with 16 colors and 720x400 in text mode.
And TVs supported 480i and later 480p. It was only the old consoles that ran at considerably lower resolution.
480p ("EDTV") wasn't very common. Most people upgraded directly from SDTV to HDTV.
Brand-new arcade CRTs are razor sharp, and certainly do not accept an RF signal (I don't think they accept composite either). With time the electron beam starts to diverge, and things can get a little blurry or color-fringey.
What I've found—based on limited experience with a "modern" arcade cabinet (Fix-it Felix Jr., a tie-in promotion to the 2012 film Wreck-it Ralph)—is that if you have an LCD or OLED that can do true enough blacks, the effect is very similar to having a brand spanking new CRT, even in arcade applications.
But that goes only for raster games. Nothing we currently have can replace the razor-sharp, completely unaliased lines of an original Asteroids and its vector display.
> if you have an LCD or OLED that can do true enough blacks, the effect is very similar to having a brand spanking new CRT, even in arcade applications.
CRTs are inherently less blurry when your eyes follow moving objects on screen, which they do all the time ("smooth pursuit"). The reason is that LCDs and OLED displays show each frame for the entire frame time (like 1/60th of a second) during which your eyes, and the corresponding tracked object, move. This creates a blur. E.g. if an object moves on the screen 10 pixels horizontally per frame, on an LCD/OLED you would then see 10 pixels of horizontal blur. This doesn't happen on CRTs because they flash each frame only for an extremely short period of time and are relatively dark otherwise. At 60 Hz, they don't show the frame for 1/60th of a second, but about 1/1000th or something like that. This time is so short that during it, even fast moving objects and the eyes that track them hardly move at all, which results in basically zero blur. See https://testufo.com/ to see the blur. On a CRT, with matched FPS and Hz, the test would appear completely sharp.
It is true that LCDs and OLED screens are much brighter (especially LCD) and that OLED has better black levels, but CRT screens have much better motion clarity.
CRTs almost never show the entire frame at all. The phosphor decay on a typical television CRT is so rapid that by the time the beam hits the right-hand side of any given scanline, the left side is completely dark.
And unfortunately that motion clarity comes at a cost: flicker. Some people, like my sister, cannot bear that cost. She has photosensitive epilepsy, but even before that ripened into full-on seizures in her 20s she became profoundly uncomfortable playing video games, and never got truly into them until flat panels predominated. Even without photosensitive epilepsy, flicker can be annoyingly perceptible and cause eyestrain even if you don't consciously register it. Most of the motion blur mitigation strategies we see on panels, like black frame insertion, suffer from the same problems. The only way we'll come close to solving both problems at once is with very high speed panels, but until then I'll take a bit of blur, thank you.
Yeah flicker, that is true. But people without epilepsy didn't really notice it on video content (TV or video games), even at 50 Hz (PAL) in Europe.
On PCs with static content, flicker was a lot more noticable at 60 Hz, e.g. when staring at a white Word document. But increasing the Hz to something like 85 Hz made the flicker practically disappear. (Not sure whether that would sufficient for people with photosensitive epilepsy. And it wasn't a solution available for consoles anyway.)
As somebody that grew up in Canada (NTSC), I noticed the 50Hz flicker on visits to Europe whenever the screen was white, but eventually my brain would filter it out and it didn't bother me. I wonder if I'd notice it on a modern NTSC screen. It's been a long time since I saw one...
Later many or even most PAL TVs were actually 100 Hz (advertised as "100 Hz flicker-free"), but I don't remember seeing the difference. They weren't optimal for games because they used a digital cache to double the input frame rate. Native Hz CRTs could be completely analog with extremely low input latency.
Probably depended. Most TVs I saw were in public places (eg bars) or hotels, which probably didn't have the most modern, high-end TVs around.
What I did notice is that colours, even on cheap TVs, always looked relatively good on PAL. Its colour system was unequivocally better.
This is a great post. Also reminded me of a video I saw a few months ago that was equally as entertaining (and somewhat informative): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-8y2R6IxI
Heck yeah, you are so right. Also, the video was fun, thanks.
My old 19-inch CRT's are dead, but I'm so glad I saved save three 17-inchers - one shadow-mask, and two aperture-grill. But the older I get, the heavier they seem go be, oh well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_mask https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_grille
The two articles by the author are focused on the sharpness aspect. What's missing are the dilation/contraction due to beam intensity and resultant gamma. You can take away the scanlines and phosphor filter and still get a more "classic" image with just a modified bilinear filter.
A particularly good example of this are the whites of Mario's and Yoshi's eyes in SMW. They look much better with dilation. (No pun intended)
The article contradicts itself for some reason. First it repeats the popular myth that CRTs made the image fuzzy, then it clarifies that this was mostly caused by RF or composite connectors. Which would produce similarly fuzzy results on LCDs or OLED screens. As the article points out, CRTs connected via S-Video or SCART did look quite sharp. The same is true for PC CRTs connected via VGA or similar.
That does relate some to my issue with a lot of CRT evangelism. Retroactively its easy to say "oh well you just needed the right input, avoid all these CRT brands, and other pitfalls. Maybe mod your console to have cleaner video output, and so on".
The reality is most people had far less than ideal setups, yet most will try to hold CRTs to a standard near impossible to most of the era.
The real advantage of CRTs was the fact that they strobed the frames, unlike sample-and-hold screens (LCD and OLED). The latter cause a blurry image during eye movement ("smooth pursuit"). Games which ran at a frame rate which was equal to the CRT Hz did have basically zero persistence blur. The UFO would appear perfectly sharp: https://testufo.com/
If your CRT had Component or SCART (not sure this was a brand thing so much as model to model, like imagine your parents bought a Sony TV with no HDMI port in the current year and then insisted you told them Sony was good in their defense) you often just needed one official cable and you were good to go. SNES and newer should be simple, NES needed modding but I wouldn't call that the norm.
The N64 goes back to requiring mods for RGB SCART though. The later SNES models removed RGB support too.
Similarly later GameCube models removed support for component cables.
I think when people think about CRTs and NES/Atari, they aren’t thinking about _monitors_ they are thinking about the low quality TVs and hooked up through the antenna adapter, which absolutely did wash pixels out to some extent.
As a retro gamer I think the people worrying about pixel blurring is overblown. I think a lot fewer artists actually intentionally used it than these articles make out
There's a reason it always comes back to the same few examples, peach hanging from a rope, dracula's eyes, sonic behind the waterfall. If it were used as widely as some people make out then we wouldn't have to keep resorting to the same 3 examples.
That and CRTs stopped being so blurry over the years anyway (especially PC CRTs), so by the time you reached the 16 bit era you couldn't rely on a blurry TV to create your effect
This video has 30 examples: https://youtu.be/nw2QfPREu-Q
Not saying you're wrong on the main message (and those examples are with filters rather than true CRT) but it's still impressive how it can make the pixel art better looking in those cases.
Why is no one manufacturing CRTs in 2026? Seriously this is such a lost art.
Seems obvious that it would be incredibly expensive to do for something very few would buy.
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.
>or just using shaders for free (which gets you 99% there on an HDR 4k
It gets you about 90% of the image quality and 0% of the motion quality. Simulating CRT motion quality on a sample-and-hold display requires around 1000Hz refresh rate.
Well, seems like we're getting there in terms of refresh rate, if not there already, so still easier and cheaper than making new CRTs.
*presets
CRTs emit gamma ray at high power(>5kV is usually the quoted figure), and the standard solution was a bandaid fix of attaching leaded gamma ray blocking glass onto the screen. This high lead glass cannot be recycled, and the EU(rightfully) don't like any of that. I don't know if manufacturing of CRTs are banned or legally infeasible, but it's clearly not encouraged.
There are still some types of CRT-related vacuum tubes in production for applications digital equivalents are objectively less performant in.
Leaded glass was a cost-cutting measure, used only for the back and sides of CRT. Leaded glass gradually turns brown under X-ray exposure, so the front screen used barium and strontium instead. There's no reason the whole CRT couldn't use this kind of glass. There are probably other heavy elements that would work too.
(Early black-and-white CRTs running at lower voltage did use leaded glass for the front too, but they aren't the CRTs people interested in old games care about.)
X-rays! not gamma rays.
> There are still some types of CRT-related vacuum tubes in production for applications digital equivalents are objectively less performant in.
Like what? The only significant applications I'm aware of for vacuum tubes nowadays are high-power RF amplifiers (including household microwave magnetrons) and intentional X-ray emitters.
Night vision goggles. The photodiode + CsO + lead coated charged glass capillary amp thing is apparently still superior to solid state image sensors with amplifiers in metrics like SNR, minimum luminosity, and longer wave IR response. The performance gap is wide enough that there's a Chinese Norinco subsidiary that entered the market during 2010s by licensing technology from an EU company.
You can get these tiny 3 inch black and white CRTs from china. They arent really good for anything but writing hackaday articles tho.
I think plasma displays are a much better option. We really should bring them back. The latest generation of plasma TVs drove their active elements at frequencies in excess of 600hz. You could do a lot of clever things with these panels. They are basically digital CRTs.
A plasma TV in a pitch black room set to its maximum output power is still the most incredible experience I've ever had outside of a commercial venue.
Self emission is the real magic trick. Not the pattern with which we scan.
As far as I know, all plasma screens use pulse width modulation to control the brightness of each subpixel. This produces even worse motion quality than a typical LCD; you get both sample-and-hold blur from the high persistence, and phantom array effect artifacts from the PWM. IMO, plasma displays are only suitable for watching movies, which have terrible motion quality anyway because of the low 24 fps frame rate.
I agree the response time is not fantastic, but if we are going for the effect of CRTs, it's not that far off the mark. Certainly higher latency than CRT and (properly driven) LCD.
Consumers at large don't like them. In the same desk or table you have a crt monitor or tv, you can have a muuuuch bigger flat screen with higher resolution that weighs a tenth as much.
Because it would be incredibly expensive for such small production runs (not to mention the cost of shipping)
First weight. Then resolution. I think SoTA for CRTs peaked at early HD resolution 720. One might be able to modulate the beam faster now. Size. And safety - anyone starting up production now would have to solve the safety issues from scratch. Nothing like a few cubic feet of vacuum imploding to ruin your day.
Resolutions were very high for the time, I have a 2002 LG f900p (pretty high end, yes but it wasn't super expensive even back in the day) running at 1920*1200@85hz and it's a delight to work and play on it.
IMO, the only factor that kills the crt vs a moderm monitor is the size and weight. I imagine resolution would be limited by how small the dot pitch can actually be made to be with modern processes but with the advances in magnets and power electronics devices I imagine going at MHz horizontal frequency would be not that hard.
CRT monitors up to 1600×1200 were available and 1280×1024 was very common.
I used to have a ViewSonic PC CRT that went up to 2048x1536. Sadly my family didn't realize the worth and tossed it out along with a bunch of other CRTs many years ago. In hindsight we should've tested them all and kept the nicest ones.
I sat before a second-hand 20" 1280x1024 monitor in 2001. And it was old (as in >5 years) at that point.
then there was Iiyama Vision Master Pro 514 with 140-ish kHz horisontal scan
No demand. There is some imaginary demand but I doubt it will realise. And on other side LCD screens are very cheap. 74,25€ for 24" IPS. With 25,5% of that being tax... There is no way CRTs with current volumes would be anywhere close.
bet they are in China
My main gripe is with sloppy technique. A lot - not all, but a lot - of modern pixel art is purposely made to look overly blocky. Dithering and anti-aliasing just isn't utilized, which makes it look even chunkier than actual old game art does on a modern screen. It seems to me as if the artists are worried that classic pixel art techniques would make things look too good, though I personally believe the opposite applies.
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.
My family had a real SNES hooked up to a real (and real shitty) CRT TV, and I played games on it. But I also had a desktop PC and then eventually a laptop computer where I played a lot more games than we actually owned via ZSNES. We also had a NES at one point that I think we got from our older cousin, but it broke. So I only ever played Final Fantasy 1 or Chrystalis emulated.
If I was today going to make a pixel art game grounded in nostalgia for these games, what style of screen should I be aiming for? Do I even want to do that, as opposed to making a pixel art game that looks good on a modern screen?
These are all aesthetic decisions. What feelings does a smeary CRT SNES screen evoke? What does a crisper 1993 DOS screen feel like to you? Which one better matches the mood of the game you want to make?
Probably you should screengrab some games from the first couple years of the SNES’ life and doodle things for your game that look like those screens. Possibly some later games that more directly inspired the game you’re making, too. Possibly you should read up on the precise technical limitations of its graphics and be precise about how many colors and moving objects you allow yourself. Possibly you might decide to break those limitations for the sake of making the game more fun, but it’s probably better to break them knowingly.
Then look at DOS games from that era. Same decisions and rabbit holes as above. Does it feel like there’s a harmony between them? Does one feel much better for the game you want to make? Play with shitty TV filters on the SNES and DOS shots.
Then doodle some things with fewer limitations. How do they feel? Does the lack of limitations make it easier or harder to animate an entire new game entity? And which one is more fun? Experiment, sketch, play, explore. It’s art. It’s also business. Maybe. Maybe you have a skazillion bucks to pay your bills and pay artists and musicians and whatnot while you develop it with no care for it selling even a single copy. Limited funds can stretch further with limited scope.
There is no single right answer to these questions. You need to find them yourself.
Indeed! My question was (mostly) rhetorical - I happen to be of the right age to have organically played some real 8 and 16-bit console video games on real CRT ; and also organically played a lot more 8 and 16-bit console video games emulated on a laptop LCD display, in an era where emulators were (mostly) playable but by no means autistically perfect. And I simply don't care whether modern pixel art games look like their pixels might've been smeared in a way characteristic of a real CRT or not. It honestly wasn't something I noticed very much at the time. It's not an artistic decision that I think should have much weight, compared to every other artistic decision someone making a modern pixel-art game needs to make.
Personally, my favorite 2D video game aesthetic was the vibrant look of high-quality late-SNES games, particularly Chrono Trigger (which obviously had a whole lot of things going right for it besides the art design). I've played a number of modern pixel-art games made by people who were clearly inspired by Chrono Trigger and eager to make graphics that look like it but without any of the SNES's technological limitations, and I'm all for it - Crosscode and (especially) Chained Echoes are salient examples, and I think both those games look great.
Really I think that deliberately courting persnickity people dissecting how Wrong it is that your pixel-art game has art displayed in three different pixel sizes that have aggressively non-integer relationships to each other might be a great way to get some free marketing. :)
If you want to look at a company that does pixel art right for the modern era, Yacht Club Games is probably the gold standard with games like Shovel Knight and Mina the Hollower.
https://www.yachtclubgames.com/blog/the-art-of-the-game
SNES 1chip using RGB/SCART is worthy of imitation. Don't bother recreating a crummy Composite signal.
I wish museums having old video game exhibits would respect the medium and display them on CRTs and that if they used LCD screens they would be as shamed as if they showed prints of paintings instead of the actual paintings
In a similar vein, for chip manufacturing, in the lithography process, they predistort features so that after etching, they get the desired shape.
Good watch on the topic that very much drives the point home in excruciating detail with a ton of side by side comparisons
what did you do by Noodle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-8y2R6IxI
I'd more than argue that even on a modern digital display, a pixel is NOT a little square.
Modern displays just can't replicate the warmth and blending a good CRT offered, especially for 2D sprites.
TLDR: "It wasn't CRT technology itself that made pixel art look better - it was the blatant artefacts of cheap, low dot pitch PAL and NTSC consumer electronics that coincided to create just the right amount of fuzz."
Somebody had better let know Nintendo they were doing pixel art wrong for the GB/A, this guy has Opinions. Pokemon is such a fake aesthetic, the only authentic and pure pixel art is whatever bullshit that happens to be exactly what the writer made.
What? The GBA knows exactly what it is and has all sorts of sprite scaling and rotation features that would look like total crap on a CRT: https://gbadev.net/gbadoc/sprites.html#attr3
Look at Kuru Kuru Kururin for example, a launch title where the GBA's fancy new sprite rotation effect is kinda the entire game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYvUZXT_43k
https://www.spriters-resource.com/game_boy_advance/kurukuruk...