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.
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.
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.
>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.
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
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 <a href="https://testufo.com/" rel="nofollow">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.
AdeptusAquinas · · focus · HN ↗
mrob · · focus · HN ↗
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.
cubefox · · focus · HN ↗
mrob · · focus · HN ↗
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.
cubefox · · focus · HN ↗
mrob · · focus · HN ↗
cubefox · · focus · HN ↗
mrob · · focus · HN ↗
cubefox · · focus · HN ↗
> 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.
Ekaros · · focus · HN ↗
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.
mrob · · focus · HN ↗
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.
ahartmetz · · focus · HN ↗
Notably, the OG VGA card from IBM could already do 640×480 with 16 colors and 720x400 in text mode.
cubefox · · focus · HN ↗
mrob · · focus · HN ↗
AdeptusAquinas · · focus · HN ↗
bitwize · · focus · HN ↗
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.
cubefox · · focus · HN ↗
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 <a href="https://testufo.com/" rel="nofollow">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.
bitwize · · focus · HN ↗
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.
cubefox · · focus · HN ↗
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.)
hylaride · · focus · HN ↗
cubefox · · focus · HN ↗
hylaride · · focus · HN ↗
What I did notice is that colours, even on cheap TVs, always looked relatively good on PAL. Its colour system was unequivocally better.