Reminds me of all the great Crusader Kings classics such as:
What are the best ways to murder my gay / stupid / disabled son?
My wife isn't producing children, do I need to murder her and marry a younger one?
I'm paranoid and sadistic, who should I murder to manage my stress?
I have mixed feelings about this. If you zoom in, it looks especially bad. If you are talking about consoles that had like 320x240 pixel resolutions, it is especially bad, but a high resolution LCD display can use filters/shaders (whatever you want to call them) to mitigate the blockiness to a large degree. Early LCDs were simply no match for a good CRT. I would argue with people all the time and they simply couldn’t believe it and thought I was crazy. But now that we have LCDs with more than 4K resolution it is game over for CRTs and my back hurts just thinking about moving another 100 lb vacuum tube monitor.
Yeah, of course games made back then are going to look ridiculous scaled up to 1080p or higher. The SNES had a resolution of 256×224, and the graphics were designed with the drawbacks of 50/60hz interlaced displays in mind. Nowadays, we have progressive scan consumer-grade TVs at 4K resolutions and refresh rates of 120hz. It doesn’t make sense to scale the graphics up directly.
I disagree but only because I’ve seen it showed to me by my friends who are super into this. When games were made for TV and consoles especially in the late 80’s and 90’s they did things that took advantage of the analog nature Cathode Tubes used to display the image. Not every game took advantage of these techniques but the ones that do are nothing short of amazing when you think about it. They make filters these days that emulate some of these effects but analog is still analog and isn’t something a digital display can always emulate regardless of resolution. I would say for most people it just doesn’t matter that much but if your a retro gamer you want the OG experience.
There are other things as well for example light guns which just straight do not work on a newer display. Games that had live action recorded video look hilarious because the same techniques that were used to make things look better were applied in make up form to the actors.
What is a bit sad is the specific techniques these developers used aren’t being well recorded and documented which I think would be very useful for future emulation and filtering.
Somewhat similar to your example of designing for analog TVs, certain games for the original Gameboy took advantage of the terrible ghosting for transparency effects. Like ZAS. On an IPS screen mod or an emulator, these just look flickery. But they make a neat effect on an original screen. Haven’t seen any filters fix that yet.
It’s also about resolution scaling. When 240p or 480p was common, most people only had 15-25" screens so they looked accurate. Nowadays 40-65" is common and 4K is the common resolution, or 1080p for smaller/cheaper TVs.
1080p is 2.25 times larger than 480p, 4K is 8 times larger than 480p (my math may be off…). Take any 480p picture and then zoom in 800% and it will look like shit, putting a 480p picture on a screen with a native 4K resolution will do the same thing. The screen is simply too big for it to look like it would on a common CRT unless you’re like 25 feet away from the screen.
I tried this in university. I knew the right answer but not how to get it, so I made a “mistake” in the calcs. It was circled with “something’s not right”. No marks.
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