- cross-posted to:
- mealtimevideos@lemmy.cafe
- cross-posted to:
- mealtimevideos@lemmy.cafe
You must log in or register to comment.
This was a really great watch. I have never seen it broken down in this way before.
Can’t believe I haven’t seen his videos before. Cool stuff
Noodle’s great. I highly recommend their video on the Matrix’s green-ness.
It’s a good video, the Dracula and waterfall examples were super evocative for me.
Great video, though I think it’s overstated how on-purpose these things were. I was only playing games in the 90s, but my understanding is the art was mostly authored on deluxe paint / on various PC systems/monitors. While also CRT, they would have much higher fidelity. I don’t know how much artists were drawing, compiling for the console and viewing on a TV to make pixel by pixel adjustments. Not to mention TVs varied wildly in quality, so it’s not like artists were ‘tuning’ their pixels for a particular CRT fuzz.
There was more of a general understanding that the TV looked worse, and to not pack key details into single pixels. Stuff like dithering and drawing shadows were existing techniques in print, and still effective today on LCDs when you render at the correct resolution.
I think CRTs were just better at displaying low resolutions generally. Watching a DVD on CRT looks amazing, on a 4k LCD it looks terrible. Even modern 3D games look amazing on a CRT.
I don’t know how much artists were drawing, compiling for the console and viewing on a TV to make pixel by pixel adjustments.
It’s inevitably highly variable, but many computers at the time supported composite-out natively, as it couldn’t always be guaranteed that a consumer would be able to afford a dedicated monitor as well. This was less common on PC’s, but Amiga’s (Deluxe Paint’s native environment) and Atari ST’s both came with composite out built-in. It wouldn’t have been difficult at the time for an artist at a game studio to mirror their high-definition monitor output on a standard composite TV to have a real-time comparison, and make adjustments to suit the fuzzyness of a consumer TV.
The bigger Japanese studios developing for the home-consoles of the 80’s and 90’s would’ve had access to custom development hardware and software specific to each console, but even then, they would usually have a lower-res TV nearby to see how their zoomed in sprite-work on an RGB monitor would translate to a TV, you can see an example of that from a dev-station at nintento, working on Mario 3:
(Picture source is from this video, which goes into more detail on how games were developed in that period).
I could be wrong but I think that photo shows the workflow I was describing, the PC compiles and loads the game onto the console that runs it. You can run it and see how it looks, and while no doubt streamlined, makes the act of drawing and viewing the final output a bit disconnected.
That said I seem to be totally proved wrong by another part of the video showing hardware I’d never heard of, the Sega Digitizer System. It looks like a tool to draw with a reference screen that’s updated in real time. It seems really helpful for drawing sprites in situ and surely enabled artists to fine tune pixels to look good on the monitor.
I think for me**, the negatives probably outweigh the positives. Particularly as the CRT screen I’d actually get (for free) wouldn’t even be widescreen. Bulky small screen. Not a trinitron and I don’t think the connection and conversion would be great either.
CRT filters are interesting too, but seems like a high bar as well. The only one (of those that I could get to work) I think I really like is the triangular* filter in PCSX2 (with upscaling). Even then I can live without it… it improves FMVs and UI icons, downside being some distant/small objects are obscured, and font quality can go either way (marginally). Also a bit odd when games also use their own CRT shaders.
* Lottes actually (better color), but the 2 lottes shaders in Duckstation don’t look like that OotB
** admittedly not super into pixel stuff, I made an inconsistent resource pack for MC many years ago but I doubt CRT would do much with free 3D. I’m more interested in vertex colors, again aesthetically it might be interesting with trianglular filter but a lot less technical benefit.
EDIT: I should also say that 1:1 (2D) pixel art on a CRT would be different methodology, and thus maybe I’d like it better. With modern textured 3D, large flat areas of color (or even dither patterns) feels like a waste, so making everything detailed can really add to the work (particularly when you have tons of texture variants to make).
If I remember right, exactly this was why for a very long time people would laugh at early LCD screens, saying everything looked bad.
It was only after game devs started making games on LCD screens that this slowly changed.
They had low refresh rates and horrible motion blur in the early days. It took like 15 years for the situation to improve but have since mostly been surpassed by OLED and other new technologies.
That and that they can’t switch resolutions like CRTs can. LCDs can only show one resolution without interpolation where CRTs can show multiple natively (within specific limits). In the olden days it was fairly common to run the desktop in 1024x768 or 800x600 and games at 640x480 or even lower on less powerful machines. Early LCDs were really bad at interpolation so lots of people stuck with CRTs for gaming.
