[city41]

Honestly most (if not all) retro gamers don't feel that way. We prefer to see the actual pixels. The XRGB Framemeister upscaler is the most popular way to play retro games on modern TVs, and it provides a visual experience about equivalent to an emulator on a PC. The other popular way is to use an RGB monitor. Both provide pretty darn close to pixel perfect rendering.

I've never met a single gamer into old games that prefers the artifacts the old, cruddy CRTs we used to use had. We're all quite relieved they're gone, to be honest.

[chongli]

Speak for yourself. I prefer to have accurate rendering, especially for something like pseudo transparency which straight pixel displays always get wrong.

[city41]

But I challenge the notion of "accurate rendering". Only America had crappy TVs. Europe had SCART and Japan had RGB21. While America was suffering through a blurry mess, everyone else had beautiful RGB output. I strongly contest the idea that developers "intended" games to look that way.

[Fej]

He's referring to a certain trick used to create neat transparency effects on CRTs. Like this one: http://i.imgur.com/9pI7cK3.png

Of course, that was most certainly intended, and the effect could be seen on any CRT (afaik).

[city41]

That isn't actually a CRT effect. A good quality CRT would look like the left picture. For example Mega Man X4 is often cited as using this "effect" as well, http://www.mattgreer.org/articles/sega-saturn-and-transparen.... But here's the same game running on my arcade CRT monitor: http://i.imgur.com/SAUkg5J.jpg

And my arcade monitor is not a good CRT at all (sadly...). Good CRTs look like this: http://imgur.com/a/Ad0pe In the last photo of the fighting game, that "grid" pattern in the back of the meters would look like the Sonic waterfall on bad CRTs, but is clearly defined on good ones

There are some CRT specific effects. For example the black shadow under the ninja in this video should be rapidly moving back and forth between each character to accomplish a transparency effect. But most modern TVs can't do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYsa8NQICnY

(For the record good upscalers fix that shadow effect.)

My point is that the article that started this thread that claims old games are supposed to look like this http://i.imgur.com/Pq2Yra4.png is just utterly not true. It's a terrible myth that someone who is misinformed started.

[chongli]

It's a terrible myth that someone who is misinformed started.

You didn't actually read the article, did you? Look at the image right after it [0]. Look at the shading on Samus and the pillar nearby. This image clearly demonstrates that the original artwork was designed to achieve a dithering-like effect due to the presence of colour bleeding in the signal. This effect occurs even on higher-end CRTs. What you are complaining about is the bloom effect of the phosphors, a separate phenomenon.

[0] http://i.imgur.com/TpAc9Cn.png

[city41]

Yes I read the article and many, many more like it. This myth has been perpetuated for decades now. It's like the NASA pen and the Cosmonaut pencil or we only use 10% of our brain. A myth that people commonly believe because it just sort of feels true based on their own experience.

The article specifically talks about CRT televisions with NTSC signals. So he's clearly an American. He also talks about how his shader was created to recreate what games looked like in his youth. That's fine. But that's his youth (and incidentally, my youth too). The problem is to suggest that how the typical American saw video games at home in the 80s and 90s is somehow representative and correct and what the developers were shooting for.

Have you ever seen an old video game on a very good CRT? Perhaps a Sony PVM or BVM? Even some of the nicer consumer Trinitrons will do. Color bleed is practically nonexistent, and it's very easy to clearly make out every single pixel the artist laid down. I included several examples in my previous reply. This would be true of 80s and 90s arcade games, most of which got ported to home consoles. It's also true of 80s Commodore 64 and Atari computer games, 90s PC, Mac and Amiga games, and basically every game played in the 90s in Europe, as they've had proper SCART with analog RGB since the 70s.

Now to be fair, the NES natively outputs composite video straight from the PPU. So you could maybe argue the case for this specific console. But every console since in the SD generation output s-video, RGB and/or component.

In your original comment you said "these artifacts are important for correctly rendering NES games according to their original design." But Nintendo released an arcade version of the NES called the PlayChoice 10 which completely lacked any of those artifacts. Metroid was released on the PlayChoice 10, and so in that environment there would be no "shading" caused by dot crawl and bleed in the background tiles.

EDIT: and to credit the article, he does state he is trying to recreate the look of his 80s TV. So I was a little harsh on this particular article. But these articles still bug me, because they lead to comments like yours where things like "according to their original design" get said.