Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mort96 427 days ago
It's similar to how old games look so different on modern hardware: the pixel art on a current-day screen looks like high-fidelity perfectly sharp uniformly colored squares, while the "pixel art" of old games rendered on a CRT didn't look like "pixel art" at all but rather like high-fidelity art rendered on a low-fidelity screen. There's a lot of detail implied by the way CRTs render what's encoded in software as perfect squares.
1 comments

Illustrative images: <https://imgur.com/gallery/SSpcDzA>
The weird rainbow effects on Sonic's waterfalls are NOT due to the properties of CRT, but a result of the Megadrive's awful composite encoder. Connect the screen through a RGB cable cable, or composite through a 32X, and the resulting image is much cleaner.

Someone created a whole subreddit a few days ago to analyze the effect and post comparison pictures: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fuckingwaterfall/

In that Imgur link I gave, a comment by “Illithidbane” linked to this YouTube video, which is all about the waterfall and RGB vs. composite: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0weL5XDpPs>