hahaha, the only thing i could figure is he’s talking about the discontinued retrotink ultimate, which was a pi hat that output analog RGB video
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ohhhhhh, yeah that makes a lot more sense, thanks
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I kinda don’t hate the differences in that last example
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Agreed, the blown-out highlights and the bright yellow claws on the monster on the right are an aesthetic that can be appreciated. But it’s perhaps adjacent to “found art”, or of the appreciation of a painting decayed with time in part for its decay, since the original artist only ever saw the version on the left.
Modern pixel art generally looks more like the right side than the left. Today’s artists look at reference/inspiration material with LCD monitors and might not even realize they’re aspiring to a slightly different aesthetic goal
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looking at the Zero portrait example and yelling why the raw pixel shot is at native resolution instead of being stretched to 4:3
odds are very good it was always being made with the expectation of being horizontally stretched (ignoring other games goofing it up, most Capcom arcade hardware didn’t run at 4:3 resolutions as well)
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Yeah that comparison’s not terribly fair to emulators who at least consistently get the aspect ratio right nowadays
i mean that’s a specific photograph of a small TV made in 1999
i don’t know much about SFC era Square’s production practices but it seems like it wouldn’t be surprising if artists worked on computers with typical 31khz monitors?
it is cool to see different results and comparisons of tvs and monitors, their sympathetic effects on sprite designs, but also there’s an off whiff to we have forgotten the magic face shield, its mystical hidden detail, conversation with the crystal tube, crt is guitar+amp, the middlebrow is misguided, etc.
but also secretly i 100% support the idea of ‘sharpies’ backlash if it one day radicalizes some smash brothers teen wonderkin into like whipping up a next-gen VR-ready crt-royale killer for ‘the lulz’ or whatever one day and we all benefit
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Yeah one thing few of these comparisons are covering is how different typical computer CRT presentation was from typical TV CRTs. I mean I experienced both at the time but hardly made the kind of close comparison of the same art in each
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Even so you will still find a lot of people online that insist old Nintendo games are meant to be played in their 8:7 pixel ratio. I get a little steamed when I see streamers poll their audience about which aspect ratio they prefer before starting a retro game playthrough and pixel ratio pretty consistently wins out.
Usually the argument for is how any sprite that consists of a single tile is not perfectly round in 4:3 like Kirby or Seamus in morph ball form. I always think that Mario’s sprite when running vertically up a wall in SMW being a few pixels shorter to account for the stretch is pretty decisive though.
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It’s tricky to know what kind of screens were used because production pipelines were very diverse. Like, sure, many companies worked on computers with Deluxe Paint and/or whatever the japanese equivalent was, but you’ve got cases like SNK who had a sprite drawing program that ran directly on a normal neo geo and might have just been using the same screen used by the arcade cabs (in fact that was probably a requirement when you worked with weird pixel ratios like CPS2’s).
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Since CRT enthusiasts are increasingly complaining how little emulator CRT filters hit the mark, I’m pondering today that one way to make Truly Period-Accurate CRT filter would be an AI upscaling type of system. Emulators are doing a poor job because the approach they’re taking requires labor-intensively understanding every technical detail of how one of them worked. But if you instead created a reference dataset of input playbacks (perhaps the ones on tasvideos.org) running both on emulator without any filter applied, plus synchronized video recordings of the same input running on a high-quality film of a CRT, then feed that to one of the standard AI image-processing systems, I would expect that to have a great result.
AI upscaling is starting to get a bad rep among the archival community for “making up fake detail”, but that’s mostly because we’re talking about particular AI systems specifically trained to make up fake detail. If your training says that it should do its best to look like a period-accurate CRT, it’ll do that instead.
The biggest practical difficulties would be A) that “high-quality film” qualifier, B) reducing the latency to a <50ms level.
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that CRT Pixels account is not very good, their comparisons are almost always using terrible examples for both sides
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i guess bad ones but the good ones are already miraculously good and ready to eat up the future’s gift of More Resolution to become even better.
i don’t think so? maybe some kind of interesting overall flavor?
I don’t think the barrier to making a good CRT filter is knowledge, I think the barrier is that mainstream consumer flat panel tech still sucks at recreating it. If your target audience is still only using 1080p non-HDR displays, it’s always gonna suck.
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regarding the 8:7 thing, as a result of going deep into this issue lately, i would say it’s highly variable to a platform/game/resolution basis, down to some elements within a single screen appearing better at differing ratios. imo there’s no one answer, and there are examples where using the “correct” aspect ratio looks worse… to me anyway. it’s a good idea to use the mathematically correct aspect ratio by default, but in some cases games will look better, even dramatically so, at other ratios
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just like always, the professionals were only slightly likely to know what the were doing or communicate it effectively to each other
HDR pipelines are the modern trainwreck; most art is made on cheap office monitors and the technical standards are confusing and offer several implementation choices that will wreck your final output and the experience on consumer displays is wildly variant
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Yeah the Apple ecosystem is the only one with any consistency in terms of a given color appearing as the same color everywhere
this topic generates some real fire. here’s 1:45:00 of famous ranting about this
it’s fucking infinitely funny because he uses the artist drawing circles which don’t look like circles to illustrate how important it is to get this right
at 21 minutes into video 2: “4:3 guys, it’s right here in WinUAE’s options if you gave a shit. If you guys just stopped to give a shit… It’s not that hard to do, IS IT? … it is, kinda, because…”
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as the owner of an HDR projector I have to say like 2/3s of the content that’s released with “HDR” grading really shouldn’t be.
I don’t love having to opt for the SDR downmixes of everything (especially on the off chance the HDR is good, which it occasionally is) but there’s a reason the scene keeps making those I guess, no one is commercially releasing 8-bit colour 2160p hevc
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