centrally-unplanned:

splitjawjanitor:

crtter:

ask-maxie-boy:

synthient:

absolutely fascinated by this raw pixels on an emulator vs how the game was actually supposed to look on old tvs twitter

People say that old games dont look as good as they remember

Its because they legitimately dont.

The “fuzz” from CRT monitors was something that was definitely accounted for and taken advantage of back in the day when it came to video games! While this effect is noticeable in 3D games, it’s MUCH more visible when it comes to 2D sprites:

Just look how much more depth these simple sprites of Princess Peach and Bowser from Super Mario RPG seem to have when seen through the “dots” of a CRT TV screen!

The same principle applies to the music, too. Composers took the sound compression caused by old software into account and wrote the music to take advantage of it. That’s why so many restorations of old video game songs lack the oomph of the originals.

This reminded me of the similar realities that went into older anime productions, one of my favourites of which is Overscan. Only anime has shots like these:

Where, if you look in the bottom right corner, uh our girl Noriko here is apparently a very acute-angled ghost. The animators just didn’t bother drawing the bottom corner, because while today every image is transmitted pixel-perfect between devices. analog CRT televisions did not work that way, and in particular due to the sort of “curved” shape of the typical CRT screen the edges of the image would get cut off by the physical limitations of the device. Animators knew this, and took advantage of it to quite literally cut corners during production - which in the modern era of HDTV gets scandalously exposed decades later.

(I learned this from 327 Robots, who’s blog post I was fortunately able to find)