The Effect of CRTs on Pixel Art (2024)

I like to think of modern pixel art as its own aesthetic and art form. It's designed to be viewed on high DPI LED screens, and that's fine. I don't think it should be judged by how it looks on a CRT.

There's an undeniable charm to the older era of pixel art, and surely part of that is nostalgia, but I also think a lot of it comes from the fact that the economics and the hardware were a lot different. Up until the mid 1990s, the highest paid artists in the industry were working on pixel art games. The hardware was slow enough that there were real creative constraints, and we know that constraints often drive creativity.

> I don't know if the CRT version is taken from an actual CRT, but I doubt it - I actually think it looks too fuzzy. I may be wrong - it could be an effect of a close-up photo scaled up - but it's more likely a CRT approximation generated by a software filter on a modern machine.

On both the NES and SNES, the pixels were so large that you could clearly see them even when using an RF adaptor. Each pixel was two scan lines, and wide enough that dithering was still very visible. The same goes for older games in the arcades up to (roughly) the early 1990s, (and I didn't spend much time in arcades after that.)

Not to say that artists didn't take advantage of CRT quirks, but you needed a really $h1tty TV, (much worse than the ones that I and my friends had) if they were going to fuzz away the edges.

It's not that CRTs were "forgiving", it's that designers leaned into what they'd do to pixels. A classic example is the tanks in Atari 2600 Combat - they look ridiculous on a hi-res screen. On a CRT they sort of look like tanks.

I have a JAMMA cabinet at home. It has a CRT in it. I usually play on x-in-1 pirate emulator board. So I don't mind that not all the hardware is authentic. But it's important to me that the screen is authentic, or it all just feels wrong. The curve must be there, the scanlines must be there.

I really get quite cross when you visit a museum and they've got retro games playing on flatscreen LCDs. Doubly so when it's meant to be a vector game.

> I also agree that modern, blocky pixel art often is a kind of misdirected, anachronistic nostalgia.

Pixel art, for me, is the Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advanced which I never played on a CRDT.

Follow-up article: https://datagubbe.se/crt2/

I thought the Macbook Pro LCDs were bright enough, high-res-enough, and fast enough to make a very accurate CRT simulation. Here it is: https://github.com/baragona/crt-xdr

It looks so much like a CRT to me. It looks like pressing your face up to a TV to see the individual phosphors. Try setting "signal" to dropped image and viewing some images. It looks like an old TV.

Bottom line, whatever you think a CRT is doing, you can probably simulate it quite accurately.

Related, I usually hate CRT filters in game, the scan lines usually look too strong (and often the image is darkened inappropriately), but I really liked the one in Cyber Shadow. It just felt right.

> Modern flatscreens all have fixed resolutions

True by design.

> and purely digital interfaces,

True but not relevant. Even if you connected an LCD monitor over an analog interface like VGA or composite video, it would have to re-digitize the signal. The fact that a screen uses a digital interface can be designed independently of whether a screen has fixed pixels (LCD, OLED) or not (monochrome CRT with continuous phosphor, without shadow mask or aperture grille).

> ensuring a fixed aspect (width-to-height) ratio

True by definition because the pixels are pieces of physical hardware in the screens.

> and completely square pixels.

This is a design choice. Nothing prevents someone from designing an LCD or OLED matrix with non-square pixels. But there's also no good reason to do so. (Side note: Due to RGB striping, single-color subpixels have an aspect ratio of 1:3, so those are non-square.)

Potentially useful trivia: Some image/video formats support declaring the pixel aspect ratio. Examples include PNG ( https://w3c.github.io/png/#11pHYs ) and Matroska.

I appreciate the author calling out the point that dithering etc. was definitely visible on better-quality CRT monitors via RGB/VGA signals.

So many people these days mistake the blurring from composite signals as being due to the CRT. A CRT doesn't magically blend pixels together. And there are certainly many tradeoffs to using composite so that many people prefer the sharper pixels of RGB.

This is a great post. Also reminded me of a video I saw a few months ago that was equally as entertaining (and somewhat informative): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-8y2R6IxI

Not so clear in the article is that also with consoles the game pixel grid didn't match the CRT grid (e.g. horizontally the number of "pixels" is similar but not 1:1) so just by geometry you have blending of one pixel data into several CRT "pixels" (plus varying intensity even in a single phosphor patch as the analog RGB signals rise and fall in intensity).

As for CRT filters one can argue how realistic they are but they show that scanline gaps and blending at least can produce amazing perceptual improvements as shown in this video: https://youtu.be/nw2QfPREu-Q

The two articles by the author are focused on the sharpness aspect. What's missing are the dilation/contraction due to beam intensity and resultant gamma. You can take away the scanlines and phosphor filter and still get a more "classic" image with just a modified bilinear filter.

A particularly good example of this are the whites of Mario's and Yoshi's eyes in SMW. They look much better with dilation. (No pun intended)

As a retro gamer I think the people worrying about pixel blurring is overblown. I think a lot fewer artists actually intentionally used it than these articles make out

There's a reason it always comes back to the same few examples, peach hanging from a rope, dracula's eyes, sonic behind the waterfall. If it were used as widely as some people make out then we wouldn't have to keep resorting to the same 3 examples.

That and CRTs stopped being so blurry over the years anyway (especially PC CRTs), so by the time you reached the 16 bit era you couldn't rely on a blurry TV to create your effect

Pixelation is clear on a CRT. Long before people stopped using CRTs, the blocky pixel aesthetic was immediately recognizable to everyone as the “video game look”. The earliest Flash movies on sites like Newgrounds, around the turn of the millennium, used the blocky pixel art style (and we were all still using CRT TVs at that point). I simply don’t see the argument about the pixel aesthetic being not original to that time.

I wish museums having old video game exhibits would respect the medium and display them on CRTs and that if they used LCD screens they would be as shamed as if they showed prints of paintings instead of the actual paintings

My main gripe is with sloppy technique. A lot - not all, but a lot - of modern pixel art is purposely made to look overly blocky. Dithering and anti-aliasing just isn't utilized, which makes it look even chunkier than actual old game art does on a modern screen. It seems to me as if the artists are worried that classic pixel art techniques would make things look too good, though I personally believe the opposite applies.

I think a lot of this is due to where the nostalgia is being aimed. The number of pixelly games trying to look like a c64 or Amiga is vanishingly small compared to the number trying to look like an NES, SNES, or Genesis. (Or a PSX or N64.) And they’re mostly trying to make things like early first-party hits, not later third-party games that do crazy techniques. How many 8-bit-looking games sound like a Tim Follin soundtrack?

And of course given that those machines are from a generation that stopped being the new hotness about 30y ago, we have pro pixel artists who have never seen a game through a shitty connection to a TV unless they deliberately sought one out or had obsessively retro gaming parents; they just like making these square mosaics look like things.

Why is no one manufacturing CRTs in 2026? Seriously this is such a lost art.

Good watch on the topic that very much drives the point home in excruciating detail with a ton of side by side comparisons

what did you do by Noodle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-8y2R6IxI

In a similar vein, for chip manufacturing, in the lithography process, they predistort features so that after etching, they get the desired shape.

CRTs are to video games what vinyl is to music and celluloid is to cinema. The flaws associated with the physical medium have become the defining aesthetic, such that a new medium which removes those flaws feels "sterile" and "hollow", like a concrete-slab brutalist building. There's also the sense of nostalgia. Rock music was less commercialized, or perceived as less commercialized, at the peak of the vinyl era (1960s-1970s). Computers and video games were more fun at the peak of the CRT era (1980s-1990s). So our brains kind of do this substitution wherein "warm fuzzy feelings we associate when X was popular" -> "X is better".

All I know is that when CDs hit the market I savored the additional detail they provided. A good, non-loudness-crushed recording had so many sumptuous highs I used to reach my fingers out and try to "feel" the consonants and vowels of the vocals. And when LCD monitors began to supplant CRTs my eyes were relieved at the additional sharpness. I remember these transition points, so I can say definitively that there was a time when we thought the newer stuff was indeed an improvement.

I'd more than argue that even on a modern digital display, a pixel is NOT a little square.

This seems a bit focused on a specific era of pixel art games AND CRTs. For me, nostalgia was things like Master of Magic or Civilization 1/2, and I played those on CRTs attached to PCs, not in an arcade - the pixels absolutely did not blend together into rounded shapes due to fuzzy scan lines.

I think when people think about CRTs and NES/Atari, they aren’t thinking about _monitors_ they are thinking about the low quality TVs and hooked up through the antenna adapter, which absolutely did wash pixels out to some extent.

The article contradicts itself for some reason. First it repeats the popular myth that CRTs made the image fuzzy, then it clarifies that this was mostly caused by RF or composite connectors. Which would produce similarly fuzzy results on LCDs or OLED screens. As the article points out, CRTs connected via S-Video or SCART did look quite sharp. The same is true for PC CRTs connected via VGA or similar.

Modern displays just can't replicate the warmth and blending a good CRT offered, especially for 2D sprites.

TLDR: "It wasn't CRT technology itself that made pixel art look better - it was the blatant artefacts of cheap, low dot pitch PAL and NTSC consumer electronics that coincided to create just the right amount of fuzz."

Somebody had better let know Nintendo they were doing pixel art wrong for the GB/A, this guy has Opinions. Pokemon is such a fake aesthetic, the only authentic and pure pixel art is whatever bullshit that happens to be exactly what the writer made.