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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

> When it was dominant in game industry, you couldn't see actual pixels.

Exactly! I didn't like the author's dig at rescaling algorithms, but he seems to be forgetting that pixels never looked like that! The pixel art he likes so much was never like what he does today. This article has good screenshots, although I think they're emulated:

http://www.tested.com/tech/gaming/2982-a-link-to-the-past-ho...

If you like pixel art, go ahead and make pixel art. Some of the artwork in the article is stunning, and I like the aesthetic a lot. However, don't romanticize it and claim that old games looked like that, because they just didn't.

I think better scalers and shaders that can reproduce the look of CRTs are a nice effort, since I want to play old games the way I actually remember them, not with visible pixels that were completely alien the first time I played Zelda on an emulator.

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This is the best article I've seen on CRT emulation: http://www.piratehearts.com/blog/2014/03/28/crt-simulation/

That article was so good, I promptly bought (and beat) the game. I wish someone would take these techniques and bring them to an NES or SNES emulator.

They have - Retroarch has CRT shaders that emulate many of these effects (and I believe other emulators can also load the same shaders).

Huh, I hadn't seen Retroarch before. Interesting.

I don't know, I don't buy into this. The pixels weren't as crisp as they are when you're emulating these games, but I certainly remember them existing. Looking at those screenshots, you absolutely can tell that those images are built out of pixels. Also, like someone else mentioned, what about handheld consoles that very clearly displayed pixels? It wasn't like everyone thought that was some crazy new idea.

They aren't wrong. Regarding the comments and images in the linked article, there's a key point made there that's fundamentally wrong. Let me pick out a quote:

"We all get how pixels basically work. A computer divides a display into squares, and each square can be assigned one RGB value at a time. The total squares supported by the hardware is the device’s “resolution.” This square grid is the smallest possible subdivision of detail available to an artist."

This is the bit that's fundamentally wrong. Pixels are not squares. And never have been. They are "point samples". The fact that "magnified" pixel art displayed here compounds the error by displaying big squares rather than using an appropriate reconstruction filter doesn't help correct the misconception.

Here's a link to a classic paper on the topic: http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf

In the case of pixel art, they are not point samples. The signal is not band-limited and the "aliasing" is deliberate and controlled. It's the same technique as font hinting.

This is a totally valid artistic choice, and they are welcome to do that. I certainly enjoy it myself when it's well done.

But... it's not pixel art anymore, it's square art. And if people want to create neo-pointilist/neo-divisionist artwork based upon a grid of coloured squares that's fine. But it's not pixels.

I can understand it being annoying, especially if you have a DSP background, but the name is well established. Language changes over time and "pixel" has gained another meaning. I don't think you're going to convince anybody to switch to "neo-pointilist".

Nope, it's exactly pixel art, because in the real world pixels were never simply point samples - indeed, few things are because they're not physically possible. (It's a reasonably approximation for audio, mostly because there's a truly massive amount of oversampling happening behind the scenes to make it work.) Pixel art takes advantage of the fact that pixels are not point samples and never were.

Reminds me of how recent scholarship shows that Greek statues weren't the blank-eyed white marble figures that influenced Western Art but were often brightly painted with additional features added.

yeah I always find that to be interesting - they look more like curios from mexico at that point than those dignified, time weathered monuments we're accustomed to.

I'm not a fan of the simulated CRT filters that try to make a game look like it did on an old television. Instead, I prefer the filters that intelligently scale pixel art as though rendered at a higher resolution, such as hq4x.

I think it depends on the context. Sometimes when I'm emulating my bro mario I do enjoy the CRT filters.

To be fair, pc games running at 320*200 most certainly did look like that - big pixels with hard edges. But very few games ape the EGA palette, all the NES-looking pixel games look like tech thst never existed. EGA was a pretty short period between cga and VGA, much of PC gaming was blocky, but high color... and had a bigger focus on strategy and puzzle games because of the keyboard/mouse input, which isn't really reflected in the indie world's love for pixelly platformers.

Pc had much better crt tech than TVs for consoles. So you cant really generalize.

Some of the big early 90s PC hits were games like Cmdr Keen and other Apogee platformers. They were hugely popular at the time.

I think you mean the CGA palette, the one used in the CGA text mode and as the default palette in some of the EGA and VGA graphics modes. EGA could pick from a palette of 64 colors.

They looked like that on the Gameboy.

They didn't. The Gameboy screen had it's own idiosyncrasies and games looked like this: https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/gameboy-inl...

It is worth mentioning that there was a clear visible difference between NTSC and PAL, so even on the same screen, playing the same game, things would look different in Europe and America (and I believe also in Japan)

Not just look different, but sometimes play differently too. Game mechanics were often tied into framerate, so 60Hz vs 50Hz could make a difference.

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