Comment by anonbanker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonbanker | Hacker News Reader

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I attended Powerfest '90 (The Nintendo World Championships)[0], and every game on display was shown on an SVideo connection. The beta Final Fantasy's pixels looked sharp and defined (I spent an hour playing it, though it reset every 15 minutes). They explicitly used the best connections possible to ensure video fidelity and minimize color bleeding.

Magazines were the same; outside of the "Take a picture of your TV Screen with a Polaroid Camera" section of the magazine (scoreboards), Nintendo Power always had screenshots of the game using a Super Wide Boy, which outputted the screen to a crisp video feed perfect for articles. EGM used the same device. Nobody wanted blurred pixels or color bleeding. They certainly didn't want cathode ray distortion.

There is nothing but anecdotal information that the developers of NES games intended the blurring and bleeding to affect their game designs. The only purveyors of the "CRT Experience" seem to be milennials born after the NES's reign.

I didn't have the best TV for my NES, but it looked tons better than some of these scanline effects. If you were using a CGA monitor to play NES games, then maybe the shaders were accurate, but even the black and white TV I had for a while was a superior experience to the scanline shaders available in the NES mini or RetroArch.

Playing Bionic Commando: Return of Hitler[1] on the NES right now, with no shaders. You should too.

0. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1990-12-07/entertainment/...

1. http://www.romhacking.net/translations/2031/

If they were using S-video in 1990, they were either converting to s-video from composite which would negate the benefit of s-video, or they were using a playchoice-10 arcade unit and converting the RGB to s-video, in which case the pixels would be sharper but the colors were wrong because the arcade ppu had a different color palette to accommodate direct rgbs arcade monitors. I sort of doubt they were using a Playchoice unit because back then pretty much all projectors could take an RGBS arcade signal directly (I am doing this today but with ordinary CRT) and gotten even less loss so, they would have used that. But, it was common back then to convert composite to s-video not to improve the picture quality, but to reduce the picture quality loss from long cabling so I'd guess that is what they were doing. I don't doubt you saw a good picture but it probably had more to do with the projector. There were projectors back then that could do a thousand vertical lines of resolution.

Subpixel rendering was a necessity to make recognizable faces on the tiny sprites, this is common knowledge in the pixel art community. This pretty much relied on the blurring effect of the CRT. Arcade monitors are sharper, but it's still a very low-res CRT.

Now that I have expressed the limits of my video knowledge from that era, some grey AV nerd with even more knowledge please come out and put me in my place.

It's not anecdotal, it's a comment that showed up in design documents of games by experienced developers. Trade shows and magazines used the best quality possible, because it was marketing.

However, I'm not aware of any gdds that specified coloring as a technical challenge; most of the concerns were around overscan and making sure games weren't unplayable on B/W TVs

> It's not anecdotal, it's a comment that showed up in design documents of games by experienced developers.

care to post some? I'm cool with being wrong.

Here's some examples of dithering being used in order to do effects like gradients and pseudo-transparency:

http://retro-sanctuary.com/comparisons%20-%20differing.html

I hate to be unable to put my money where my mouth is, but I read a bunch of early 3d game GDDs in college as part of understanding and overcoming hardware limitations in computer graphics. It wasn't so much "dont do this" as justifications such as "we did this because many tvs dont have stereo sound" or "using colors of the same hue is unviewable on black and white TVs and our portable systems"

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