dog
@dog

"CRT aesthetics" posters will have you convinced old games were made for CRTs and you can't play them the right way without one, and then insist on only playing games using professional broadcast monitors that 0% of game players in the 80s/90s had access to


Fel-Temp-Reparatio
@Fel-Temp-Reparatio

Yeah, this is why the PVM and RGB thing always seemed weird to me. Like I just got myself a consumer level Trinitron because that's on the better end of what developers could reasonably expect people to play their games on back in the 90s (with the possible exception of European developers assuming some of their audience was using SCART connectors). It looks nice while still preserving the effects that devs assumed would be seen by the vast majority of their audience, such as checkerboarding being used to fake a transparency.


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in reply to @dog's post:

having a realization that the devs of the day had to have been using common consumer televisions and not professional stuff about 90% of the time, because most games of the time have some idea of where the overscan regions tended to be, and placed important status information within broadcast safe regions. it was a select few games of the 8 and 16-bit eras that did not heed those safe zones, resulting in games like top gear 3000, where older or worse-calibrated tubes would just crop off half the HUD.

Later on, Nintendo and Sony started to publish specific guidelines for the safe areas and would fail to certify games which didn't abide by them, but yeah there was an entire generation of consoles where that wasn't the case.

The C64 "solved" the issue by just putting a big border around everything, thus making it impossible to violate the safe zone, but that's given the C64 a reputation of having "low resolution" graphics even though the actual pixel count is higher than most game consoles of the era and even several which came later. (Not that pixel count is everything, obviously, but still.)

i think my favorite example here is that the best examples where you can point and say "yes, this game was meant to be seen on a CRT" is games that are relying on composite artifacting for its visual effects. which is to say they're supposed to be used on the absolute shittiest, most bargain-bin CRT TV you can find, not a fancy PVM with an RGB-modded console