Comment by gwbas1c
4 months ago
When I played NES and SNES as a kid, the resolution was so low that I only saw pixels. (Edit: I saw whole pixels when using the RF switch.) To this day, when I go back and play those games on modern consoles I just can't use CRT emulation.
Maybe I just didn't play games that used tricks to get around the pixels?
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That being said, I remember that "New Super Mario Brothers" on Wii appeared to use a CRT trick to try and make the background flash in a boss room. I always played my Wii in 480p, so it just looked like there were vertical lines in the boss room.
I grew up playing Atari, NES, SNES, and PS1 games on old TVs most of the time, sometimes not the best quality. I also remember that often in 80's arcades, it was guaranteed for at least one or two machines to have CRT issues; colors not aligned, skew at the top/bottom, burn-in (common), screen too bright, etc. All part of the experience and quite nostalgic for me.
The NES had a particular quirk with its NTSC output that I always thought was very characteristic of NES. I found this article a few years ago, and was fascinated that work was done to really figure it out - https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/NTSC_video - and it's awesome at at least some emulators (FCEUX) seem to use this info to generate an experience quite similar to what I remember the NES being when I grew up. But I don't think any NES game graphics really depended on this for any visual output. All NES games had jagged vertical lines, for example.
> The video timing in the NES is non-standard - it both generates 341 pixels, making 227 1/3 subcarrier cycles per scanline, and always generates 262 scanlines. This causes the TV to draw the fields on top of each other, resulting in a non-standard low-definition "progressive" or "double struck" video mode sometimes called 240p
Ahh: I always wondered why I never saw interlacing artifacts on the NES! (I'm going to assume the same thing for the SNES too.)