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.
It's very hit or miss. Abylight Studios (Super Hydorah, Cursed Castilla) seems to do them pretty well, but then I've seen some that left me wondering how they ever made it past QC. (I won't name them because it's been a while and I don't want to name the wrong game.)
I want to point out though that it's impossible for any CRT filter to have a peak brightness that's not significantly lower than without the filter, since it can darken pixels but not brighten them past what the maximum already is.
I know someone who uses a CRT filter for vscode... I thought that was just a meme theme we all downloaded and clicked once to check it out then turned it off but he likes it along with his exploding text characters, forgot the name of that, powerblock or whatever. His vscode triggers my ADHD like trying to read a too busy restaurant menu, literally can't absorb anything.
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.
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.
The article is about SD CRTs (480i for NTSC or 576i for PAL, or more commonly for games 240p/288p progressive scan using non-standard timing, often underscanned with pixels left unused in the borders).
VGA MS-DOS games usually ran at 320x200, but VGA CRTs supported up to 640x480 resolution. There was hardware line doubling from 200 lines up to 400 lines so you actually got two scanlines per pixel. It wasn't LCD sharp but the individual pixels were easily distinguishable. And lots of people played these game on SVGA CRTs so the pixels would be even sharper.
If you assume a SD CRT, as the article does, then yes, the display connection makes the most difference (although there are still differences between individual CRTs).
But that does not cover all CRTs relevant to pixel art. If you display low resolution art on a CRT designed for high resolutions it makes a big difference in pixel sharpness.
Ha I remember SVGA. Darn we're old. But pixel art was definitely a style of it's own then and thats what my modern efforts attempt to replicate, at least
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's very hit or miss. Abylight Studios (Super Hydorah, Cursed Castilla) seems to do them pretty well, but then I've seen some that left me wondering how they ever made it past QC. (I won't name them because it's been a while and I don't want to name the wrong game.)
I want to point out though that it's impossible for any CRT filter to have a peak brightness that's not significantly lower than without the filter, since it can darken pixels but not brighten them past what the maximum already is.
I know someone who uses a CRT filter for vscode... I thought that was just a meme theme we all downloaded and clicked once to check it out then turned it off but he likes it along with his exploding text characters, forgot the name of that, powerblock or whatever. His vscode triggers my ADHD like trying to read a too busy restaurant menu, literally can't absorb anything.
I use it in Windows Terminal when in a cmd.exe shell (as opposed to a PowerShell or Git Bash shell)
Also, for MacOS: https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term
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.
Ironically, pixel art today is the affordable default for indie games.
Follow-up article: https://datagubbe.se/crt2/
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.
The article is about SD CRTs (480i for NTSC or 576i for PAL, or more commonly for games 240p/288p progressive scan using non-standard timing, often underscanned with pixels left unused in the borders).
VGA MS-DOS games usually ran at 320x200, but VGA CRTs supported up to 640x480 resolution. There was hardware line doubling from 200 lines up to 400 lines so you actually got two scanlines per pixel. It wasn't LCD sharp but the individual pixels were easily distinguishable. And lots of people played these game on SVGA CRTs so the pixels would be even sharper.
The sharpness of the pixel is in the display connector, not the resolution.
If you assume a SD CRT, as the article does, then yes, the display connection makes the most difference (although there are still differences between individual CRTs).
But that does not cover all CRTs relevant to pixel art. If you display low resolution art on a CRT designed for high resolutions it makes a big difference in pixel sharpness.
Ha I remember SVGA. Darn we're old. But pixel art was definitely a style of it's own then and thats what my modern efforts attempt to replicate, at least
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.
Why is no one manufacturing CRTs in 2026? Seriously this is such a lost art.
True by design.
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).
True by definition because the pixels are pieces of physical hardware in the screens.
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.
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.