this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
185 points (95.1% liked)

RetroGaming

19631 readers
388 users here now

Vintage gaming community.

Rules:

  1. Be kind.
  2. No spam or soliciting for money.
  3. No racism or other bigotry allowed.
  4. Obviously nothing illegal.

If you see these please report them.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Atomic Robo-Kid

Moto Roader

Mr Heli

Samurai Ghost

Super Volleyball

Tiger Road

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] limeaide@lemmy.ml 12 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Question that might sound dumb.

Were they actually this vibrant back then or were they made more vibrant to make up for limitations of a CRT?

[–] Daxtron2@startrek.website 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Little bit of A, little bit of B. The sprites were also designed with CRT limitations in mind so they generally look better than they do on non-crt screens

[–] Blackmist 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Things like stippled dots or vertical lines especially would blur into each other making new colours or faking transparency.

Random video to demonstrate it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IthGu6Ysmpc

But if your TV was too good, you wouldn't get the effect as much.

[–] PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocks 1 points 8 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://www.piped.video/watch?v=IthGu6Ysmpc

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[–] PinkOwls@feddit.de 7 points 8 months ago

Nope, they weren't. But there were definitely differences whether you played on a Sony Trinitron or a cheap TV. Hell, I even played some games on black-white-TV when the color TV wasn't available.

[–] TechAnon@lemm.ee 7 points 8 months ago

The system could only display 400-something colors at a time. Once you reduce the number of colors that can be used, you lose gradients so one color doesn't ease into another color. Due to this, art styles were typically different and used contrast to "pop" the characters and items visuals in game since being more realistic wasn't an easy (or possible) option.

Now that we can have millions of colors, you can do whatever style you want.

A similar thing happened as polygon counts went up.