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.

On both the NES and SNES, the pixels were so large that you could clearly see them even when using an RF adaptor. Each pixel was two scan lines, and wide enough that dithering was still very visible. The same goes for older games in the arcades up to (roughly) the early 1990s, (and I didn't spend much time in arcades after that.)

Not to say that artists didn't take advantage of CRT quirks, but you needed a really $h1tty TV, (much worse than the ones that I and my friends had) if they were going to fuzz away the edges.

I have a JAMMA cabinet at home. It has a CRT in it. I usually play on x-in-1 pirate emulator board. So I don't mind that not all the hardware is authentic. But it's important to me that the screen is authentic, or it all just feels wrong. The curve must be there, the scanlines must be there.

I really get quite cross when you visit a museum and they've got retro games playing on flatscreen LCDs. Doubly so when it's meant to be a vector game.

Pixel art, for me, is the Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advanced which I never played on a CRDT.

It looks so much like a CRT to me. It looks like pressing your face up to a TV to see the individual phosphors. Try setting "signal" to dropped image and viewing some images. It looks like an old TV.

Bottom line, whatever you think a CRT is doing, you can probably simulate it quite accurately.

True by design.

> and purely digital interfaces,

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.

So many people these days mistake the blurring from composite signals as being due to the CRT. A CRT doesn't magically blend pixels together. And there are certainly many tradeoffs to using composite so that many people prefer the sharper pixels of RGB.

As for CRT filters one can argue how realistic they are but they show that scanline gaps and blending at least can produce amazing perceptual improvements as shown in this video: https://youtu.be/nw2QfPREu-Q

A particularly good example of this are the whites of Mario's and Yoshi's eyes in SMW. They look much better with dilation. (No pun intended)

There's a reason it always comes back to the same few examples, peach hanging from a rope, dracula's eyes, sonic behind the waterfall. If it were used as widely as some people make out then we wouldn't have to keep resorting to the same 3 examples.

That and CRTs stopped being so blurry over the years anyway (especially PC CRTs), so by the time you reached the 16 bit era you couldn't rely on a blurry TV to create your effect

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.

what did you do by Noodle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-8y2R6IxI

All I know is that when CDs hit the market I savored the additional detail they provided. A good, non-loudness-crushed recording had so many sumptuous highs I used to reach my fingers out and try to "feel" the consonants and vowels of the vocals. And when LCD monitors began to supplant CRTs my eyes were relieved at the additional sharpness. I remember these transition points, so I can say definitively that there was a time when we thought the newer stuff was indeed an improvement.