Dessa

He's doing his best, jill!

The vast majortiy of people were using RF cables or RGB until like the 2000s. Most people were not rocking state of the art stuff.

I'm talking about CRT vs modern monitors. You, I think, are talking about the video feed? S-video and RGB and RF cables and all that can and did still feed into CRT monitors. And while theres a world of difference between a low ejd and a high end CRT, there is still color bleed on all but the crispiest displays, and all of them have scanlines and other CRT elements, as well as a different relationship to color than modern displays.

Pixel art has inherent limitations that can lead to artifacting issues. Take a look at this image:

See how the middle and right-side examples have these apparent vertical lines that run through them? This is called "banding," which is a partocular example of the moire effect (or screen door effect). It makes the lines look like giant removedy pixels and increases the "apparent resolution." Or to put it another way, it makes the pixel grid more obvious. And that can look very different on a CRT or an LCD display because of how they render images. Looking at the art of Chrono posted earlier, there are places on that image where the natural blurring of a CRT makes an otherwise poor choice look amazing. That's because an artist made that image intetionally to look a certain way on the CRT medium.

So Prodigy was good?

Of course they didnt assume everybody has the same setup. But they likely did make things to appear a certain way on an average setup or a range of setups that only looked good on the top 1% of monitors.

And the waterfall transparency trick doesnt make the entire game look bad. It makes one specific part look really cool and the rest just looks like a sonic game, which is to say absolutely incredible in CRT and mediocre on a modern monitor.

Looking at the color choices on old sonic sprites alone, the artists at sega would have to suck to make those decisions knowing how they look without the assumed artifacting of an LCD. And that's not getting into the decisions they made that make the pixel grid obvious and deacrease the apparent resolution of the sprite. The sprites are clearly drawn by skilled hands but with flaws that even a newbie would avoid on a modern monitor. The only reasonable explanation is that these artists knew what they were doing and took into account the display media that the end user would experience

If that's the case, there's a good chance some hobbyists have made a hob for the hardware that can do it.

As for your first question, I don't know A/V stuff that well so I have no idea. What's a shadow mask?

Many older games were designed with CRTs in mind, and the colors and shapes don't look so great on modern monitors without some shaders applied.

There are some pretty good CRT shaders out there. The ones used in Sonic Mania get pretty close!

Sub-struggle: CRT vs LCD? Those waterfalls used to look really different, and took advantage of the color bleed of old CRT monitors to mimic transparency

"Mr. Burns, you are the sickest man in the United States” - but there are too many germs and they all cancel each other out."

And what of the Georgists?

I'm so upset that I never got the chance to not post on CTH3