Nerdly Pleasures

I think you had a maladjusted TV or something. On a good TV or composite monitor, pixel art should have fairly sharp edges. Most televisions had adjustment controls for various thing (sharpness, contrast, tint, color, etc); so many people didn't know how to properly adjust them, though.

My first video game system was a cheapo b/w pong clone knockoff thing from radio shack. My second was an Atari 2600. Later my parents bought me a TRS-80 Color Computer 2 with 16K (which eventually got upgraded to 32, then 64K), and then still later a Color Computer 3. An NES was in there somewhere, and I played on friend's Sega Genesis systems and C=64 computers (plus Apple IIe, PCjr, and others).

Pixel art (back then, they were just "sprites" or "tiles" to us - I'm not sure if the term "pixel art" was a thing then - I never heard it, but it doesn't mean it wasn't) wasn't fuzzy or soft, unless things weren't adjusted right.

The only other time it might be a little funky was if the machine in question was trying to use artifacting in some manner:

http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-overlooked-artifact-color.html

As you can see - artifacting could introduce a certain level of "fuzziness" to graphics; but scroll to the bottom of that page, to see what the CoCo 2 could do in the hands of someone competent with the effect.

The CoCo 2 got 4 colors on an effectively black/white screen mode by interleaving black and white values - spaced close together on the screen, the NTSC system…

Closest I ever got to Japanese computers was using an IBM JX in primary school. That's a variant of the IBM PCjr – the biggest difference is, unlike the PCjr, it had a proper keyboard, and by default 3.5-inch floppies rather than 5.25-inch. It was primarily sold in Japan – but also to schools in Australia and New Zealand. The Australia/NZ model was missing the extra memory and Kanji-specific display hardware that the Japanese model came with. http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2021/03/ibm-jx-ibm-pcjr-20-revised-article.html

One other (even bigger) way in which Japanese computer technology influenced Australia, was that Fujitsu had a lot of success selling their clone IBM mainframes here in the 1980s/1990s. The university I went to – and later became staff member at – had used one. By the time I joined the staff, it had already been thrown out, but I remember discovering all this evidence of its past existence left behind – masses of tangled bus and tag cables under the data centre floor tiles, a storeroom full of 9 track backup tapes, etc.

Fujitsu's mainframes mostly didn't run MVS (although they could), they ran OSIV/MSP, Fujitsu's "clone" of MVS with significantly reduced licensing costs. However, the reason why it was cheaper, is it wasn't actually a clone – Fujitsu had illegally stolen the source code to MVS from IBM. They tried to cover it up by doing things like changing the copyright notices (apparently they forgot a few though), and they also renamed a lot of the…

> Its a factoid pulled out of nowhere

Nope.

And your gameboy examples are not counter points to the fact that games were designed around a target screen limitation. They weren't designed around a CRT quirk, but they were designed around their own LCD quirk instead.

The first gameboy's screen was painfully bad, with a lot of ghosting during movement.

It was exploited in various way in games :

https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2018/03/compatibility-issues-within-game-boy.html

https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2019/05/screen-persistence-and-gba-lcd-abuse.html

There was even a game that exploited the screen of the original gameboy to achieve a transparency effect in a spirit (but not implementation) similar to how Sonic devs created transparency on CRTs on the genesis.

https://youtu.be/MytSySMUwv8?t=2892

In this case, artificial flickering doesn't look like flicker on the original gameboy screen because it had a lot of ghosting. But it looks terrible on an emulator. You don't get those effects playing the same games on a modern computer monitor.

The various gameboys, and even the advance, were not as crips as you remember them to be, their LCDs weren't particularly high quality stuff. None of the original pixel art of those times were meant to look the way they look on a modern high contrast, high luminance, high resolution LCD or OLED screens of today. It's particularly true as soon as movement is involved as the ghosting was intense and it was one of the…

> Nobody needs to be emulating the exact characteristics of a CRT to chase down some "artistic intent" that only vintage CRT's provide.

While it's true that blurring is one aspect of CRTs, there are multiple different things we're talking about here. Let's get specific. This is an image of an Apple II's composite video output as seen on a naive RGB LCD.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM70Qt9m1uvw6oZOqpZxNy0x_Os12blzs5lDdVzm_-3KfU1moKlZs500zz6Ljxa-hPbKkgY6V1L_0yEJpsHnTCTZwegwjV8StJ_oVKBUaqOjCghaupDVJGlDUSVxnjjVBAZnbx5LANSGs/s560/Apple+DOS+3.3+August+1980+B%2526W.png

This is the exact same video output displayed on a CRT (or via a CRT shader properly decoding it).

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUPl2xUM0UyrJxP8c2sUYOvcW-xhHXVN4corGHk9en6Ob3GzxWs37nln__IhOHT0owxlnhUQ6Z3owEBTDJwupPOZWW-2_Vzl7Kj5Jpdyh4M9n9Lv2xEF5NrB_Lwa-_zErg29dGRcbq5Ss/s560/Apple+DOS+3.3+August+1980+Color.png

This is not just blurring. The colors aren't even there on the naive RGB image. This is because modern displays don't properly decode the pixel pattern data as specified in the RS-170A analog video standard. A CRT shader can do many things including add blur, cross-talk, noise, scanlines, etc. But it ALSO does something else - properly decode the bit patterns in the first image to add the colors in the second image. The bit pattern was put there on purpose by the original artist/dev. Not decoding it properly means the colors are wrong or…

> And this was before pirating.

I'd be careful arguing that this period was pre-piracy, copying floppy disks containing commercial software/games was rampant in this period among many enthusiasts. Software piracy arguably came of age with floppy disks, and there was all sorts of weird and wonderful attempts to combat it.

I still really miss the weird 'papercraft' contraptions that started to appear with many games in the mid to late 80s that had to be used to 'verify' you had a legitimate copy. As a kid I particularly enjoyed the "Grail Diary" that came with your 5 1/4 inch floppies for the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade adventure game, and required the use of red acetate cardboard glasses (also included!) to reveal hidden messages printed on the page.

> http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2013/03/exposing-code-wheels-pc-game-document.html

> https://www.wired.com/2009/07/grail-diary/

>Digital art does not have this problem.

https://xkcd.com/1683/

On a less smug note, truly digital art might not have that problem, but digital representations of analogue art (which the topic of discussion falls under) do. Most movies are just digital encodings of analogue film, and it's only very recently this stopped being true.

And that's not to mention the fact that the way you that you view digital files also affects them. There's the general trend towards denser displays requiring higher resolutions for a file to appear crisp, but even the screen technology itself is a factor - take a look at how much different pixel sprites look on modern displays compared to the CRTs they were designed for:[1][2]

[1] https://twitter.com/crtpixels

[2] https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-case-for-composite.html