Topic: Just curious, do you prefer pixel perfect on retro games or the original 4:3 aspect?

I mean with old games on modern systems that have the option like the mini consoles or emulators. I know 4:3 is the original ratio but it was stretched to fit old TVs. These days you can sometimes have an option for pixel perfect. It's supposed to be the creators original intent had technology been better but instead we old farts in our 40s grew up playing everything stretched.

Are you the nostalgic play it as you remember type or do you now prefer the accurate pixel perfect setting?

As a fellow older gamer, I don’t remember playing anything stretched until 16:9 widescreen TVs became the norm around 2000. CRTs were all 4:3 (and when I play old consoles on my widescreen CRT I set it to 4:3).

I’ve played pixel perfect mode on a few modern systems (such as the SNES mini) and although I can see the difference it really is minimal when compared to 4:3. What ratio were TVs supposed to be back in the day to match this?

I just play old games on original hardware with a CRT. It feels like it looks better than new games, played on a 4k oled tv. And no burn-ins.

@Jhena crt's really do have an aestetic quality that is hard to replace. the way the pixels kind of blur together like they were supposed to is way preferable to stark HD pixel squares. There is a depth and richness to the colour of original CRT graphics as well. there is also a big difference between pixels was what was needed to get the job done, and self conscious: 'look at these lovely pixels'

@Gamecuber
The NES and SNES have internal resolutions of 256x240, though the top and bottom 8 vertical rows are overscan and expected to be not visible so the effective resolution is 256x224.
The raw uncropped image though is an 8:7 aspect ratio, which is slightly horizontally narrower than 4:3 televisions.
CRT televisions have a fixed number of vertical rows, from the electron gun's beams emitted into the screen. Due to this process, the horizontal information is stretched to fit the screen, and NES/SNES 8:7 information is slightly widened, and a perfect circle drawn in say a 16x16 pixel area will appear as a slightly wider oval on a 4:3 CRT display.

In most modern displays and image storage formats we're used to square pixels now, but that wasn't always the case back in the 80s and 90s.
Games developers at the time had to account for this when working on graphical workstations that displayed true 4:3 with square pixels, as a result on a game-by-game basis the internal 8:7 aspect ratio is either the "correct" or the "uncorrected" output, but the stretched 4:3 output is the hardware accurate display.
Since so many people are used to playing emulated games, the 8:7 square pixel display is often preferable as it has the cleanest, sharpest output.

I think you've got to do it on a case by case basis.

Sometimes, the developers were aware that the systems they were working with had different shaped pixels and adjusted their designs to compensate. Playing those in pixel perfect mode is going to give you a squashed picture. However, rather a lot didn't do that, because it made the work of designing graphics rather more complicated, and those games will benefit from playing in pixel perfect mode.

Also, there are a few systems from the 1980s, most notably the Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore Amiga, that had approximately square pixels to begin with. I always thought it an underrated feature, and we were well into the 90s before every other system started to do that.

@Smithicus
I agree. It looks like it is supposed to look. I was also impressed how great black looks on a crt.

I just love my pixels to be "soften" and not so sharp and blocky. Which is why I do appreciate Sonic Mania Plus to have a "Soft CRT" filter. I still have my JVC SDTV and all that. It's makes DVDs look much better than they would on HDTV's

But anyways...yes...I do prefer 4:3 aspect ratio. Dunno why...just feels much natural imo.

I noticed when you do games in pixel perfect mode on The nes and Snes mini they usually look squashed into a perfect square which kinda resembles the screen on the original gameboy. Pretty sure that was a perfect square. Sometimes games look better to me with the CRT filter on. The images are smoother looking due to the slight blurring effect. On the genesis mini i turn on CRT filter and it's ugly as hell. You can see these lines going through the image that just looks awful.

I think mostly i do prefer the CRT filter on with alot of games because without it games look way too blocky and not how i remember. Games being played on my old TV back in the day never looked that blocky.

It's funny how all those ultra sharp images you can get today look like crap when playing old games so we gotta make our TVs simulate the ancient look of CRTs. It's like we're setting our games to nostalgia goggles mode.

Are you more likely to turn the CRT filter on or off?
I'm thinking I'll stick with on. I just can't stomach a super sharp blocky Nes or Snes game. That's not what they looked like when little me was sitting on the living room floor playing games as a kid.

@Truegamer79 What irritates me is when some retro game compilations have that anti-aliasing filter...it just "smears" the overall look...Sonic Origins is guilty of that...

Like you...I grew up with CRTs in much of my life that it's hard for me to see old games looking blocky when they were not meant to look like that. I mean...a Soft CRT filter should be standard for most retro games compilations and games the emulate that style. Though...I do appreciate some games that use HD sprites.

@Smithicus @Jhena
yeah it makes me think of When you see some people playing or discussing older games and talking about how the game doesnt look as good as they remembered its often chalked up to "nostalgia goggles" (or something to that effect) when there can often be various aspects which could actually make a game look worse than people remembered.

One example is like what was mentioned, CRT-tvs and the specific vibe they had often working well with the games asthetic to the point where some Devs would work around some of the aspects of CRT displays (like using dithering to create the illusion of transparency)

Another is with things like some HD remasters or increasing resolutions of 3d games in emulation which can actually make some of the flaws and quirks more apparent such as seeing texture seams in places where you normally wouldnt and how on a lot of psone era games they used the pixelated look to create a more "textured" look to something (such as grass) which can be lost when the textures are smoothed out.

and another being that some ports/remasters introduce their own graphical quirks such as certain visual effects being missing or not displaying as they originally would, or something like with the modern ports of the psone FF games alongside VII and VIII using the PC versions as a base which had their own issues (such as how shadows on FFVII look like solid circles wheres on the original they had gradients) they also introduced the issue of having high rez characters on top of the original resolution backgrounds which caused a visual clash which wasnt nearly as bad on the psone versions but also having those FFVII field models at high res did them no favours wheres originally they kind of reminded me of 3d interpretations of the older sprites.

while a lot of these things can get dismissed as "nitpicks" i do feel like a lot of these small things add up to affect a games overall "feel"

apologies for the ramble but it generally does really give away my stance of more a "play as close to how i remember" person though with a lot of psone games i didnt really mind playing them on something like psp or vita since the smaller screen did help towards hiding some of the imperfections though not to the degree a CRT would.

@Mgalens
Totally agree. I have seen comparison pictures between the original Final Fantasy X and the PlayStation 4 remaster. The remaster felt like a dead version. So the only times you will see me buying a remaster or remake is when the original costs a fortune. Just not worth to throw the beauty of a game away for convenience.

@DanijoEX-The-Kumiho apart from gaming up to the Wii, the other reason I keep a widescreen CRT in my game room is DVDs. They look excellent on the CRT and terrible in comparison on my 4K TV.

Funnily enough we have a 15 year old HD Sony TV in the living room that I hooked up a modern, upscaling DVD player and they look fantastic through that. The upscaling tech today is much better than it used to be.

@Gamecuber
Anamorphic widescreen DVDs store 16:9 information in 4:3 data, so the thing with CRT TVs and how they widen the image with analogue methods is why they look better than digitally widened images on modern LCD panels.

The internal resolution of the Wii is also a pretty tricky thing, it's not true 16:9! It's something the Dolphin emulator devs had to handle since the Wii's widescreen output did not have perfectly square pixels iirc.

@RupeeClock yes, I tend to set the Wii to 4:3 and the TV to that as well, mainly as VC games are meant to be in that ratio anyway.

As for DVDs on HD tvs, it’s more the case that the tech seems to have ‘caught up’ with the older tv now and the DVDs look great on the 15 year old Bravia TV than they did in the past.