Appreciating 240p

A brief history lesson

July 15, 1983 was a red letter day in gaming history when Nintendo's Family Computer (Famicom) and Sega's SG-1000 were released simultaneously. Today, these video game consoles are known for their charming 8-bit graphics, but it was their processor (that the graphics were incorrectly named after) that was the real star. With the ability to store up to 256 (2⁸) values, the 8-bit processor was a revolutionary technological advancement for video game consoles that shifted the primary place to play video games from arcades to homes. Saving the game progress to battery-backed SRAM (memory) on the game cartridge was introduced, which enabled more complex game design since games could now be completed in more than one play session. The 1985 release of the Famicom in North America—branded as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)—brought an end to the video game crash of 1983 and set the wheels in motion for video games as a mainstream form of entertainment. The NES featured a progressive resolution of 256 x 240 pixels, introducing us to 240p gaming on cathode-ray tube (CRT) televisions. There was a lot to celebrate with all of the progress that had been achieved, yet a combination of ambitious people and market competition meant that this was only the beginning.

The 8-bit processor had clear limitations. The maximum of 256 values (ranging from 0-255) that had previously enabled new heights of creativity began to constrain game designers. One example of this limitation was in the NES game The Legend of Zelda, where the player could only store a maximum of 255 rupees¹ used for currency. Nintendo went on to join the TurboGrafx-16² and Sega Genesis³ in the 16-bit generation with its 1990 release of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES⁴). Officially, the SNES was followed up in 1996 by the Nintendo 64 (N64), but it was spiritually succeeded by the PlayStation (PSX⁵) in 1994. Unlike the N64, which was a 64-bit⁶ console that primarily offered 32-bit⁷ 3D games, the PlayStation felt like a natural refinement of the SNES by offering the same 2D sprite-based games (in addition to crude 3D games) now in 32-bits. Further, many popular game franchises on the SNES such as Square's Final Fantasy and Chrono series and Capcom's Mega Man and Street Fighter series, made the jump to the PlayStation rather than the N64. This was primarily due to affordability of producing games on the CD-ROM⁸ used by the PlayStation compared to the N64's more expensive cartridges. Finally, the PlayStation had its roots in the Super NES CD-ROM (SNES-CD), a failed joint venture between Nintendo and Sony to bring a CD-ROM drive expansion to the SNES.

The PlayStation was succeeded by the PlayStation 2 in 2000, which offered 64-bit 3D games and raised the resolution to 480i. However, the PlayStation fittingly had a spiritual successor with Nintendo's Game Boy Advance (GBA) in 2001, which also offered 32-bit 2D sprite-based games now in a portable form factor with a 480i TFT LCD display. With these two new consoles, the 240p era was finally over. The shift from 240p, a low-definition progressive scan resolution, to 480i, a standard-definition interlaced scan resolution, coincided with the shift from analog CRTs to digital televisions. While this shift in technology provided clear benefits and was inevitable, I feel that something great was lost with the transition.

Analog vs. digital comparison

CRT television

The image on the CRT has a beautiful glow. The colors are extraordinarily vivid. Although the background appears too dark to see in the image above, it's perfectly viewable in real life. The illumination on various surfaces goes through a variety of ranges, much like how my mind imagines real life reflects light. The image is by no means high quality, but the screen blends things together in a way that allows for the imagination to actively fill in the gaps. Without anything else to compare to, the image just looks right and is beautiful in a way I have never experienced on a digital display. It's clear that the artists were designing the image for this display. The magic is in how the brain takes what it sees and automatically makes sense of everything.

OLED television

Moving onto the OLED, the image is terrible! Putting aside that the image is slightly too wide, everything is overly blocky. The yellow lights on the top of the save station highlight the problem. The sprites are clearly made up of various colored squares. The object is no longer spherical, and it's difficult to process the differing illumination levels across each one. The entire image is significantly too bright. Depth is also very hard to discern with everything looking flat and on the same 2D plane. All of the clever tricks utilized by the artists for how the CRT would display the image no longer work to the image's detriment. The mind no longer automatically blends the sprites into intuitive objects. It's hard to believe this image is taken from the same game at the same location.

OLED television - scanlines filter

Things improve greatly when a scanlines filter is added. Once again, objects start to blend together, which not only makes it easier to understand the image, such as Samus' left hand being in a fist, but also restores depth. The lighting is vastly improved as well, with the background texture being much closer to how it appears on the CRT in real life. The lighting is still a touch off however, which can be seen the three white dots on Samus' head and chest. On the CRT, they appear to be a reflection that is scattered, but on the OLED, they look closer to a sphere with a vertical split where the scanlines cut through. Going back to the yellow light on the save station, they now appear to be a consistent object across each of them. However, they are more of a rounded square than a sphere, and the shadows around them don't blend in very well, ruining the effect altogether.

OLED television - scanlines filter & CRT filter

Finally, adding the CRT filter to the scanlines filter arguably does a better job of blending things together, but at this point, the colors are significantly duller than they are when viewed on the CRT. The lighting is dimmer and more accurately reflects the background detail, but the save station is not shiny and lit up by light like it is on the CRT. The yellow lights on the save station appear much closer to the original versions now that the shadows are not as pronounced. Sitting a bit further away, some of the negatives aspects are not as pronounced.

Conclusion

It may be overly obvious to say that of course the images look the best on a CRT display since they were designed for it, but there is so much more to it than that! If I had to play the game digitally, I would use the scanlines filter since I feel it gets the closest to the original image on the CRT. But playing 240p games on a digital display fails to capture the subtleties of the CRT. The CRT has a slight curvature that the sprites take into account. It oozes colors in a way even my fantastic OLED fails to achieve when displaying 4K HDR UHD Dolby Atmos content⁹. The CRT uses an electron gun to fire electron beams to create the image! Seriously. An electron gun! The display is full of static electricity, so you can feel the picture being displayed. The OLED does have perfect blacks, but it feels surgical. Everything is too perfect to the point where it feels like it lacks character.

Modern digital displays are a remarkable achievement in iteration and ironing out the kinks to produce a perfect image. I have been a major fan of using my OLED television for watching modern movies and television and playing modern games. But it has also ushered in a new era of games designed for the digital screen. As I sit here absolutely engrossed in the world of Baldur's Gate 3 while playing on ultra settings driven by an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT GPU on an LG computer monitor, I appreciate how gorgeous the game looks and how far games have come since the days of 240p. Still, I continue to find myself drawn back to the simple yet beautiful 2D sprite-based games available on the SNES, Genesis, and PlayStation. Each time I sit down in front of my CRT to play them, the same sense of wonder and curiosity that I had throughout my childhood immediately returns because the art triggers the imaginative part of the brain. Without imagination, our brains would fail to blend the objects on the screen into instantly recognizable objects. The limitations of analog¹⁰ created a wonderful type of art that has begun to die out, and it would be a shame to ever see it forgotten after the final CRT dies.

Addendum

How the images were set up

It's difficult to accurately capture analog displays with an iPhone 13 mini camera, so unfortunately these pictures do not do the display justice. You will have to take my word for how I experience it in person or hopefully experience it yourself. For comparison, I loaded up the 1994 SNES game Super Metroid using a MiSTer FPGA. The MiSTer takes instructions to reprogram its chip into a recreation of the original console it is running at a hardware level. It's not a perfect one-to-one replication of a SNES, but it's pretty darn close. For the analog side of the equation, I connected the MiSTer to a Sony PVM-20S1WU CRT television using direct video to convert the HDMI out to VGA, which was then fed into an Extron RGB 203 that connected to the RGB inputs on the CRT. For the digital side, I connected the MiSTer to an LG B7A OLED television via HDMI. I set the MiSTer to the SNES' 8:7 aspect ratio, but the image still appeared too wide on the OLED, which might be entirely my fault. No matter how much I tinkered with it, I couldn't get that right, but it looked a lot better at 8:7 than the default setting that stretched to fill the entire OLED's display.