Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Why Old Games Look So BAD”.
You’Re digging through some old moving boxes, you never unpacked and you discover your old console with a bunch of retro games. Ah nostalgia you dust it off and after managing to hook it up to your shiny 4k flat-screen TV, you find that it looks well did link always look so blurry part of the problem is that old consoles, like the sneza Lucian of just 256 by 224 pixels Compared to the 3840 by 2160 pixels of a modern 4k TV, that means that if your TV were to show the game at its true native resolution, it would be this tiny and you’d have to get so close to the screen. You’D go cross-eyed, so instead a television will take that small media and upscale it so that it fills up most, if not all, of the available pixels. To do this, the TV manufacturer had to choose just one of several different upscaling algorithms.
The most common ones are nearest-neighbor, bilinear, bicubic and lan shots with nearest-neighbor being the simplest and fastest to process and LAN chose being the slowest and most complex. However, on modern-day hardware, any of these algorithms can easily upscale an image in real time which, for this video, I am defining as 16 milliseconds or less and that’s because, if you’re playing a game at 60 frames per second, each individual frame will appear on screen. For about 16 milliseconds, therefore, each of these algorithms should work faster than that, which also means that buffering multiple frames is not necessary.
However, for a ai or smart image, upscaling, a multi frame buffer can be necessary which will result in a delay or input lag of much more than 16 milliseconds. So check out this video for more information about all that, but back to the topic at hand. Assuming that each of these algorithms can work in real time, which one actually looks the best well see for yourself and me, you can see that only nearest neighbor can deliver the perfect, sharp pixels that make pixel art, look good, all the others just kind of blend.
The pixels together, which blurs the image so the upscaling algorithm on your TV, is probably some form of bicubic or LAN shows raising the question. Why would anyone want an upscaling algorithm? That’S more complicated, slower and looks worse because, while nearest neighbors scaling looks great for pixel arts, it does not look good for most other images. Your TV doesn’t know that you’ve plugged in a retro game console as opposed to a DVD player or something and for live-action video by cubic or lancha scaling, really are better choices.
The real world is not made of pixels, and so when we upscale a photograph, the result should not look. Pixelated 2d Mario is made of pixels and therefore, when we upscale him, the results should be pixelated but wait. I hear you say my TV already has a game mode setting.
Why doesn’t it just use nearest neighbour for that? Well, the manufacturer would have to include a nearest neighbor menu option which doesn’t sound so hard as for why they don’t do that. I don’t know TV manufacturers just don’t care, I guess maybe because not enough consumers know or care about this problem. But if you really want those sharp pixels, I have good news. There are a lot of options like the retro tank, 2x framemeister or open source scan converter, but before you buy anything, I recommend you check out this great RGB video explainer series from my life in gaming, because this stuff can get really complicated. I ended up just buying a $ 14 component cable for my Wii, which provides much better quality than the stock composite cable, and it’s not perfect, but you know what it’s good enough now, if you’re emulating your old games, you have way more options.
Emulators, like retro, have access to an arguably even better scaling method called sharp bilinear, which uses nearest neighbor for pre scaling to the closest integer and then uses by linear scaling. For the remainder, this method even allows you to rotate the image without getting any jagged edges. There are also tons of other interesting scalars and shaders that can be mixed and customized to get just the look you want and blurry pixel art is not just a problem for retro gamers if you’re a digital artist. Like me, you should know that programs like Photoshop and After Effects do have support for nearest-neighbor. If you know where to look, but some creative software, including Premiere huh, does not it’s annoying. Also.
Support for integer scaling from PC hardware manufacturers like AMD Nvidia and Intel has been getting better lately, but we’ve still got a ways to go. If you want to learn more and get involved in the sharp pixel revolution, Merritt’s tenens website, which i used as a resource for this video, is a great place to start he’s even developed a browser plugin that solves a similar problem with improperly skilled images on websites And I use it every day when taking important screenshots for Technic evideos like this one, never mind that, but you should mind today’s sponsor iFixit, it’s affordable to fix or upgrade your consoles with. I fix its parts and tools. Even the Nintendo switch they’ve got all the parts you need to replace and make it run like new fix that drift on your joy, con install a new battery or even the little fans, they’ve got all the parts and tools you need and guides to show you How to do it? Have I used my eye fix-it kit, to fix my wii.
Yes, I have head to ifixit.com slash tech wiki to get everything you need to fix your Nintendo switch and other game consoles thanks for watching like dislike and check out our other video about how to buy a TV for gaming leave a comment with your video suggestions And subscribe for more tech, quickie .