Have you checked the examples…? I feel like we’re going in circles. There are cases where the CRT looks objectively better, supporting examples have been provided, technical explanation has been provided… it’s up to you to look at them or not.
If you wish to discusd some of the examples, or the tech, I’m open to that. Otherwise I’ll leave it here. ✌️
All pixels are a “blur” of R, G, and B subpixels. Their arrangement is what makes a picture look either as designed, or messed up.
For rendering text, on modern OSs you can still pick whichever subpixel arrangement the screen uses to make them look crisper. Can’t do the same with old games that use baked-in sprites for everything.
It gets even worse when the game uses high brightness pixels surrounded by low brightness ones because it expects the bright ones to spill over in some very specific way.
The more subscriptions people need to access the content they want, the more likely they are to pirate it instead.
Everyone is talking about “Netflix-like” and “Steam-like”, while forgetting that Netflix and Steam grew big not because of their subscription plans, but because they were a single point to access all content.
The video shows an objective example where square pixels destroy the image, while rearranged subpixels restore it. There are more similar examples here around in the comments.
The good ones aren’t “blur”, they’re “subpixel rearrange”.
It takes about 4x4 square pixels to emulate the subpixels of a single round one… just like it takes about 4x4 round pixels to emulate the subpixels of a square one.
I’ve spent way more than 100 hours on plenty of games over the years, games that nowadays are below $10, like:
Doom
Duke Nukem 3D
Tetris
BlockOut (now, BlockOut II)
MS Flight Simulator 5.0
F-117A 2.0
Monkey Island 1
Monkey Island 2
Ultima Online (now, UO Outlands)
GTR: FIA GT Racing
There are many free-to-play mobile games with optional ads, that I’ve also enjoyed for over 100 hours each before they became frustrating, but hard to make a list now.
Crazy talk, and you’re onto something… that’s been solved already.
First part: you hate that a 10+ years old game is only getting cosmetic changes instead of a rehaul of the whole character model. That’s crazy, nobody’s going to do that, not the ones expecting a profit, and not the modding community doing it for free. If you feel it’s a silly change, you’re right, but realize that it’s the only change they could do.
You’re onto something: body feature sliders. Male, female, giraffe, and turtle bodies, have some structural differences, that however mostly match to the same bones having different shapes. The solution is a body shape slider, or 50. It’s something that existed, in some games, since at least the 2000s. Others were lazy and didn’t do it.
For reference of how far this could go, the following all have the same bones, only change in shape, size, and muscle placemen:
Games could have multiple protagonists with different bodies, genders, personalities, etc… something like Overwatch did have that, you could even play as a hamster or a robot!
Could be a chat or email trail. People nowadays often forget the difference between talking something over at the urinal, and writing about it in an app.