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0 pointsido7y ago0 comments

I remember playing Master of Orion 2 on my computer at the time (mid 90s) and thinking:

1. it's amazing this game actually runs at 640x480

2. there's no point in having resolutions any higher than that, as you can't see the individual pixels at that size anyway (I had a 14" CRT, viewable area probably around 13").

At least in the early to mid 90s you definitely still had "CRT fuzz" on computer monitors.

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zozbot1237y ago· 2 in thread

I think the typical CRT fuzz is actually quite close to the optimum smoothing that could be achieved with a simple, analog system, such as was common in the 1980s and early 1990s - in that it should closely approximate a Gaussian blur! But lanczos (or hq#x) is crisper than that, of course.

(And yes, 320x240 did use 2x nearest neighbor interpolation on later video cards/monitors that could only display higher resolutions natively. But I assume that back in the early 1980s, you would actually get a "native" 320x240 screen, just like on a home computer or console.)

int_19h7y ago

On any CRT screen, you'd just get 320x240 as native resolution, the "interpolation" basically done by the phosphorus of the screen. This was the norm well into 90s, and not everybody was on an LCD monitor in 00s, either.

I remember that many games (myself included) resisted LCDs for a long time even beyond that, precisely because they could only do one resolution well. If you played old games, this wasn't satisfactory because those were often hardcoded in the resolutions they support - typically 320x200 or 640x480. And if you played new games, you'd often have to dial the resolution down to get it running reasonably fast.

idoOP7y ago

I think the point was that it was the video card that didn't support 320x240 natively, so it NNed to 640x480.

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