End of the arcade CRT monitor

[RP2A03]

It is actually possible for the crystals in an LCD to get stuck in a twisted state resulting in what is essentially burn-in.

[Ed Oscuro]

They specifically designed most of the sprites to look good on a CRT monitor

Man, I remember back when I used to believe this. Those were the days.

Then I found MAME's Pixel Aspect setting, and fat Simon from Dracula on X68000, and nothing was the same. Actually having a discussion about that right now.

A good example - reportedly you get 1-to-1 horizontal and vertical movement in Thunder Dragon 2 if you go to square pixels. Sure, why not? The problem is that the game plays, obviously, in 3:4 aspect, and in this case it looks wrong if you go to 1x1 square pixels from "pixel aspect" mode. But it's not always the case that graphics were designed that way.

There are some occasional odd effects that are CRT-based - I recall reading about a change to MAME's Three Wonders so that a screen would appear blue instead of black as in MAME. That was the result of a rather obscure quality of CRT monitors.

But for most purposes, and especially for classic NES console games and the like, they were plotting those graphics on 1x1 paper grids or maybe composing them in 1x1 on a computer monitor grid, and maybe peeking at the game later running on a television if they had time, maybe changing something if it looked really hideous.

[Jack_Burton_BYOAC]

How do we know those grids weren't composed of rectangles to compensate for the aspect ratio differences?

[Ed Oscuro]

How do we know those grids weren't composed of rectangles to compensate for the aspect ratio differences?

There definitely are some questions to be answered here. Thunder Dragon 2, when viewed in pixel aspect mode (or just when taking an unstretched screenshot) is a good example in that it gets very widely stretched out. If anything is going to show evidence of distortion, it'd be something with a reference outside the game, like a simple grid, logo, or a digitized photograph you could access after (not arcade, but try Joker's body at the end of Batman on Genesis; for arcade, Aliens has a lot of promising sources, although the 9:7 pixel aspect mode comes out reasonably close to 4:3 display). I won't generalize and say none were tweaked with a perspective-corrected grid, but there's photographic and other proof that some weren't, at least on consoles (I need to look at this again, though): Pictures of graphics being composed on some computer monitors, where the grids obviously have a 1:1 ratio, and some graph paper plots of other game graphics, I think. (I should ask around to see who has pictures of those...bet you Dion Dakis has a bunch! ) In some early cases (NES would be an example) I think it's most likely that if something was tweaked it was done only by eye, which is more than good enough in many cases.

Having the planning grid use square pixels still doesn't prove the games weren't tweaked for non-square pixels in the output resolution, but in some cases you can see things look better as 1:1 pixels than in the final resolution's aspect ratio.

I don't mean to say that people are wrong for having a preference on this, either, although this is usually said with respect to output formats, not in attempts to change the actual aspect ratio of the pixels, which is impossible for output to any classic 4:3 style CRT and only really possible for most people when emulating. The more typical case of "is this how the designers intended?" is when talking about NES output, since that system's default hardwares output composite and the RGB generating chip variants seem to have some errors in design.