Re:Final Fantasy remasters reignite controversies over pixel...
by joshspankit on Friday June 25, 2021 @06:58PM
(#27637284)
^ Can confirm. The tech itself might have had less “complexity”, but devs had to practically (or actually) become engineers of every single piece of the pipeline. The different connectors, the different tubes, how colour works, how the memory functioned (not just how the docs said it functioned), the math that each chip did as the functions were run, everything.
Lack of knowledge of any specific part could mean anything from muddy graphics to a bug in the retail version of the game in a time when there was literally no way to patch a game after release. Those bugs could ruin a company.
Oh you don't even know the half of it, believe me! That was not how it went back in the day.
While every monitor was indeed a CRT, the difference between composite, EGA (later VGA), and RF cable, TV and computer monitors were in fact quite visible.
You could draw perfectly good pixel art on a nice, well calibrated 14" computer monitor only to see the same graphics look like a blend of mouse excrements and frog barf on a PAL TV via RF cable.
In fact, artists needed to make sure their palette and graphics worked reasonably well on both PAL and NTSC devices (different resolutions, slightly different colours, etc.).
Some companies made good ports that worked- and looked well on both PAL and NTSC, while many games had terrible PAL versions.