When old games are connected to modern flat-screen TVs, the image often doesn't look as natural as remembered. This isn't just a difference caused by nostalgia: many titles from the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s were originally designed around the display characteristics of CRT TVs. Switching to LCD or OLED screens changes how motion, resolution, and pixel art appear.
CRTs use an electron gun to excite phosphor material on the screen, drawing horizontal lines from left to right and top to bottom. Modern LCDs and OLEDs generally use a "sample-and-hold" method, keeping a complete frame displayed until the next refresh. The difference between these two mechanisms gave CRTs higher motion clarity for a long time, a gap that LCDs and OLEDs have only gradually narrowed with the advent of high-refresh-rate flat-panel displays.
This difference is more noticeable in older games like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The game's originally lower and unstable frame rate was less obvious when motion was handled by a CRT; on modern display devices, the stuttering becomes easier to perceive.
Resolution is also a key factor. CRTs do not have a fixed native resolution like modern panels and can display various resolutions without the blurring and stretching commonly seen with low-resolution images on flat-screen TVs. Before the PS3 and Xbox 360 era, console games were primarily designed around two standards: 240p and 480i.
Specifically, 480i uses interlaced scanning, drawing odd and even lines sequentially; 240p uses progressive scanning, drawing all active lines in order. Standard-definition CRTs displaying 240p signals leave gaps of black lines between them, creating a visual effect commonly known as "scanlines," which has become a typical feature of retro pixel art.
Modern TVs' processing of old signals introduces additional issues. Some devices need to convert 480i to 480p, and the deinterlacing process can increase input lag; some TVs also misidentify 240p as 480i, resulting in visual artifacts such as motion blur. The signal is then further upscaled to 1080p or 4K, further altering the presentation of the original image.
The art style of older games also leveraged CRT characteristics. Developers used dithering techniques, adding checkerboard patterns to sprites and textures to simulate smoother color transitions; these patterns blend naturally with the phosphor screen of a CRT but are clearly visible on LCD or OLED displays. When Square Enix recently re-released Final Fantasy Tactics, they removed this dithering from the classic display mode due to differences in visual presentation.