Hi, this is Mr. Gimmick!
As you can see he’s pretty small. That’s because he was made in 1992 for a NES game with 240p resolution.
If we wanna play his game on screens with higher resolution, we have two options. Scale him up, or, make our screen emulate a lower-resolution screen.
The fun thing about scaling him up is that there’s all this information in between the pixels that is unknown to us:
There’s lots of options of how to fill in those gaps. Build him out of triangles, or blurry circles, or try to interpolate and recreate an underlying drawing the way a DAC turns audio samples into sound, like ScaleFX does. You might have seen this option: building him out of big squares:
That’s not necessarily the default or only approach. That is one specific algorithm called “nearest neighbor”. Each empty pixel is given the color of the nearest “real” pixel.
Importantly, there’s no single one answer how the artists who made each game would want their work scaled up. Super Mario Bros. 1 was made on graph paper, which Super Mario All-Stars was made to reflect with its assumptions that pixels are square. While Chrono Trigger was made for wide pixels, by artists that knew how the TVs of the time would display that game. But that’s just two games. The creators of those games left clues in the game (by clues I mean the coin logo in All-Stars, and the moon background in Chrono Trigger) on how they were making the art for their games. For most other games we just have no idea.
It’s okay that you, the player, set the game to look in a way that you yourself feel is comfortable to play and lets you enjoy the game.
ScaleFX which is less blocky and more vectory is to me a very relaxing and inviting look for 8bit games, especially new-to-me ones where there’s less need for nostalgia. It just makes me wanna play the games for hours. (I haven’t found a scaler for SNES and Mega Drive I like as much. I do use ScaleFX after an mdapt pass on them first, but it doesn’t as feel as 💯 as it does on say SG-1000 games or Master System.)
The other approach is to turn your screen into a lower-resolution screen instead, by emulating exactly how that older screen would look through a magnifying glass. NES and SNES famously used a “double-strike” rendering method which made it look like there’s black lines between the scanlines. And pixels weren’t square, they looked like sideways glowing ellipses almost. While on older Game Boy systems you can see a small cell divider between each square in the matrix.
I’m really grateful for this approach because sometimes nothing beats that magic nostalgic feeling of looking at the video game the way it looked back in the day, or if you really do prefer a CRT screen but can’t have one for space reasons this can be a way to make what you have look like what you want.
But I’m really sick of the approach online that this is the only way and that all other approaches is “destroying” the games; it’s 100% fine if you personally treasure the screen emulation approach but the level of vitriol and attacks against the scaling approaches is what’s not as welcome.
In the CRT era and the original DMG-001 era, I loved the games but they were so tiring. I’m grateful can emulate that look for the occasional nostalgia hit but I don’t want to make it my bread and butter. I was so grateful when TFT LCDs came around! I personally liked the GBC and original GBA so much more than gaming on a CRT.
Screen emulation also kind of assumes that the screen that is doing the emulating is some sort of platonic neutral that doesn’t have any traits of its own. I’ve seen expensive high-end FPGA Game Boy clones advertising a 615 PPI resolution vibrant IPS screen… and then it defaults to emulating the blurry old dot matrix green yellow retro screen that so many people hated back in the day! I personally kinda liked the original Game Boy screen unlike CRTs. Not sure I’d be able to go back to it though. It’s funny how many hours I logged on the original DMG Game Boy, then after Game Boy Pocket I couldn’t go back, and then after GBC I couldn’t even go back to the GBP (even though I tried a couple of times because my GBC had a DC hum audio problem, as did my GBA, a problem that my DMG and GBP didn’t have).
Newly made screens can also have all kinds of interesting traits, like they might be RLCD or even memory displays, or someone might be gaming on an actual CRT. Scaling up the game in a way that suits your screen might be the best or only option then.
When we try to preserve classic movies we don’t always try to add extra film grain or lower the framerate to the silent era’s 16 FPS or jam extra chromatic aberration and VHS tracking errors onto it. We just want the movie itself.
Sure, movie players can add that kind of stuff or we see those kinds of effects be valuable for flashback scenes or a retro vibe (just as how in indie games pixel art is often great for low-memory, smaller artist teams etc along with the aforementioned nostalgia hit), but when you just want the movie and just wanna watch the movie for the movie’s sake, no-one is gonna bite your head off saying “you’re destroying the movie”. (Outside of that one HBomb video when he tried to convince everyone to go back to VHS tapes for movies.)
There’s also some value in hybrid approaches. The Sega Mega Drive famously had an issue where transparency effects wouldn’t work on an RGB TV connection, only on composite, at the expense of color fidelity, but with mdapt+RGB you can get some of the best of both worlds. Or, people from the scale-up side of things can have fun with some glowies or other effects originally created for screen emulation.
Point I’m trying to make here is as per ushe that we’re condemned to choose; that we can case-by-case it. You can use one setup on your handheld and your daughter can use another on her TV. Or even different setups for different games or even different moods.