MaximRecoil

No, not everyone, and the supply of CRTs will never run out during the lifetime of anyone here. My main CRT TV, which I bought new in 2006 (I bought it specifically because the writing was on the wall for them at that time, and I wanted to get a new one while I still could), only gets used when I'm in the mood to play old video games, which is maybe a few weeks out of each year. Needless to say, it is still like new. The original video game hardware and software obviously hasn't changed, so why should the type of display? It won't be possible to convincingly emulate the look of a CRT until they can convincingly emulate the look of real life, i.e., when they can make a TV that is indistinguishable from looking out your window, then they can generate video that is indistinguishable from watching video on a CRT. For the time being and for the foreseeable future, CRT effects are for people willing to settle for a poor imitation.

According to this ... ... the conservative/safe box art was part of a marketing strategy due to the climate surrounding video game systems in the United States at the time.

And this thread is specifically about putting the D-pad on the left and the buttons on the right, as opposed to an Atari 2600 joystick where the joystick (D-pad equivalent) is on the right and the button is on the left. It is also specifically about the transition and even mentions the NES gamepad. There were no analog sticks on gamepads then. I'm not ignoring anything, given that you haven't established any sort of statistics regarding what percentage of people used centered joysticks with their right hand, and Donkey Kong isn't "backwards". There doesn't seem to be more than 3 titles which had the joystick on the right, 2 of which are from the same series, and one of which wasn't even a directional control. In order for something to be "backwards", it has to be opposite of the norm. 3 examples does not constitute a norm. No, I couldn't, not to anywhere near the same proficiency as with my right hand anyway. The same goes for writing. But regardless of how well I could learn to use a mouse with my left hand, the fact is, I would have to learn it, and there would be a long transition period to get to the point that it felt somewhat natural. With digital joysticks and D-pads on the left, I didn't have to learn anything. It felt natural right from the get-go.

Yes, you did. You mentioned "blur" as being an intrinsic quality of CRTs: "The blur, moire, bloom, artifact colors, scanlines, and other intrinsic qualities of CRT displays were a product of the time." RF is the lowest quality input. Issues associated with it aren't the CRT's fault. The biggest issue I have with the Atari 2600's RF output is the interference patterns. The best RF I've seen is from an original front-loader NES. Interference patterns are virtually non-existent, and the picture is almost as good as with its composite output, and better than the composite output from most other consoles. For example, the RF output of an NES is better than the composite output of a Sega Genesis. Why? It's the "purest form" of the graphics. Isn't that supposed to be a good thing? If they had, it would have made everything look worse. By the mid-80's, the graphics were up to the point of looking almost like hand-drawn animation when viewed on a CRT, i.e., the outlines looked fairly smooth even when curved or angled, and the shading looked like fairly realistic cartoon-style shading. How is that not a good thing? How is blatantly revealing that the outlines and shading effects are actually discreet, perfect squares aligned to a grid? Do you also think it is better to view traditional artwork under a microscope so you can see how flawed it really is? I vividly remember when I saw that for the first time, about 2 weeks after the NES was widely released in the U.S. in '86 (i.e., when my cousin bought one). When I saw it I said, "That sucks. I thought the Nintendo was supposed to have good graphics." But once we started playing the games, I was impressed, because on a CRT, it looks nothing like that made-with-floor-tiles look. The way I described the appearance of the onscreen graphics to other people at the time was, "It looks almost like a cartoon." I don't. That was just a cheap, unimaginative, and safe way of representing the graphics. Activision did the same thing on its Atari cartridge labels, but at least they had the good sense to put stylized artwork on the front of the box. Note that none of the art on any Nintendo arcade machine was drawn as pixels on a grid; they used stylized comic book / cartoon style art. Also, they quickly abandoned that early black box look for their NES cartridges as well, and the Famicom versions of those same titles had stylized cartoon style artwork too. For example - link.

As I've already said, trackballs, like mice, require a lot more dexterity than digital joysticks. The same applies to spinners. They both require more dexterity than operating buttons, which is why they are usually on the right. This thread is about gamepads which have the D-pad on the left, and those are electrically the same thing as a digital joystick, thus the analogy. The thrust button isn't directional control; the rotate right/left buttons are directional control, and they are on the left. They could have just as easily used a 2-way joystick for that, and they should have. Note that the fire button, which often needs to be pressed rapidly, is on the right, where it should be, because of all the controls in those games, that one needs the dominant hand the most. That would be expected for any time, with arcade games that use a digital joystick + buttons. There aren't many examples in the entire history of video arcade games where such games have the joystick on the right and the buttons on the left. So far, Gauntlet, Gauntlet II, and Arm Wrestling have been named (and Arm Wrestling had a good reason for putting the joystick on the right, as I explained in a previous post). Do you know of any others? With the exception of the two Gauntlet games, all of their right-handed motion-control games that I know of were non-joystick games (and with the Gauntlet series, we got a tacit admission from Atari, in the form of Gauntlet Legends, that they wrong-handed the controls on the first two games). Instead they used analog controls, such as spinners, trackballs, and Major Havoc's roller control, and as I've said, those require a lot more dexterity than a digital joystick does. I have no problems at all using a left-side digital joystick or D-pad, but there's no way I would want the trackball in my Missile Command arcade machine to be moved to the left side, and there's no way I'd want to use a computer mouse (which is the same idea) with my left hand either.

As I said before: CRTs aren't blurry. If you have one that is, it is in need of repair or adjustment, or it was never built to a high standard of quality in the first place. The CRT that connected to my PC right now is capable of displaying 1920 x 1440. Of course, it's no good for classic video games, because like any high-resolution display, it makes low-resolution graphics look like large, perfect squares arranged on a grid. But the point is, if CRTs were inherently blurry, they certainly couldn't be used as a modern PC monitor. I wouldn't be able to read that small text in the quotation box above because it would be nothing but a blur. Also, scan lines aren't an intrinsic quality of a CRT either; they are what happens when you display ~240p on a ~15 kHz CRT; they are the result of skipping every other line (the skipped lines are left blank, thus appear as "scanlines"). There are no scanlines with 480i on a 15 kHz CRT, or 480p on a 31 kHz CRT, and so on. Moire happens due to certain patterns; it is not exclusive to CRTs. It can even be seen in real life. The term is hundreds of years old. The "purest form" looks worse in the case of simplistic graphics, and it has nothing to do with nostalgia. If going for nostalgia, I'd use a 19" or 25" CRT and the RF connection for everything, because that's what we, and most other people, had in the '80s. Instead, I use a 32" CRT manufactured in 2006 with the highest quality connection that the video output device offers, up to component (YPbPr). I'm stuck with a crappy picture from some devices, such as the Atari 2600, because it only has RF, and not very good RF at that, but from devices with at least a good composite output such as the NES or SNES, the picture is beautiful. If low-resolution graphics looked better on high-resolution displays, then I'd use a high-resolution display. It is not as if they are hard to come by. The graphics were never intended to be seen in graph-paper form. They all knew that they would be viewed on 15 kHz CRTs; and since that drastically alters the appearance of simplistic graphics (for the better), you can think of that as being analogous to a final rendering stage. In a modern game, would you want the "purest form" of the graphics to show up on your screen, i.e., the basic 3D models without all the rendering effects that get added to them? I know, but that's what you should want, because that's the "purest form" of the graphics: Awesome, right? I like high-resolution displays for high-resolution content, such as my 22" Mitsubishi Diamondtron CRT PC monitor that I'm using right now. I don't like LCD screens for anything other than e.g., calculators. I hate their image characteristics. And no, blurry (which means out-of-focus) is never an improvement. Making a high-resolution display blurry does not make it look like a CRT in the least ... ... because, as I said, CRTs are not blurry.

Most? You only gave one example. Can you name any others? By the way, they fixed those wrong-handed controls with Gauntlet Legends and Gauntlet Dark Legacy. Most of the famous/classic Atari arcade games didn't have a joystick at all, and among the ones that did, most were in the center.

No. That's because an HD monitor reveals what it is, while a CRT monitor makes it look better than what it is. A CRT is like a professional make-up and lighting crew for an aging actress. No, you clearly see it on an HD monitor. On the original arcade monitor it looks more like actual live-action video. ^^^ Another progenitor of non sequiturs, as well as comical irony.

Your non sequitur is dismissed. Not in my book; I see them as glorified calculator screens. Also, HD digital TVs didn't exist when Pac-Man or SMB was created, so back then, they literally weren't real. Once again you've demonstrated your mastery of the obvious. Of course, large squares aligned to a grid isn't a generally desirable look for graphics, which is why the squares (pixels) got smaller and smaller relative to screen size as graphics hardware progressed. An HD display pulls back the curtain to reveal the ugliness, while an SD CRT naturally rounds out the sharp corners of the pixels (among other things), making it look more like traditional artwork, or even live-action video in some cases, such as Mortal Kombat (arcade) and other games with digitized graphics. Mortal Kombat graphics on an HD display looks like photographs converted to 64-color, non-dithered GIFs as viewed on a PC monitor, such as cluttered the web during the dial-up era.

Come to think of it, there was at least one arcade game, made by Nintendo no less, with the joystick on the right: Arm Wrestling: There was a good reason for it too, i.e., it was because in that game you have to rapidly push the joystick to the left or to the right (2-way joystick), which is the same idea as rapidly pressing a button (the joystick doesn't control any directional movement at all in that game). The dominant hand is better at that sort of thing.

"Going for round" is "giving the game designers a bit much credit"? What are you talking about? Of course they did, but they also knew that, when viewed on a real TV/monitor, each pixel isn't going to look like it was cut out of vinyl with a razor blade guided by a carpenter's square. Blurry screens are never a blessing. Fortunately, CRTs aren't blurry. If you have one that is, it is in need of repair or adjustment, or it was never built to a high standard of quality in the first place. And Pac-Man machines came with Electrohome G07 15 kHz RGB monitors, which were a far cry from "crappy", and not even remotely blurry. That's because they had no choice; that was the limitations of their graphics hardware. But it was obviously plotted to be as round as possible, and the CRT monitor took care of the rest. And on a CRT, Mario actually looks like a cartoon character, rather than something made out of large squares aligned to a grid.

That's comically ironic. Here is what I said: Does the "bolding" help? In other words, that some joysticks were in the center isn't in contention, thus, no need for me to quote it. In any case, you said: And I refuted your assertion. Given that you didn't actually address that refutation, nor even anything relevant at all (all you did was put your confusion on public display), your tacit concession on the matter is noted.

Not that that's a big enough sample size to mean anything, but what's your source for that assertion? Who are the best? The top 10? Top 20? Top 50? Top 100? How would you even go about finding out whether they are right- or left-handed without interviewing all of them? Everyone who can consistently reach the "kill screen" is on the ~same skill level. There is no getting better. A higher score doesn't mean they have more gameplaying skill (i.e., progressing-while-avoiding-enemies skill), it means they've found a better way to "point press". The act of "point pressing" itself in Donkey Kong is a low-skill affair, e.g., standing close to the Gorilla's foot and repeatedly jumping. The same applies to "point pressing" in Ikari Warriors. I can run straight through the game without losing a life and get about 1,350,000 points, or I can intentionally lose all my lives (which is part of "point pressing") and get an extra ~200,000 points. Neither one requires more gameplaying skill than the other. You do need to find the point-pressing opportunities, but that has nothing to do with being right- or left-handed. I can barely write my name legibly with my left hand, and I find it awkward even trying to light a Zippo left-handed. I definitely can't use a mouse or trackball left-handed worth a damn. If I don't find using a digital joystick with my left hand even remotely difficult/awkward, I have a hard time imagining how useless someone's left hand would have to be in order for them to have difficulties with a digital joystick or D-pad. My best score on this test was 57 taps in 10 seconds for my left hand, and 74 for my right. But more important than the difference in speed was the difference in comfort, i.e., it felt awkward and uncomfortable tapping with my left, and I could feel it in my wrist muscles, while I was perfectly comfortable tapping with my right.

Plenty of them were set up that way. Defender is about as classic as you can get; the joystick is on the left. Space Invaders is also about as classic as you can get; the joystick is on the left (Midway version uses buttons in place of the joystick, still on the left though). Stargate, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Punch-Out, Popeye, Mario Bros., Galaga, Galaxian, and many others all had the joystick on the left. And by the time JAMMA came along in '85, practically all joystick/button games had the joystick on the left. No arcade game that I know of had the joystick on the right; it was on the left or in the center. A joystick on the left doesn't favor left-handed players, it favors right-handed players. Operating the buttons not only requires more dexterity than operating a 2-, 4-, or 8-way digital joystick, but you can also tap buttons faster with your dominant hand. There was no conspiracy, which is proven by the fact that trackball games usually had the trackball on the right, and that's because operating a trackball requires more dexterity than operating buttons or a digital joystick. If the joystick on the left favored left-handed players, then I'd be horrible at videogames, because I'm not even close to being ambidextrous. But a joystick or D-pad on the left has never bothered me in the least, and on arcade games with the joystick in the center, I still use my left hand. I can beat Ikari Warriors without losing a single life, and that joystick is a rotary one, which means you rotate the knob to aim your gun, and use the normal joystick function for walking. Ikari Warriors actually has ambidextrous controls, but I always use the buttons on the right and control the joystick with my left hand. My late friend Corey, who was also right-handed, and who was as good at the game as I am, always had a bizarre way of doing it. He used the buttons on the left, but with his right hand (which he crossed under his left arm; his left hand controlled the rotary joystick of course).

Why do you think that's all but certain? Past video game systems, including those from Nintendo, often didn't comply with the old NTSC broadcasting standard. The original NES output is a far cry from a standard NTSC signal, for example. There's no need for a video game system to comply with a broadcasting standard; they only need to make sure the signal is compatible with the display device. The 16:9 menu will no doubt be a standard 720p or 1080p signal, but there's no need to do anything at all to the gameplay signal other than upscale it to 720 or 1080 vertical, and not worry about the horizontal resolution because pillarboxing takes care of itself. The only way to know for sure is to try it through an A/V adapter on a 4:3 TV and see what happens, or talk to a Nintendo engineer. If the pillarboxing is burned into the signal, you'll end up with gutterboxing (AKA: windowboxing) on a 4:3 TV.

Because that's where it belongs. Look at most any arcade machine; the joystick is on the left, the buttons are on the right. As for joysticks vs. gamepads, a joystick is the ultimate form of video game control, but only when it is solidly mounted, such as in the control panel of an arcade machine. For a handheld controller, I much prefer a gamepad. It's not as good as a panel-mounted joystick, but it's better than a handheld joystick.

I take it you've never actually played Robotron 2084 in the arcade, nor any other arcade game which uses a digital joystick. Using a digital joystick mounted in the control panel of a ~300 lb. arcade machine is nothing like using tiny analog thumb sticks. For one thing, digital joysticks are nothing like analog joysticks, and for another thing, you have far more control over a large panel-mounted joystick than a thumb stick. You can grip the panel-mounted joystick with your whole hand, and rest your wrist on the control panel (or other methods which are equally stable and conducive to dexterous control). With a thumb stick, not only do you have to do far more than just slam the lever in one of 8 directions until it stops (with analog there are infinite directions and graduations), but you also have far less control with only your thumb perched atop a wobbly stick. I've tried Robotron and Smash TV in MAME with analog sticks (Playstation controller), and it sucks. I'd much rather have a controller with a pair of D-pads for those games, which is the next best thing to panel-mounted arcade joysticks. Quite a few years ago I bought a pair of Virtual Boy controllers, which do have dual D-pads, intending to adapt them for use with MAME, but I don't know if I'll ever get around to doing that or not. In addition to Robotron and Smash TV, they would also be good for Karate Champ, which is the first game I ever got good at in the arcade.

I would like to see one of those new controllers disassembled. I might buy one just to have a look; $10 isn't much of a gamble. If they use the same rubber switches as the original NES controllers, they would be a good source for repair parts for the original controllers. Those rubber switches are typically the only things which go bad in the originals, i.e., after a lot of use, they start to split/tear in the areas where they are constantly being flexed. Also, I suspect their circuit board could be rewired/hacked to function as a standard NES controller, or a 7800 controller (you'd obviously need a different cord in either case). HDMI can support any aspect ratio, as can the backwards compatible DVI. There were plenty of 4:3 and 5:4 DVI and HDMI PC monitors made. Just look at the available desktop resolutions on any PC with an HDMI video card; you'll see plenty of 4:3 and 5:4 options. If only 16:9 resolutions were possible, you wouldn't even be able to enter safe mode on Windows (640 x 480 [4:3]) with an HDMI connection, nor would the default VGA driver be able to work when you install a new video card but haven't installed the proper drivers yet. You're thinking of specific categories of video signals, such as the signal from a Blu-Ray disc or an HDTV broadcast, which will always be 16:9, and will include letterboxing or pillarboxing in the signal to pad it out to 16:9 if necessary. That has nothing to do with the capabilities of HDMI. You could hook a 1280 x 1024 PC up to a 16:9 TV via HDMI and it would display fine, and depending on your TV settings, it would either distort the image to 16:9 or leave it alone, and the areas on the side that don't fill the screen are left blank, naturally resulting in pillarboxing. Also, there are Blu-ray/DVD combination players which have HDMI, and NTSC DVDs are strictly 720 x 480 (1.5:1, or 1.36:1 when the standard 10:11 PAR is applied, or 1.33:1 with the PAR and overscan taken into account, or 16:9 when flagged with a 1.2:1 "anamorphic widescreen" PAR).

So you didn't read my posts before replying to me? In my original post (#1150) I said: In another post (#1170) I said: Plus there is the possible issue of pillarboxing being encoded into the video signal, which ruins it for use on a 4:3 TV, unless you have an elaborate (and expensive) composite adapter which gives you horizontal width control over the video signal. The best thing for me would actually be an adapter which generates a ~240p component (YPbPr) signal. Not only is component higher quality than composite, but unlike composite, there's nothing to really go wrong in the implementation of it. In other words, the quality of a composite signal can widely vary depending on how the circuits are designed (and the quality of your TV's comb filter comes into play as well), whereas a component signal is a component signal. RGB is the ultimate form of component signal, but the only 15 kHz RGB monitors I have are 19" CRT arcade monitors. I'd prefer a YPbPr signal going to my 32" 15 kHz CRT TV. I think it's funny that anyone would naysay the idea of wanting to play old video games on the type of display that they were originally designed for. It is also funny how much more common this type of naysaying has become in the past ~decade, which is illustrative of how malleable people are in general. But I don't want this thing anyway, even if it had 15 kHz analog output, because it doesn't have any means for using game cartridges.

So you prefer your graphics to look less like they're intended to look like, rather than more? For example, in the CRT image, it actually looks like there are shadows on his torso, in the pattern of human musculature, which is obviously what the graphics designer was going for. Have you even seen shadows fall on a human torso in the shape of perfect squares arranged on a grid? What about Pac-Man? On an original arcade machine, the Pac-Man sprite and other things look ~round. Send the same ROM to a high-resolution monitor, and it looks like this: Obviously the game designer was going for round. By the way, the CRT looks a lot better in person than in an open-air photograph of the screen (which is the only way to capture it), taken with a cheap camera, no less, whereas the LCD examples look exactly how they look in person, because they are raw pixel dumps and you are viewing them on a high-resolution monitor, the same as playing the game on a high-resolution monitor in real life. You can't capture the brightness and vibrancy of a CRT by taking a picture of it (and taking a picture results in inherent losses in other areas as well), no more than you can capture the real-life brightness and vibrancy of a light bulb by taking a picture of it. Even with all of the losses with the CRT picture, it still looks better than MS Paint graphics.

It would still be "mini". No one would be required to buy the cartridge adapter or the A/V adapter (and the A/V adapter wouldn't even be very big; smaller than a pack of cigarettes). There are already aftermarket options for an HDMI-to-A/V adapter, but I suspect they suck compared to the picture quality of the original NES's, or even the SNES's, composite video output. I already have a real NES, as I said in my original post (I have 4 of them actually; 3 front-loaders and 1 top-loader; none of which I paid anything for). I don't have any problems with the cartridge loader. The front-loaders work perfectly with their original 72-pin connector as long as you keep it, and the cartridge pins, clean. That's because sharpness on a standard-resolution CRT looks good with primitive graphics, while the sharpness on a high-resolution LCD, or even a high-resolution CRT, doesn't look good with such graphics. You are talking about two totally different types of "sharpness". Standard-resolution CRTs have a very coarse dot pitch, along with a coarse shadow mask, which inherently rounds the edges of the game pixels: Both of those are "sharp", i.e., in focus, but as I said, it is a very different type of sharpness. The CRT version, on top, looks more organic, more like a real painting, and the shadow mask even gives the textured effect of a canvas. The one on bottom, which is how primitive graphics look on a high-resolution display, is the very definition of pixelated; it looks like something out of an old version of MS Paint. Also, 15 kHz CRTs display the graphics in their native resolution, while high-resolution displays have to "upscale" the graphics in order to make them fill the screen. They do this with either a "nearest neighbor" approach, which preserves and magnifies the MS Paint / Lego look, or with a filter such as along the lines of bicubic or bilinear, which looks even worse, because it creates a headache-inducing Gaussian blur effect (like so), which is ugly as homemade shoes.

Why are you replying to me without saying anything relevant to my original post or this thread? Are you looking for someone to randomly chat with? I'm not interested. You might try a social networking site.

Well, I do find your belief that you're qualified to appraise anyone else's sense of humor, funny.

Given that I already said ... ... and based on your "conclusion" that I'm "not Nintendo's audience for the NES Classic Mini", I can safely say that you have a firm grasp of the obvious.

I said: Negated, due to you not actually reading my post before you replied to it.