Top all-time · #2861
Nerdly Pleasures
Personal blog · nerdlypleasures.blogspot.comhardwaregameshistory
Nerdly Pleasures is a personal blog at nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com about hardware, games and history. Since 2015, 27 different Hacker News readers have linked it 30 times, most often “Apple II Composite Artifact Color - NTSC, PAL and Filters”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (14) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link this retro computing blog for detailed write-ups on composite video and CRT effects on pixel art, Apple II PAL colour circuits, CGA 16-colour graphics, and floppy disk copy protection history.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 14 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Vintage computers and retro gaming
Most-linked posts?
- /2021/10/apple-ii-composite-artifact-color-ntsc.html3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-03-09
- Apple II Composite Artifact Color - NTSC, PAL and Filters2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-12-06
- Transparency effects in SNES and Genesis games via composite video artifacts2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-03-06
- The saga of the color brown in the early years of the PC (2023)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-03-16
What Hacker News says?
I think you had a maladjusted TV or something. On a good TV or composite monitor, pixel art should have fairly sharp edges. Most televisions had adjustment controls for various thing (sharpness, contrast, tint, color, etc); so many people didn't know how to properly adjust them, though. My first video game system was a cheapo b/w pong clone knockoff thing from radio shack. My second was an Atari 2600. Later my paren…
Comment linking /2013/09/the-overlooked-artifact-color.html
on “Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap”Submitted Transparency effects in SNES and Genesis games via composite video artifacts as a story · 156 points
HN discussionIt’s interesting though that composite PAL/NTSC (especially NTSC) has a massive effect on the picture, owed to the fact that the color carrier was embedded into the luminance spectrum, so a re-digitized PAL/NTSC signal will still look very different from a digital-output-first signal, or a re-digitized VGA or component signal. There’s some evidence that console games of the era were sometimes designed for the effect…
Comment linking /2015/03/the-case-for-composite.html?m=1
on “The Effect of CRTs on Pixel Art (2024)”Submitted The saga of the color brown in the early years of the PC (2023) as a story · 92 points
HN discussion> Its a factoid pulled out of nowhere Nope. And your gameboy examples are not counter points to the fact that games were designed around a target screen limitation. They weren't designed around a CRT quirk, but they were designed around their own LCD quirk instead. The first gameboy's screen was painfully bad, with a lot of ghosting during movement. It was exploited in various way in games : https://nerdlypleasures.…
Comment linking /2019/05/screen-persistence-and-gba-lcd-abuse.html
on “The effect of CRTs on pixel art”Submitted Apple II Composite Artifact Color - NTSC, PAL and Filters as a story · 17 points
HN discussionLooking at the gameplay, it seems fun https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tI-N_TnTp1c Apparently it was released with the Atari Flashback 2 mini console and that's how it became known to the public https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2017/12/atari-flashback...
Comment linking /2017/12/atari-flashback-2-only-flashback-worth.html
on “Atari asks for help finding developer of 2600 game Aquaventure”Submitted USPS Media Mail Rules Are Arbitrary and Stupid as a story · 12 points
HN discussion> Nobody needs to be emulating the exact characteristics of a CRT to chase down some "artistic intent" that only vintage CRT's provide. While it's true that blurring is one aspect of CRTs, there are multiple different things we're talking about here. Let's get specific. This is an image of an Apple II's composite video output as seen on a naive RGB LCD. https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj...…
Comment linking /2021/10/apple-ii-composite-artifact-color-ntsc.html
on “Subpixel Snake [video]”Submitted Resurrecting the Most Useless Piece of Vintage Computing Technology – The Modem as a story · 6 points
HN discussion> They just developed on what they had Correct. > No one was sitting down and factoring in blur, scanlines, phosphor persistence I get why you'd assume that from today's digital context. But analog video was different. I created video games in the 1980s and I know a lot of other people who did too. We still get together and hang at places like the Hacker's Conference and reminisce about hand-coding composite video p…
Comment linking /2021/10/apple-ii-composite-artifact-color-ntsc.html
on “Subpixel Snake [video]”Submitted The Ownership of and Issues with the ColecoVision Trademark as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSome did use the 160x100x16 graphics mode (using some of the same techniques in the OP) but one drawback is that they didn't always look 100% correct on clones, and some eventually broke when VGA cards came out. http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2014/09/cga-16-color-rgb...
Comment linking /2014/09/cga-16-color-rgb-graphics-modes.html
on “1K colours on CGA: How it's done”Submitted Model F104 Classic Style Keyboard – Buckling Spring Perfection at Last? (2024) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion>Digital art does not have this problem. https://xkcd.com/1683/ On a less smug note, truly digital art might not have that problem, but digital representations of analogue art (which the topic of discussion falls under) do. Most movies are just digital encodings of analogue film, and it's only very recently this stopped being true. And that's not to mention the fact that the way you that you view digital files also…
Comment linking /2015/03/the-case-for-composite.html
on “The Matrix looks dramatically different on Hulu versus on HBO Max”Submitted The Modern Unfriendliness of 8-Bit Keyboard Layouts as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> And this was before pirating. I'd be careful arguing that this period was pre-piracy, copying floppy disks containing commercial software/games was rampant in this period among many enthusiasts. Software piracy arguably came of age with floppy disks, and there was all sorts of weird and wonderful attempts to combat it. I still really miss the weird 'papercraft' contraptions that started to appear with many games i…
Comment linking /2013/03/exposing-code-wheels-pc-game-document.html
on “Video game crash of 1983”Submitted The Saga of the Color Brown in the Early Years of the PC as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIf this is going to occur on a regular basis, we will eventually run into copy protection mechanisms, which are also worth preserving. A bit-for-bit copy, uploaded to something like museum.github.com would be a much better archival record. https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2015/11/ibm-pc-floppy-d...
Comment linking /2015/11/ibm-pc-floppy-disks-deeper-look-at-disk.html
on “How Not to Release Historic Source Code”Submitted Oddball EGA and VGA Resolutions, When the Standard Resolutions Aren't Used as a story · 2 points
HN discussionInteresting. It would generate a PAL-clocked black-and-white signal (with what would be NTSC artifact colors, except in PAL they don't artifact), and then a separate circuit would read that and generate the colors based on the pattern. There also seemed to be "International NTSC" models that would output NTSC color at 50 Hz and only worked with Apple's own displays... https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2021/10/app…
Comment linking /2021/10/apple-ii-composite-artifact-color-ntsc.html
on “So you want to make pixel art for an Apple II”Submitted The Famicom Microphone as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI'm scratching my head over your statement. You can see how they generated artifact color on the back porch of the colorburst by looking at the screen? You can see the phaase of their color reference wrt the pixel clock? Please explain. See https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2021/10/apple-ii-compos... for how it really works.
Comment linking /2021/10/apple-ii-composite-artifact-color-ntsc.html
on “Franklin's bad ads for Apple ][ clones and the beloved impersonator they depict”Submitted Exciting Developments for NES ROMs as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYes, that's right. This page has more info: https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2021/10/apple-ii-compos... The PAL color circuit was initially an expansion card for the Apple II+ in 1979. The same circuit was built-in to the later Apple IIe and IIc models. A novel part of the design is that the TCA650 is actually a PAL decoder chip that is meant to split a composite video signal into YPbPr components. The Apple II…
Comment linking /2021/10/apple-ii-composite-artifact-color-ntsc.html
on “Appler: Apple ][ emulator for IBM PC, written in 8088 assembly”Submitted Digital Sound in DOS Games Without a Sound Blaster as a story · 1 points
HN discussionClosest I ever got to Japanese computers was using an IBM JX in primary school. That's a variant of the IBM PCjr – the biggest difference is, unlike the PCjr, it had a proper keyboard, and by default 3.5-inch floppies rather than 5.25-inch. It was primarily sold in Japan – but also to schools in Australia and New Zealand. The Australia/NZ model was missing the extra memory and Kanji-specific display hardware that th…
Comment linking /2021/03/ibm-jx-ibm-pcjr-20-revised-article.html
on “When is a PC not a PC? The PC-98”Submitted IBM PC Floppy Disks – A Deeper Look at Disk Formats and Copy Protection (2015) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Breaking PC DOS Game Copy Protection as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
