The system could only display 400-something colors at a time. Once you reduce the number of colors that can be used, you lose gradients so one color doesn’t ease into another color. Due to this, art styles were typically different and used contrast to “pop” the characters and items visuals in game since being more realistic wasn’t an easy (or possible) option.
Now that we can have millions of colors, you can do whatever style you want.
A similar thing happened as polygon counts went up.
Daxtron2@startrek.website 3 months ago
Little bit of A, little bit of B. The sprites were also designed with CRT limitations in mind so they generally look better than they do on non-crt screens
Blackmist@feddit.uk 3 months ago
Things like stippled dots or vertical lines especially would blur into each other making new colours or faking transparency.
Random video to demonstrate it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=IthGu6Ysmpc
But if your TV was too good, you wouldn’t get the effect as much.