/vr/ - Retro Games

we wuz trapped in space by someone

The scanlines thing is less of a factor than how outright blurry and grainy the picture was on an old 80's TV with just coax/RF. Even so, the games looked nice. Later on I plugged an NTSC Amiga 500 with its A520 (RF modulator box) into the TV and it was totally unusable in Workbench in 80-column mode. Just too damn blurry to make out the characters. I guess that's why they had a 60-column option, and that was good enough so long as you didn't spend hours staring at text. But otherwise it was very usable for games, and even doing pixel art in Deluxe Paint. Getting a real monitor later on improved things a lot though (although their 15 KHz 1084 series is still relatively grainy compared to VGA PC monitors).