They did look better on CRTs. Modern displays will smooth things in a way the original developers didn’t intend. It’s less pronounced in the PS1/N64 era, but SNES/NES has some games that look noticeably worse without applying a filter.
Plus VHS and analog SD broadcast used to “compress” the signal by sending only every other line, every other frame. That interlacing allowed them to basically halve the bandwidth of the signal while still mostly giving the human eye the illusion of the full frame rate, especially with the glowing phosphors of a CRT screen).
The main problem for digital video formats is that interlacing doesn’t play well with the compression methods in modern codecs, so video that was originally in that analog-friendly format is very inefficient to encode (and looks bad on modern displays).
They did look better on CRTs. Modern displays will smooth things in a way the original developers didn’t intend. It’s less pronounced in the PS1/N64 era, but SNES/NES has some games that look noticeably worse without applying a filter.
This is true of SD media as well. Watching a VHS rip for example is pretty jarring on an HD display, but it didn’t look that way on a CRT.
Plus VHS and analog SD broadcast used to “compress” the signal by sending only every other line, every other frame. That interlacing allowed them to basically halve the bandwidth of the signal while still mostly giving the human eye the illusion of the full frame rate, especially with the glowing phosphors of a CRT screen).
The main problem for digital video formats is that interlacing doesn’t play well with the compression methods in modern codecs, so video that was originally in that analog-friendly format is very inefficient to encode (and looks bad on modern displays).