The recent update to Breath of Fire IV adding Point Sampled and Bilinear rendering is a fantastic improvement. Point sampling restores the crisp, clean look of the original pixel art and removes the blurry smoothing that happens on modern displays. Combined with integer scaling, it finally lets these games look the way they were meant to sharp, authentic, and faithful to the original art style.

It would be amazing to see this applied to other classic DirectX games in the GOG catalog especially older RPGs, adventure games, and sprite-based titles. This small change has a big visual impact, and it really enhances the retro experience without needing mods or external tools.

Please keep this going it’s a great step toward making GOG the best place to play classic PC games!

Okay, do you know perhaps some magical incantation that'll work across several incompatible API versions of DirectX?

That's pretty much what Wine does ;)

Haha, fair enough! If I did have a magic spell to unify all those old DirectX versions, I’d probably be too busy fixing every retro game ever to post here

Even if it’s not something that can be done across the board, just having it show up in a few more games especially the ones where pixel clarity really matters would be awesome. Thanks for the work gog have done already, and here’s hoping the magic can spread carefully, one spellbook at a time!

While the new point sampling option looks ok'ish (passable) on the new BoFIV release, this is definitely not how the sprites were intended to look at all.

Those were the days of CRT and scanlines to handle most of the filtering for home consoles. So while the GOG release does look better, it does not look authentic at all in regards to its initial Playstation offering or to the way the initial PC port looked either.

So, in addition to filtering, let's see some scanlines for GOG 4:3 releases of console games. I know this is a 2003 PC port, but it's a port of a PSX title.

The 1st pic is how it is supposed to look...not just point-filtered pixelation. We call that pixel vomit these days.

Pic 2...point-filtered pixel vomit of Fou Lou and Zaurus

Pic 3. scanlined Zaurus

The whole point of point sampling, and its downfall, is that if makes textures blocky and chunky and pixels even more pixellated.

The PSX used bilinear filtering...just as this PC port uses by default, in conjunction with interlaced scanlines to give a smooth appearance. The reason why using bilinear filtering on this PC port looks like shit on modern displays in this example is due to lack of scanlines.

I guess the point I'm getting at is that if you didn't grow up with CRT, then maybe it looks authentic to you. We didn't grow up seeing these crisp pixels that everyonme seems to think are charming and authentic....but are not.

Actually, the CRT was very common and mainstream for PCs when this title was initially released. So, the devs would have had no need to add scanlines as that was how CRTs work anyway. i bet this port looked really good back then......not today though....unless you go that extra step and add your own crt overlay/filter.....which GOG should and could do.

Visible scanlines were mainly a TV thing. None of my PC CRT monitors ever had scanlines visible from a normal viewing distance, you'd have to have your nose to the screen to see them. Pixel games always looked like your Pic 2 on them.

Again….we are talking about the original supposed appearance of this game These sprites of this game in particular. They are ported from console. They were indeed meant to be viewed with scanlines. As for not being able to see scanlines on PC CRt….I’ve always been able to see them at lower resolution …always.

Yeah, but the point is that on a good PC monitor the scanlines were not visible as distinct lines with black lines between them, when viewed from a normal viewing distance. Only when you looked at the screen from very close you could see the scanlines.

I've been PC gaming since the 80's and pixel games always looked like your Pic 2 to me. I understand that for a console gamer with TV display things may have looked different.

We are talking about a port of a console game…..again …a port that was designed for a televisio. You are going in circles. The issue was with how it is supposed to look based on original design . Hence…..scanlines.

I've used CRT screens for quite a long time, and I don't recall any visible scanlines either. Multi-platform games are not supposed to look exactly the same on each of the supported platforms.

Personally, I find scanlines tiresome for eyes.

Everyone has had varying experiences based purely on what the hardware they happened to own, so unless numerous filters (and none) are offered, someone is always going to complain that the appearance isn't "the intended viewing experience", or that "it doesn't look the way I remember". May as well just release it crisp as it was originally, so people can play it on a CRT monitor if they want, or apply their own shaders as a CRT TV may have done.

The only time I recall scanlines are on faulty old tubes on 30+ year old arcade machines that likely had never seen a day of maintenance.

Exactly this. Especially non-3D / games built on top of ddraw that are using the GOG ddraw -> d3d9 wrapper would benefit from this immensely. There's nothing that would technically stop GOG from writing a post-processing shader to get the game closer to its original look and feel, much like retroarch and others are doing when emulating consoles. That is, if they wanted to, they could very well include the option in their wrapper. But, even without it, point sampling is a step in the right direction.

I've never seen a CRT shader that really worked on a 1080p monitor. On my current 1440p monitor, they don't work much better. Maybe 2160p is enough, dunno, but honestly I prefer something like scalefx filtering for 2D games. Any shader is going to be at best an approximation of the real thing anyway, so you might as well use something you like looking at, regardless of how "accurate" it is.

From my vague understanding, this is less a problem of normal resolution and more a problem of temporal resolution; most CRT shaders would need an insanely high refresh rate to work well.

Most. There's a few subtle shaders like the ones in DosBox Staging or the lovely TAS Community Emulator BizHawk, both of which have CRT simulations which are subtle enough to pass muster for what I remember monitors and screens looking like.

(Which were double scanned, progressive monitors.) https://www.dosbox-staging.org/

It's subtle in most examples. But it is there like I remember it.