CRT screensafe
August 18, 2020
With retro game development, one thing has been lost since we transitioned to LCD screens; screen-safe!
Screen-safe isn’t just for games, but was an industry standard used by the movie industry, broadcasters and DVD content creators so their content fit on the myriad of crappy CRT screens out there.
In regards to the NES specifically, Nintendo would check that games followed the screen-safe principal, rejecting games that had menu UI outside of the “title safe” area. In all, 3 areas existed:
- Clipped – some CRTs couldn’t show this area.*
- Action safe – action can happen here but no text.
- Title safe – put here your ui and any other important information.
* In the case of NTSC screens, the top and bottom 8px were cropped entirely, making NES vertical resolution 224px high, not 240px.
Here is the screen-safe card for the NES, you can overlay this on any NES game and see that it all fits in the right areas. You can also run this file on your own NES and see which areas get clipped on your CRT.
Download the .nes file at itch.io here
Here are some CRTs we have knocking about the studio, notice how the action safe is almost cut off on the Sharp TV, this is one of the better CRTs out there! If you have a CRT and want to try this out, feel free to post your photos to the itch.io download page.
