> You deserve to see them as they were intended to be seen.
I've never bought that argument, and I grew up playing games on CRT's.
The reality is that different CRT's had wildly different characteristics in terms of sharpness, color, and other artifacts -- and it also varied tremendously depending on the type of video output/input. Were you hooked up to a TV? A cheap monitor? An expensive monitor?
About the only thing you can say for sure is that CRT's were blurrier. And the comparison image you provide is completely misleading because the brightnesses are totally different, which suggests that the LCD/LED version isn't using correct gamma. If you used a random CRT her skin tone also had a good chance of turning greenish or whatever because that's just what CRT's did -- the color artifacts could be atrocious.
I definitely appreciate wanting to blur the image in an emulator to remove the jaggies, and the retro CRT effects are a cool novelty. But I just don't buy the argument that it's "how the games were intended to be seen", because there was just way too much variation and the screen quality was so low. It's like only listening to music from the 90's on cheap speakers over the roar of the road because it's how the music was "intended to be heard". No it wasn't. It's just the best you had at the time.
> I just don't buy the argument that it's "how the games were intended to be seen"
I do, though.
At its most extreme, compare how this CGA imagery looks like on an NTSC television, with the crisp, clean signals that generated it. The demo makers here absolutely intend you to see this via NTSC, it will look like complete trash if you don't.
There's no mistaking it. The artists on those 80s/90s games worked with the expectation of how it looked on display hardware of the time. The actual pixels, in complete precision on a vastly higher resolution display, look like shit. Or they look "retro".
Your first link is using weird color hacks that maybe could have worked on some specific hardware, but nothing like that was used on any average popular video game of the time as far as I know.
So that's not an example of how regular video game artists were working, it's an example of how some (current-day?) demoscene people are trying to push specific vintage hardware to its limits.
And like I said -- you can apply a blur filter (or basic interpolation) to get rid of jaggies, that's totally understandable. The pixels weren't meant to be sharp square blocks, just blobs of color. But a lot of these pages are showing how CRT's supposedly looked so much better are doing a lot of cherry-picking -- the reality was that they looked like blurry color-distorted wavy jittery messes just as often. There just wasn't any kind of consistency between dramatically different displays. Artists couldn't plan for some highly specific amount of horizontal smear to look "just right" because there was gigantic variance.
> a lot of these pages are showing how CRT's supposedly looked so much better
That's shifting the goalposts. The question is whether old games were intended to be seen on CRTs, or intended to be seen on LCD screens created years later. There's no question, they were intended to be seen on CRTs.
The pixels were placed by artists who looked at how they rendered on a CRT, and they'd change pixels here and there, do hand dithering, and play with the colour palette until they got what they wanted on the CRT. That was the canvas they painted with. The artists didn't have high-resolution LCD screens.
And the thesis of all the things I linked were "the artists intended you to see this on a CRT". And yet, people playing games in emulators on modern high-res LCD screens have picked up this unintended visual style and dubbed it "retro", and modern artists have created new art that was intended be seen on LCD and look "retro" while doing so. They didn't even get a CRT to check how it looks on it.
Two different sets of artists, with two different intents, separated by time and fashion.
"The question is whether old games were intended to be seen on CRTs, or intended to be seen on LCD screens created years later."
I think the counter-argument is that they were intended to be seen on CRTs but the differences between CRTs were bigger than the difference between CRT and LCD.
I don't know if this holds water but I think this is the point some try to make.
> The pixels were placed by artists who looked at how they rendered on a CRT, and they'd change pixels here and there, do hand dithering, and play with the colour palette until they got what they wanted on the CRT.
The issue is, sure they could do that for their CRT. But plug in a different one and the colors are different, the hand-dithering effect looks totally different, etc.
This stuff was drawn using zoom levels where the pixels really were squares. Obviously the artists looked at the preview to get a rough idea of how it would look blurry, but they also couldn't optimize too much for their particular display. It was more important for the design to be robust across a wide variety of displays, some of which would just look like crap no matter what.
So I'm saying, if you just apply some blur it's fine. Nobody needs to be emulating the exact characteristics of a CRT to chase down some "artistic intent" that only vintage CRT's provide. Just blurring out the jaggies is really the only thing that was ever consistent across displays, and even that varied greatly.
> Nobody needs to be emulating the exact characteristics of a CRT to chase down some "artistic intent" that only vintage CRT's provide.
While it's true that blurring is one aspect of CRTs, there are multiple different things we're talking about here. Let's get specific. This is an image of an Apple II's composite video output as seen on a naive RGB LCD.
This is not just blurring. The colors aren't even there on the naive RGB image. This is because modern displays don't properly decode the pixel pattern data as specified in the RS-170A analog video standard. A CRT shader can do many things including add blur, cross-talk, noise, scanlines, etc. But it ALSO does something else - properly decode the bit patterns in the first image to add the colors in the second image. The bit pattern was put there on purpose by the original artist/dev. Not decoding it properly means the colors are wrong or missing.
Admittedly, this is an extreme example. Most games shown undecoded in naive RGB still have roughly the right number of pixels, in about the right colors, and in about the right places. So people accept it. But without composite decoding, some colors will be incorrect and some shades will be missing. It's as objectively wrong as decoding surround sound improperly. I don't care if you use a shader to "Make it look more like a fuzzy-ass old screen." In fact, I'd prefer you didn't. Adding excess blurring or noise just degrades pixels I worked hard on. But please, when you play games I wrote almost 40 years ago, I ask that you properly decode the color data I painstakingly encoded by hand and tested on a variety of different displays from Amdek monitors to cheap ass old TVs. If you don't, you're not playing the games I wrote. You don't have to buy a CRT. Shaders are free - and just a few clicks away. Use a high-quality one that just properly decodes composite and doesn't add any degradation bullshit.
Note: those images are borrowed from this blog, which is a good discussion of composite video color encoding on the Apple II but the same principles apply to all analog composite video sources and displays. http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2021/10/apple-ii-composi...
> whether old games were intended to be seen on CRTs, or intended to be seen on LCD screens created years later.
A lot of older games were designed on grid paper or workstations, not on the consoles or homecomputer that were running them later on. Just look at all the NES and SNES games with broken aspect ratio (i.e. circles not being round), that's not rare outliers, but like half of the library.
Also the CRT vs LCD comparison are extremely disingenuous to begin with, since you are not supposed to be so f'n close to the TV to begin with. If you watch a game at its intended viewing distance and screen size your eyeballs will smooth out the LCD picture just the same as they would a CRT. If you sit close enough to see the shadow mask of your CRT, you are using it wrong.
While I agree that the pixel-art look is drastically overdone in modern retro games, it's not like it didn't exist back in the day. Most old hardware had sprite or layer scaling that allowed you to enlarge the image. The Pokemon in the battle screen on GameBoy for example are all heavily pixelated, so are many SNES games that make use of Mode7 or the enemy sprites in games like AstroBot on GBA. Meanwhile most of the C64 library uses a mode that requires pixels be twice as wide as tall, which also makes everything look blocky.
In PC gaming most of this didn't matter to begin with, since the monitors where capable of far sharper and higher resolution images than your average TV, much like a LCDs, while most of the early games where still doing 320x200. So things did end up look blocky even on original hardware.
That's not to say that CRTs don't have benefits, the motion clarity is much better than sample-and-hold/full-persistance LCDs and LCD scaling gets incredible ugly when it's not a integer multiple of the original resolution and colors/vibrancy of early LCD was also horrible. But most of those are slowly going away with black-frame insertion, 4k resolution and HDR.
And yes, sometimes you come across a Sonic waterfall that is designed to specifically take advantage of CRT TVs, but those effects are pretty rare.
Sonic the Hedgehog, 1991. First level of the game. Gorgeous translucent waterfalls on the family TV of the time. Weird solid vertical bars on a high-end monitor or in a modern emulation.
I don't buy it either. Showing something that came out 30 years after the time in question is not supportive of the argument. People wrote games and developed games and made game art on CRTs. They just developed on what they had. No one was sitting down and factoring in blur, scanlines, phosphor persistence, or etc.
> No one was sitting down and factoring in blur, scanlines, phosphor persistence
I get why you'd assume that from today's digital context. But analog video was different. I created video games in the 1980s and I know a lot of other people who did too. We still get together and hang at places like the Hacker's Conference and reminisce about hand-coding composite video pixels on 8-bit processors in assembly language. Good times.
Back in the day, we not only considered how the pixel data we put in memory would be displayed differently on screens, we had to iteratively test it because analog video output circuits weren't always consistent between platforms (Woz made things a lot trickier by saving a nickel on the video output of the Apple II). Take a look at this http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2021/10/apple-ii-composi...
Part way down the page you'll see a clear example of how we could put a specific pattern of black and white pixel data in memory that would cause the monitor to display 15 different colors. What we put in memory was not what the monitor displayed. And we wrote whole games this way. It also wasn't just the Apple II. Every arcade board and computer system could have it's own quirks. So, thinking about the blur, scanlines, and phosphors you mentioned was actually the easy part. The hard part was manipulating the display circuit in unnatural ways by hand-counting CPU cycles to display pixels in the "off-limits" overscan area or to switch display modes in the middle of a raster. There's even a book about programming the Atari video system that's literally called "Racing the Beam" (as in racing the electron beam scanning the CRT raster 59.94 times every second with the CPU). Most 80s games programmers had to know a lot about analog video signals. In fact, that's how I eventually crossed over from computer programming to video engineering.
But these are different things -- color hacks and overscan or switching display modes are about circumventing known hardware limitations in predictable and clever ways.
The topic under discussion here is the pixel art -- the idea that the artist would be relying on a fixed amount of horizontal blur to get the amount of glint in the eye "just right". And that's what you couldn't do, because that blur would be dramatically different on different CRT's.
The art was designed to be robust under blurry conditions that had extreme variation. It wasn't designed for some kind of ideal CRT so it would look "just right".
You're assuming that in the analog era content creators wouldn't bother because different analog TVs and monitors had differing fidelity and quality (or could be mis-adjusted). But we did bother. Most of us cared a lot about the pixels we made - maybe too much. We worked our asses off to make them as good as we could. It's no different than when I worked in an audio mixing studio. We had four different sets of stereo speakers sitting on the console and tied to a switchbox. When we were getting close to the final mix, and certainly during all of the mastering process, we'd switch between the audiophile grade speakers to the K-Mart speakers to the shitty car speakers. Of course, it sounded better on the better speakers and there was much less clarity in the cheap speakers. But we needed to make sure it sounded good enough on the bad speakers. This was just the normal way content creators in the analog distribution era worked.
When making games I'd check the graphics on a good composite monitor but also on a TV through an RF switchbox. In the Amiga/Atari ST era we checked on analog RGB too. Commodore 64s had optional S-Video output which looked very good compared to composite video and light years better than RF. We checked it all and created content with it in mind. In the analog era I worked in games, video production and audio production. And in all three I can recall specific instances where we worked on aspects we knew would probably only ever be appreciated by those with better gear. This was especially true with visual effects work we did for broadcast television. We added detail that we saw on the studio master tape but which a lot of people never saw at home (at least until home DVD re-issues became a thing). We hated the limitations of the current distribution standards and of the gear we authored on (even though it was the best money could buy at the time). And we struggled mightily to overcome those limitations and preserve every shred of quality we could.
Also, keep in mind that arcade cabinets weren't variable like consumer TVs. They used very specific monitors which had specific, sometimes non-standard, refresh rates. I never worked at an arcade company but I knew people who did and they often had the bare monitor tube that would be in the cabinet right on their desk during development. And in that era we only ever saw our game graphics on composite displays. All our monitors were composite video, unless you were senior enough to have a 80x25 serial terminal (which were amber or green text only). On the quad-sync analog RGB display I have now in my arcade cabinet, I've installed around 40 specific modelines so that they exactly match the original vertical and horizontal frequency of the monitor in, for example, a Williams Joust cabinet when I'm playing Joust. The CRT I have was made by Wells Gardner, a company that specialized in making CRTs for arcade cabinet manufacturers like Atari, Sega, Namco, etc.
First, I just want to thank you for all your extensive comments. It's really cool to get to hear from someone involved in all of it. It sounds like I probably played a bunch of stuff you were involved with! :)
And I don't think we're really disagreeing -- what you're describing is exactly what I meant when I said "the art was designed to be robust". Just like the sound that still works on bad speakers.
I never meant to imply there was any kind of lack of care or attention to quality. It's more that I see a kind of certain fetishization for "one true image" that never existed in the first place. Rather, the art was intentionally (and carefully) designed to be robust -- and of course more detail would come through on better displays.
You make a great point about the arcade cabinets though, where they did have that level of control, where maybe it really was "one true image" -- I was definitely thinking only about the consumer systems I grew up with. I can definitely appreciate that the art was specifically fine-tuned for that one display. I am curious if there are CRT emulators that try to replicate the individual monitor models used in arcades, as opposed to more generic TV's and monitors...
Thanks again for your comments and for engaging! This is the stuff I love HN for.
Yes, I think we broadly agree. There was quite a bit of variability in home CRT games and much less variability in arcade cabinet games. However, there was a clear specification establishing what these games should look like on a CRT which was set by the RS-170A composite video standard - even if some home TVs fell short of this goal due to age or maladjustment. Our goal in the 80s and 90s was to create game graphics that were as high-quality as we could and ensure the graphics we shipped would look correct on any CRT set to the RS-170A standard. To accomplish this we actually calibrated the composite video monitors on our desks to match the broadcast video standard. I recall one time when a new artist joined the team and his monitor wasn't set up right. The first floppy disk of image tile data he gave me had some odd color choices that were puzzling until I went and looked at his screen - where the same images looked fine. Of course, he had to redo the bitmaps but he did learn a valuable lesson about always checking the calibration on a new monitor. His monitor was literally out of phase with the rest of the universe. :-)
> It's more that I see a kind of certain fetishization for "one true image" that never existed in the first place.
Well, it's a matter of degree. The nature of analog composite video is that it can never be as precise as 16 or 24 bit digital color. But it also wasn't 'horseshoes and hand-grenades' approximation. Just because analog video is old doesn't mean these standards aren't capable of being very precise. It's possible to adjust a decent composite video monitor very close to objectively "correct" per the specification in a few seconds with just standard color bars. Many people assume the standard color bar test signal only allows calibrating correct color with the tint knob. However, it also allows calibrating correct brightness and contrast if you know what you're doing. So, we were creating our game content targeting a precise objective standard.
As for fetishization of vintage or retro... I hate it. Hopefully I've made clear I have no interest arbitrarily injecting the limitations or shortcomings of the analog past if there's any way to avoid it. I love today's 4K 10-bit HDR+ video sources and have a perfectly calibrated, ultra high-end home theater with 150-inch screen, 3-laser projector and 7.4.2 THX surround sound that can damn near make your eyes and ears bleed. It's about as good as it's possible to do in 2025 - and most days I wish it was possible to achieve even better quality. I really want 1,000 nit video projection and 12-bit sources. So, those people degrading video quality to match some nostalgic memory of the past are misguided in my view. 40 years ago those of us making the content, hated that the tech wasn't better. The tech today has improved 10x and I still hate that it isn't even better. :-)
That said, when we're playing old analog era content, whether a retro-game, laserdisc or whatever, we should make sure we're putting all the quality that was in the original up on the screen and that our replay environment correctly matches the standards the content was originally created to match. Back in the day, doing that used to be really hard. Today it's damn near trivial. Which is why it makes me maybe a little extra crazy some people who profess to love "retro" don't even bother to do it.
> You make a great point about the arcade cabinets though...
> I am curious if there are CRT emulators that try to replicate the individual monitor models used in arcades, as opposed to more generic TV's and monitors
Oh yes, indeed there are! Hundreds in fact. And it's a glorious rabbit hole to dive down. I'll just point you to this forum to get started: https://forums.libretro.com/c/retroarch-additions/retroarch-... First, there are shaders, shader packs and shader presets. The lovely thing is that it's easy for anyone to examine, adjust and remix components between various shaders. While the RetroArch emulator system has it's pros and cons, it's undoubtedly excellent for auditioning, adjusting and remixing shaders and presets.
In general, I recommend CRT Royale as a good baseline for shader newbies as it's good and not too complicated. However, I'm personally quite impressed by CyberLab's recent work on the Death to Pixels shaders. https://forums.libretro.com/t/cyberlab-death-to-pixels-shade.... Download and install the latest shader sets into RetroArch. Find and follow an online guide if it's confusing. There are tons. Advanced shader authors like CyberLab and a handful of others are doing some incredible work in the last year. Crazy stuff like researching the phosphors used in certain CRTs and doing physically based modeling on the data. There are shaders specifically for emulating CRTs with dot masks, slot masks and aperture grilles (used in Sony Trinitron CRTs). There are also shaders that target specific classes of legendary CRTs like Sony WEGA, PVM (professional grade) and BVM (broadcast grade). Others target emulating different kinds of cable connections from RF, composite, S-Video, YUV, and RGB). One of the latest trends is creating shaders which rely on what kind of flat screen technology you have. So a shader that more correctly emulates a certain Trinitron CRT by leveraging the uniquely wide contrast range of an OLED monitor but doesn't look as good on a non-OLED monitor. The same is happening around both HDR monitors and high FPS monitors, as each enables better kinds of fidelity by using those traits.
Personally, I prefer maximum quality, fidelity and authenticity (and zero nostalgic degradation). So, I avoid the entire mega-bezel series as that takes up precious screen space for rendered monitor bezels with reflected screen glow. It's cute but simply a waste of space and the bounceback reflections wash out the original image. I focus on RGB shaders and set them to minimal blurring and minimal scanlines. Have fun exploring and trying different things.
> No one was sitting down and factoring in blur, scanlines, phosphor persistence, or etc.
Sure they did, implicitly, as a byproduct of using what they had and developing game art on CRTs. That’s the whole point; using the CRT affects your choices, and things would come out different if they’d used LCDs. We know that for a fact, because things are coming out differently now that people develop game art on LCDs. :P
GP here. I don't want to repeat the lengthy technical explanation I already posted in another response downthread, so please refer to that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42817006
> The reality is that different CRT's had wildly different characteristics in terms of sharpness, color, and other artifacts -- and it also varied tremendously depending on the type of video output/input.
As a video engineer old enough to have started my career in the analog era, I fully agree composite video displayed on consumer TVs could vary wildly. I already explained the technical point about decoding the signal information properly in my other post but you're making a different point about variability, so I'll add that just because TVs could be mis-adjusted (or even broken) doesn't mean there's not a technically correct way to display the encoded image data. This is why we used color bars to calibrate TVs.
> I definitely appreciate wanting to blur the image in an emulator to remove the jaggies
But that's not my point, blur was an undesirable artifact of the composite video standard. 80s and 90s 2D pixel art was hand-crafted knowing that the blur would blend some colors together, minimize interlace artifacts and soften hard edges. However, I only use shaders that model a small amount of blur and I run my CRT in analog RGB instead of composite, which can be quite sharp. My goal is not nostalgia for the analog past or to degrade a game's output as much as my parent's shitty 1970s living room TV did. I had to engineer analog video in that past - and I hated it's shortcomings every day. When I play 80s and 90s video games, whether via shaders or on my analog RGB CRT, it probably looks quite a bit sharper and clearer than the original artists ever saw it - but that's not due to some subjective up-res or up-scaling - it's due to accurately decoding and displaying the original content to the technical standard it was created to comply with (even if many consumer TVs didn't live up to that standard).
In the 90s I worked at a TV station and after hours we'd bring in consoles just to play them on the $3,000 Sony BVM broadcast reference monitor. And they looked great! That's what I'm after. Accurately reflecting the original artist's intent in the maximum possible quality - without slipping over the line into editorializing colors or pixels that were never in the original data in the first place. I want to play the game as it would have looked back in the day on the best video output available, through the best cable available and on the best screen money could buy. And via emulation and shaders, now everyone can have that experience!
You have very valid points, variation in CRTs was very high back in the day, and the example image does have a gamma/brightness discrepancy, I agree with that. Back when CRTs were dominant, gamma and brightness were all over the map, almost nobody knew what those were. You couldn’t even count on where the visible edges of the screen were. And you’re right that saying “the way it was intended” is perhaps slightly hyperbolic or maybe isn’t quite meant the way you’re taking it. It’s not that using CRTs or not was a choice, but it is fair to say artists used CRTs when creating game art and intended for it to look as good as it could on CRTs, and they did not intend for the pixels to turn into multi-pixel solid color blocks.
Yes exactly CRTs were blurrier, and that alone affects artistic choices. It is fair to say that CRT art looks different than LCD art because CRTs are blurrier. Games developed on CRTs with low resolutions don’t look as good when displayed on high res LCDs with up-resing and nearest neighbor sampling. The problem with using a solid 2x2, 3x3, 4x4 block of LCD pixels to represent a low res CRT pixel is that it’s a poor reconstruction, introduces unwanted high frequencies, and looks very different from the original. It’s true from a signal processing perspective that 4-up LCD reconstruction of old CRT art is quite wrong and bad.
This does extend into music, kinda. We can look at music from the 30s and 50s for an even stronger example - early recorded music was both technically limited to, and also artistically designed for, a frequency range of, I don’t know, like 500-3k Hz. Some audiophiles do argue that using an old record player to play old vinyl is a superior experience to listening to a digitized copy on modern hardware, and often with the same argument - that the old stuff is the way it was intended to be heard.
However, the analogy to music is slightly broken since today’s digital music - unlike LCD up-resing of old games - never tried to reconstruct old music using nearest neighbor sampling. When you do that with audio, you can instantly hear it’s all wrong. If you were actually comparing nearest-neighbor audio reconstruction to blurry reconstruction, you would 100% agree that the blurry reconstruction was the ‘way it was intended to be heard’. The biggest problem with this whole argument that neither you nor the parent addressed is that LCD nearest-neighbor reconstruction is crappy, and as long as we try to blur when using LCDs, most of this discussion is moot.
So anyway, in many ways I think your argument already does agree with the idea that games designed on CRTs look better on CRTs than, e.g., 4-up reconstructions on LCDs. The entire sticking point in your argument might hinge on how you interpret the word “intended”. I’m saying the original argument isn’t necessarily claiming that the intent was conscious or explicit, it’s merely saying that the intent was a byproduct of having used CRTs during the creation process. In that sense, it’s a valid argument.
I largely agree with your points, especially about 4-up reconstruction.
> variation in CRTs was very high back in the day
I wanted to add some more info around this point. In cases of home consoles this is true (because they hooked up to whatever TV you had) but there's one very large case where it's not true - and it's a case that matters quite a bit, especially from a historical preservation perspective.
Most arcade cabinets were made on factory assembly lines and used bare industrial CRTs. These CRTs were made by a handful of companies and arcade manufacturers selected the CRT model for a game by its specifications, which often differed from CRTs designed for use in consumer TVs. We know exactly which CRT (or CRTs) were used in most arcade cabinets and the detailed manufacturer specifications and schematics for those CRTs are preserved and online. When researching the proper modeline frequencies to set my quad-sync monitor to (because it's a chameleon), I look up the specifications of the original CRT in the original cabinet. The game developers usually had one of these industrial CRTs on their desk, so that they were developing for the exact CRT that would be in their game's arcade cabinet.
But it's even more precise than that. Many game ROMs have a set of hidden factory calibration screens with alignment grids and color bars. On the manufacturer's assembly line, after installing and connecting the CRT, workers fired up the game, went into these screens and adjusted the internal controls of the CRT so the horizontal & vertical positions and sizes of the grids were correct as well as the color bars via the tint control. I use these calibration screens to this day to properly set up my CRT to match the adjustments of the CRTs in the original cabinets (which the game ROM was written and tested against). Because my monitor handles so many ranges of frequencies, it stores and recalls these horiz/vert/tint adjustments for each unique scanning frequency (along with other adjustments like pincushion, skew, bow, etc). Historians have even managed to preserve some of the instruction sheets written for the factory floor workers to use when adjusting the CRTs to the intended spec.
I've never bought that argument, and I grew up playing games on CRT's.
The reality is that different CRT's had wildly different characteristics in terms of sharpness, color, and other artifacts -- and it also varied tremendously depending on the type of video output/input. Were you hooked up to a TV? A cheap monitor? An expensive monitor?
About the only thing you can say for sure is that CRT's were blurrier. And the comparison image you provide is completely misleading because the brightnesses are totally different, which suggests that the LCD/LED version isn't using correct gamma. If you used a random CRT her skin tone also had a good chance of turning greenish or whatever because that's just what CRT's did -- the color artifacts could be atrocious.
I definitely appreciate wanting to blur the image in an emulator to remove the jaggies, and the retro CRT effects are a cool novelty. But I just don't buy the argument that it's "how the games were intended to be seen", because there was just way too much variation and the screen quality was so low. It's like only listening to music from the 90's on cheap speakers over the roar of the road because it's how the music was "intended to be heard". No it wasn't. It's just the best you had at the time.