Probably down to VGA's double scanning which makes modes with 200-ish line look "chunky", even on a blurry 14" CRT. But drawing technique does factor into it - some artists do better at manually 'anti-aliased' graphics, others not so much.

Aesthetics are as always subjective... personally, I'd take well-drawn low-res artwork any day over the typical hi-res job around 1993 and earlier, which might have been 640x480, but used only the barest BGI or GDI primitives and tended to look very crude. *shrugs*

I can't imagine an Atari 2600 version of a game ever being the better looking version. Graphically, my Intellivision was world's better than my friend's 2600.

The slow ISA bus is no joke. 320x200x256 lasted quite a while, and there's the early "VGA" 320x200x16 stuff as well. Good luck making a 640x350/640x480 VGA smooth scrolling platformer!

Also those consoles you've mentioned all have dedicated hardware for drawing sprites. PCs don't. For a while, the only dedicated hardware video acceleration functions - if ANY - were more about rendering primitives and text to get that spreadsheet refresh quicker.

On the flipside, those old consoles have trouble going higher. SNES rarely has some 512x res at times for some games' condensed text (Secret of Mana) but hardly for gameplay. I think RPM Racing is the only one that does IIRC

Another thing that has not explicitly been mentioned yet is that while some VGA monitor had quite coarse dot pitch and were not all that sharp compared to better ones, standard definition NTSC monitors had even coarser dot pitch and were even less sharp .

That lack of sharpness helped mask the aliasing inherent to low resolution computer (console) generated images . The visible scanlines due to interlacing also contributed . If you try running a 320x200 PC game on an NTSC monitor through a good quality converter, you will get a similar effect .

If you run a console emulator on a PC monitor (preferably a CRT to avoid adding LCD scaling to the mix), and do not use any of the picture "enhancements" available, if any, the picture will look much sharper and unlike you remember ftom playing on an NTSC monitor or TV .

EDIT: Feel free to replace NTSC with PAL or SECAM in my post . The idea is the same .

PC Games well after 360kb was more or less obsolete continued to be available on that format.

PC games suffered into the early 90’s from

1. Low budget / low installed base
Meaning many were programmed by hand or by an individual (sometimes for fun)
Also that programmers would try to program for a relatively obsolete machine to make sure anyone could pick up and play.

2. The reality that many of the programmers suffered through “home micros” like the c64 and the horrible load times and space constraints.
It was very much a reality that the game should fit on a single floppy so things like ray casting, solids and other minimalist graphics were par for the coarse.

3. Many programmers were using old school methods of programming ignoring features present on the 8088, the PC/XT was cable of doing many relatively modern things and could have had much more complex games but the techniques to do so didn’t exist until after the machines were very obsolete.

Thanks so far everyone! 🙂

I guess it's because of the comb filters and
analogue anti-aliasing that made the TV games look less pixelated also. And the smaller "sprites" or tiles.
Black-White TVs had a very soft image, for example, almost organic.
Some ZX81 games looked cleaner than some CGA/MCGA games..

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7FWlVjwhGI4

PS: Ironically, Composite CGA doesn't look half as bad as regular video modes of the time.

VileR wrote on 2020-07-12, 09:09:

Probably down to VGA's double scanning which makes modes with 200-ish line look "chunky", even on a blurry 14" CRT. But drawing technique does factor into it - some artists do better at manually 'anti-aliased' graphics, others not so much.

Ah, I see. I totally forgot about the line doubling.. 😅
Ironically, some old PC Demo which I took a DOSBox recording of, describes line doubling.
More precisely, how to make use of the 200 extra lines to make a 320x400 mode.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F3mikF1bUT4

Boy, I wished PC games made use of this resolution! 😁

clueless1 wrote on 2020-07-12, 09:41:

I can't imagine an Atari 2600 version of a game ever being the better looking version. Graphically, my Intellivision was world's better than my friend's 2600.

Fair enough, maybe I shouldn't have mentioned this one.
Especially, since it uses RF connection by default.
However, some games like Skyjinks, Robot Tank, Midnight Party, Battle Zone and Solaris
look more visually sophisticated than some commercial pre-'93 DOS games.. Full NTSC versions of course. PAL and SECAM (yikes) have less colour.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9X4_xy7rC1A

rmay635703 wrote on 2020-07-12, 16:33:

2. The reality that many of the programmers suffered through “home micros” like the c64 and the horrible load times and space constraints.
It was very much a reality that the game should fit on a single floppy so things like ray casting, solids and other minimalist graphics were par for the coarse.

I see, makes sense. This also was a good thing, I guess.
The European sound engineers of NES titles that had an origin like that
made their games sounding very SID like.
The games The Smurfs and The Lion King sounded much better than the usual NES titles.

Edit: Edited.

Jo22 wrote on 2020-07-14, 17:42:

Boy, I wished PC games made use of this resolution! 😁

There's already been a few then - Moraff games (since FLYGAME), Flight Simulator 5, Threat, Ravenloft, Descent, Blood & Magic, Menzoberranzan, Extreme Pinball, Quake, Looking Glass' early 3d games, some Gremlin 3D games...