> I'm seriously amazed they have any opinion on them at all. Do they universally loathe > LCD and LED screens too? How about modern day controllers? Do they dislike modern > development tools and languages? It's such a minor change, after all. Take Pacman as > an example - nothing is destroyed by using HQ3x, all the detail is there to my eyes, > it's just less jagged.
Actually, a lot of artists who worked on these older games are annoyed by how the games look on LCD and LED screens. These sorts of screens do not convey the image in the way originally intended by the artists. Running on a CRT, or with a CRT simulator, gives you an image that is as close to what the artist's original vision was. Modern-day controllers are an issue, too - the people who originally tracked the note data for Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero designed it around being played on a full-size dance pad or a five-button guitar controller, not around pushing buttons on a keyboard. In fact, playing these games on a keyboard makes them far easier than the designers ever intended. They wouldn't care about modern development tools and languages, because they have literally nothing to do with the final visual result of the game, and at this point I'm forced to conclude that you're just throwing as many random terms as possible into the mix in order to feel better about bastardizing the artists' original works. The funny thing about art is that as much as you're entitled to draw your own conclusions about what the "intent" was behind it, the original artists are just as entitled to tell you that you've entirely misconstrued it. Funny how that works.
Quite frankly, you seem to be spending a lot of words to justify shitting up old games' graphics. I have yet to see a single modern 2D game at modern resolutions that looks anything like the blobby, watercolor nightmare that all of these filters produce. But I'm also working on adding support for such filters in MAME. Do you know why? Because I respect your right to fuck up the output of a game running on your system however you want. Maybe you should try respecting other peoples' rights to not.