I may be breaking some sort of blogging code of ethics and/or laziness with this post, but if the way I hang my toilet paper (in front of the roll) has taught the world anything, it's that I'm a maverick who doesn't play by the rules. That being said, back during the Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts unreadable text debacle, where Rare clearly didn't have SDTV users in mind when developing their game, a certain 61FPS reader made an enlightened and very long reply that really cleared this issue up for me; unfortunately, said reply was made when the post was more than a week old, so I doubt anyone but me saw it.
So, in honor of our 61FPS chum Roy G. Biv, I'm going to do the honor of reposting his comments about the issue on the front page of our fine blog. Unorthodox, I know; but this dude put more work into a single reply than I do in most of my writing. Roy, should I ever die, you can take up my freelancing sword. I got it from the Home Shopping Network.
So, without further ado, here's Roy's well-researched take on why SDTV readability issues aren't an issue for developers:
1) At some point in the past few years Dell & Co. started putting HDMI & Component inputs on the backs of LCD computer monitors, alongside the DVI & VGA ports. Game programmers 7 designers already tend to have (at least) one of these on their desks and swapping inputs on a single device turns out to be a lot easier and (perhaps more importantly) cheaper than having a separate CRT on hand for reference.
2) "But that's just the programmers and designers!" you might say. "Surely the QA Testers must be looking at these games on a variety of rigs?!" Well, you'd think so, but in many cases the operational expense of keeping a bunch of heavy-ass, old vacuum tubes in working order is slashed in favor of tiny, reliable LCD monitors which take up less space and allow for testers to be placed closer together. Even when SD sets *are* employed, testers aren't playing the games the same way an end user would. They're sitting in a cube (if they're lucky) with their eyeballs 12-18 inches from the screen.
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